“You’re just making this up,” said the woman.
“Next page?” Danny suggested.
“There is zero chance that the Semitic god Bel or Baal was ever spoken of in any Indo-European language, let alone some ancient form of German.”
“You lose the bet,” said Danny. “Do you think the Hittites never spoke the name?”
To Danny, the Hittites were just another branch of the Family, albeit an extinct one. To this woman, though, it seemed remarkable that he even knew of them. “How old are you?” asked the woman. “What are you really doing here?”
“I’d like to read the next page,” said Danny.
“You aren’t reading, you’re just playing. This is just a lark to you, but it’s my life’s work to me.”
Danny shook his head. “Really, ma’am, it’s at least as important to me as it is to you.”
“I thought you’d like to see something old. I didn’t expect you to mock me by pretending to read it.”
“I’m not pretending.”
The woman closed the book. “Come on, we’re done here.”
She was right, of course—Danny was playing with her, though not in the way that she supposed. But he was through playing with her now. He reached down and picked up the book.
Immediately she grabbed for it. “How dare you touch that!” she said. “I trusted you.”
“The book belongs to the one who can read it,” said Danny.
She pulled harder. He held tighter. If he made a gate right now and passed through it, would she be dragged along with him, because she was holding on to the book that he was holding on to?
“The book belongs to the Library of Congress, for the use of serious scholars.”
Again, Danny resorted to truth, because he knew he would not be believed. “These inscriptions are about Loki, a gatemaker. I’m a gatemaker, and I have to learn whatever it has to teach me.”
“This is a nightmare. Let go of the book, you’re going to damage it.”
“And if I do, who will lose her job? Not me,” said Danny. “Just let me read the rest of the runes and you can have it back.”
“Security!” she shouted.
Danny made a gate and let it suck him through.
He was in the restroom again, holding the book. She was not with him. She must be back in that employees-only room, clutching at nothing. Let her tell security what happened. See whether they believed it.
He took a paper towel and dried the counter around the sink, then set the book on it and opened it.
The third page of runes said:
Loki found the dark gate of Bel through which their god poured fear into the world and through which he carried off the hearts of brave men to eat at his feasting table.
Loki’s heart was stabbed with the fear of Bel and the jaws of Bel seized his heart to carry it away.
Loki held tight to his own heart and followed the jaws of the beast.
Danny read it twice to make sure his reading was accurate and it was locked in his memory. Then he turned to the next page that held a copy of the untranslated runes:
Loki tricked Bel into thinking he was captive, but he was not captive.
His heart held the jaws; the jaws did not hold his heart.
And when he found the gate of Bel, he moved the mouth over the heart of the sun.
Let Bel eat the heart of the Sun and drag it back to his dark world!
He has no more home in Mittlegard.
Well, how nice. A commemorative inscription about the achievements of the Loki of that age. No pariah then—there had apparently been some kind of war with the Carthaginian god, or perhaps merely with the Carthaginians, and Loki was given credit for shutting down the enemy. By moving the entrance to a gate, apparently, though Danny had no idea how such a thing might be done, especially if he really moved one end of it to the center of the Sun.
Enough. Danny had read it now. It was memorized. He had it.
Danny reached into the bottom of the trash receptacle and pulled out his backpack. He shouldered it, picked up the book, and made a gate back to the room where the woman had shown him the book. He could hear her in the hall, shouting for Security. Poor foolish drowther. Did she think she had any kind of control here?
He set the book right where it had been and opened it to the first runic inscription. He was tempted to stay long enough to smile at her when she returned, but no, he really did not need to be any more flamboyant than he had already been. In fact, he felt more than a little ashamed of himself now, for having responded to her trust and kindness by flaunting his knowledge and then doing something in front of her that was undeniable magery.
At the same time, he still felt the thrill of having done it—of having proven before a witness that he, too, was one of the mages of the North Family, and not a trivial mage, either. A dangerous one—so dangerous that he should be killed and put into Hammernip Hill.
He used his gate to the restroom again and then immediately outside to where he had been when he first gated into the library.
Eric was standing there, grinning. “You kept me waiting a long time in this cold, boy,” he said. “You got some explaining to do.”
7
STONE’S HOUSE
Danny thought of simply making a gate and getting away. Or going back through the gate into the library.
But then he remembered that Eric was useful. And then Danny remembered that he didn’t like thinking of drowthers the way the Family did—dividing them into the two categories “useful” and “expendable.” No, if Danny was going to get the hang of being a human being and not a sort of pathetic halfway wannabe god, he was going to have to think of Eric as something else. Perhaps “friend.”
“What did you see?” Danny asked.
“It’s what I didn’t see,” said Eric.
“And what was that?”
“You.” Eric grinned. “Neat trick, turning invisible like that.”
“Is that what I did?” asked Danny.
“That’s what I saw,” said Eric. “Come on, you can tell me. The whole way here to DC from Lexington, you were holding out on me, you owe me now.”
This irritated Danny. “I think we’re about even. You got more from begging with me than you usually do without me. And you kept all the money.”
“I shared the food,” said Eric.
“I earned my share of the food. Nobody owes anybody anything.”
“Yeah, I think you do,” said Eric. “For instance, what if I tell the cops about you?”
“Are we five years old?” asked Danny. “ ‘Do what I say or I’ll tell Mom’?”
“I think there are some government agencies that would love to study you.”
So maybe Eric wasn’t a friend after all. Then again, his life had been all about hustling, turning anything he could to his advantage. All Danny had to do was let him see how little hold he had over Danny, and that old cooperative big-brother attitude was bound to come back.
“See, that’s not going to happen,” said Danny.
“You think it’s not?”
“First,” said Danny, “who’s gonna believe you when you tell them all about this kid you met in Lexington? What are you going to tell them about me?”
“You can turn invisible.”
“Yeah, they always listen to teenage beggars who tell them stories about invisible kids. They got a whole department full of agents who investigate claims like that.”
“All right,” said Eric, dismissing the whole idea with a wave.
“Plus, if you gave it about three seconds’ thought, you’d see a huge hole in the idea of turning me over to the government.”
“What?”
“Three seconds,” said Danny.
“Don’t screw with me, kid.”
Danny counted to three on his fingers.
“All right,” said Eric again. “All you’d do is turn invisible and they’d never be able to get you. But what if they surprised you and got handcuffs on you
? What good does it do you to be invisible if you’ve got handcuffs on?”
“And that’s the third thing,” said Danny. “I have never, not for one second, been invisible.”
“I know what I saw.”
“You did not see an invisible kid,” said Danny.
Eric was about to say something scornful when Danny held up three fingers and began the count again.
“What were you if you weren’t invisible?” demanded Eric.
“Not what, but where,” said Danny.
“Oh,” said Eric. “You weren’t there-but-invisible, you were visible-but-not-there.”
“And as for telling you,” said Danny, “would you have believed me? And what if somebody overheard me as I told you? We were always around people.”
“So if you can just go away, why didn’t you split when I surprised you here?”
“I thought about it,” said Danny. “But I decided that even though you ditched me just because I wanted to see all the tourist stuff on the Mall, I wasn’t the kind of guy who ditches a friend.”
Eric rolled his eyes at first, then closed them, nodded, and stuck out his hand. “Okay, man. Friends.”
“Well, I know I’m a good friend. But you just got through threatening to turn me over to the cops or the government. How do I know I can count on you?”
“I didn’t have to bring you with me in the first place,” said Eric. “And I also didn’t have to follow you up and down the Mall, Lincoln to Washington to the Capitol.”
“Why didn’t you just come walk with me instead of stalking me?” asked Danny.
“Can we just drop it?” said Eric. “I was worried about you.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“What did you think?”
“That you care about me.”
“Okay, now’s when I puke,” said Eric.
“So you aren’t going to try to boss me around?” asked Danny.
“Of course I am,” said Eric. “It’s just not going to work.”
“As long as you know that.”
“We decide stuff together,” said Eric.
“Works for me,” said Danny.
“But first you have to tell me how this thing works, this thing you do.”
“And there we are, back to ‘have to.’ ”
“How can I figure out how to turn it to our advantage if I don’t know how it works?”
“Our advantage?” asked Danny.
“Friends and partners, aren’t we?” said Eric. “You didn’t mind using the stuff I knew how to do. Can you teach me to do that? Disappear and reappear somewhere else?”
“In a word—no.”
“Can’t or won’t?” asked Eric.
“I’m still trying to figure it out myself,” said Danny.
“So when you disappeared from here, and then came back, where did you go?”
“Into the library,” said Danny.
“What, you were having a library emergency? Jonesing for a book?”
“Needed the restroom,” said Danny.
“So that’s really where you went?” asked Eric.
“Really.”
Eric studied his face. Seemed satisfied. “Well, there you are. You can go through walls.”
“Of course I can,” said Danny.
“Why ‘of course’?” said Eric. “Why would I know you could go through walls?”
“Okay, not of course. But yes, I can go inside buildings and leave buildings the same way. Without doors.”
“Do you make holes in the walls?”
“No,” said Danny. “It’s a gate.”
“Please stop talking like you think this is stuff any idiot would know,” said Eric.
“Sorry,” said Danny.
“How far does it work? How far can you go?”
“I don’t know,” said Danny. “Most I’ve ever done is a couple of miles, maybe.”
“But you can go anywhere?”
“Anywhere I wanted to, so far,” said Danny.
“Can it be a place you’ve never been before?”
Danny thought about it. When he first made gates through the perimeter of the Family compound, he hadn’t known where he was going on the outside. And when he gated his way into the space inside the wall of the Family’s library in the old house, he certainly didn’t know what it was like in there.
“Yes, it can,” said Danny. “But I’m not sure how I do it. I keep worrying that I’m going to gate myself into a tree or a stone wall or something and blow up half the city.”
“But you haven’t so far,” said Eric.
“I’m still in existence,” said Danny, “so no, I haven’t so far.”
“Can you take me with you?” asked Eric.
Danny shrugged. “I don’t know.” He held out his hand. “Want to try?”
Eric hesitated. “What happens to me if it turns out you can’t take me with you?”
“I don’t know,” said Danny.
“Or what if you can only move me away from here, but you can’t deposit me there? Do little bits of me get scattered all along the way?”
“You really do have a weird imagination,” said Danny.
“Got to try to think of the consequences,” said Eric. “There’s always consequences.”
“I don’t know how any of this works, Eric.”
“I think I’ll pass on testing whether you can take me with you or not.”
“For what it’s worth, I take my clothes with me every time,” said Danny. “And all the stuff in my pockets. And I’ve pushed stuff through gates without going all the way through myself.”
“That’s ‘clothes’ and ‘stuff.’ You tried it with anything alive? And was it still alive when you got there?”
“Never tried it.”
Eric grinned. “See? I don’t want to be the first experiment, in case I end up having my body half-swapped with a fly and I’m trapped in a spider web waving my arms and saying, ‘Help me! Help me!’ ” He said this last in a high soft voice.
“What are you talking about?” asked Danny.
“You never saw the old black-and-white The Fly? Not the Jeff Goldblum but the good one?”
“Movies? You’re talking about movies?”
“Why not?” asked Eric. “This is a movie. I mean, I’m just minding my business and along comes a kid and I take him under my wing, and then it turns out he can disappear in one place and appear in another. I’m in a Twilight Zone episode. Teleporting. Stargate!” Whatever “Stargate” was, Eric apparently thought it was brilliant. “Why didn’t I think of that already? Of course, you don’t need some pyramid or a big machine or anything so it’s not the same.”
“I don’t see a lot of movies,” said Danny.
Eric shrugged. “Let’s see what we know. You can go through walls. And you can push stuff through gates without actually going through yourself, right? So you’re, like, the perfect burglar.”
“Burglar?”
“You know, guy breaks into a house, steals stuff without waking up the people.”
“I know what a burglar is.”
“How would I know you know that? If you don’t know The Fly or Stargate, I figure you might not know how to put your pants on frontward.”
He said it with a grin. Danny grinned back. “I’m not a burglar.”
“Really?” asked Eric. “Where’d you get those clothes?”
“Wal-Mart,” said Danny dryly.
“Credit, debit, or cash?”
“Shopping cart plus gate,” said Danny.
“So you’re a burglar.”
“Shoplifter.”
“So you’ll steal stuff from Wal-Mart and that’s okay, but stealing stuff from rich people’s houses…”
“You gotta draw the line somewhere,” said Danny. “Stealing from Wal-Mart just causes them to raise prices a tiny bit to amortize the cost.”
“ ‘Amortize’?” Eric said it slowly and mockingly, as if there was something wrong with knowing the right w
ord.
“Breaking into somebody’s house is different, Eric, it’s stuff they own personally.”
“So … what if I promise that we’ll only steal stuff from the houses of people so rich they’ll barely notice that it’s gone?”
“What kinds of things do we steal?”
“Whatever the fence wants to buy,” said Eric.
“In your life of crime in Washington, you know who deals in stolen goods?”
“No, but I know people who know people who probably know people who deal in stolen goods.”
“And we trust these friends of friends of friends? That experiment worries me a lot more than trying to take you through a gate.”
“Why should you worry?” asked Eric. “No matter what happens, you’re okay. I’m the one taking all the risks.”
“So does that mean you think you deserve more than fifty percent of what we make?”
“Yes,” said Eric. “I deserve twice as much as you.”
“Even though I’m the one who goes into the house and risks getting caught.”
“But it’s not a risk for you. You can’t get caught.”
“I can get recognized. Posters can go up with my face on them.”
“So what?”
“That happens, I can’t go into stores, I can’t walk the streets.”
“Nobody pays attention to that kind of thing. Come on, there are neighborhoods in DC where everybody’s on a poster somewhere.”
Danny still hated the idea of burglarizing people’s houses. At the same time, it sounded better than begging. Indoor work, more money for the time expended, and as long as they only went into the houses of rich people, who would they be hurting?
Danny heard voices and looked up to see several uniformed men with guns. They were skirting the library and looking down at Danny and Eric.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Danny.
“Too late, they’ve seen us,” said Eric. “If we split, they’ll be sure they’ve got the guys they’re looking for.”
“But I am the guy they’re looking for,” said Danny.
“Oh, so you were getting a little burglary practice in the library, were you?”
The Lost Gate Page 12
