Wad had suppressed them, kept them silent. But they had been watching. They knew him as no one could ever know another human being, from the heart out-unless manmages also had such deep understanding.
In only a few days inside Danny North, Wad knew him intimately, the feel of him, the kind of man he was, the loves and fears and hopes and hates of him. So in these fourteen centuries, how well did the other gatemages still shadowed in Wad’s hearthoard come to know him?
And now their knowledge was inside Danny North.
Wad could feel them, too, the gates that were fellow captives of this boyish Gatefather. He realized now that he knew them all, that even as he suppressed their cries, the tumult of their rage and despair, their surges of will, he had come to know them. They had been a part of him, and now that they were gone, he missed that intimate connection. At such great distance, in another man’s hearthoard on another world, he longed to listen to them now.
The trouble was, they hated him. Even inside Danny North’s hearthoard, they stayed as far from Wad’s gates as they could. For even there, Wad’s power was great, his hoard of gates vast indeed compared to theirs-though all of them were puny before the billion gates that belonged to Danny North himself. The other gates-the remnants of so many dead mages-still feared and hated Wad.
And loved Danny North.
That was what astonished Wad, when he understood it. These gates were no less captive than they had been before. Danny North had not set them free. Yet they responded to their new master as if he had liberated them. As much as they had hated-still hated-Wad, they loved this boy.
That was what Wad now struggled to understand. I was a good man, thought Wad. When I walked two worlds under the name of Loki, I saw the great danger that both worlds faced from the dark manmages from the world of Bel, the possessors of men’s bodies and souls. And I sacrificed everything to save the worlds from the dragons of Bel. Did that not make me the best of men?
Yet they never came to understand the nobility and greatness of my cause. Centuries inside me, and their hatred never relented.
Inside Danny North, though, they seemed to blossom, to come to new life. A pathetic, shadowy life, but life it was. They were still alert, still aware, but calm, not seething as they had done inside Wad.
They liked Danny North. They liked living inside him. They liked seeing the world through his eyes. They were at peace with him.
And they were not fading even now.
Nor are my gates fading, though they are apart from me, thought Wad. In fact, my gates thrive there. I, too, am more at peace inside Danny North than I am inside myself.
That was Wad’s great discovery: The reason he could bear the death of his son, the betrayal of Queen Bexoi, the agony of his own guilt for what he had done to Anonoei and her sons, and the terror of having lost almost all his power, was that Danny North held a huge part of Wad inside a heart that was astonishingly pure and at peace.
Danny North was good.
Undisciplined, untrained, raw, confused, afraid-young.
Yet even so, his character was fully formed, as it is in all people by the time they reach the age of understanding-as it is, perhaps, from the moment they are conceived. And the person that Danny North revealed himself to be, by those who were held against their will inside his heart, was decent to the core.
Am I not decent, too? Why was dwelling in my hearthoard such a torment, and dwelling in his is an experience of healing, rest, calm, comfort?
Maybe the difference is this: The first thing I tried to do, when I realized I was still alert and aware inside of Danny North, was to exert some kind of control over him.
My first instinct was to rule.
But Danny North does not want to rule over anybody.
The poor child. So much power, and no idea of what it’s for.
He did not eat my gates because he saw me as a rival. He was merely trying to survive, to hold on to himself. He does not want to rule the worlds. He does not even want to be the hero who saves the worlds. What does he want? Who is this boy?
And why, when he is so utterly different from me, do I find myself so glad of his company?
Danny North was such a compelling presence in Wad’s mind that it took Wad days to realize that he knew something very important about events here on Westil.
There was a new mage in the world. A mage who had passed through a Great Gate. The powers of the Great Gate still clung to him; it was as if his footfalls reverberated like temblors through the deepest rock of the world, and made the slightest of vibrations in Wad’s gatesense. Even though the Great Gate had not been of his making, the disturbance in spacetime could not be hidden from an old Gatefather like Wad.
What was he? What magic was this interloper doing? Whatever it was, the world was waking up before this surge of magic. No one had exercised such bright power since the closing of the Great Gates fourteen centuries before. Whatever Danny North was doing in Mittlegard, Wad was here on Westil, and this new greatmage was Wad’s business.
And because Wad was not as decent, as unambitious as Danny North, his first thought was this: How can I harness the great power of this new greatmage and use it to wreak vengeance on my enemy, Queen Bexoi, and make her suffer as I have suffered?
5
By the time Danny got to the farm in Yellow Springs, Marion had already suspended a rope over the central beam of the cowbarn. “Ladder work?” asked Danny.
“I’m a Cobblefriend,” said Marion. “I can’t fly, nor can my clants, such as they are.”
“Then why didn’t you wait for me to make a gate and carry the rope up there?” asked Danny.
“Hard for you to believe, I know, Danny, but before you ever came to this farm, I was able to wipe my butt all by myself.”
Danny grinned. “Are you suggesting that you want me to install a rectal gate? Outbound only, I promise.”
Marion made as if to smack Danny, though he never had and never would. But then he stopped. “Could you?” he asked. “Not rectal, but a gate that’s attached to a person instead of to a place?”
“When Hermia gets here,” said Danny.
“Hermia. Veevee. They’ll only know what’s in books.”
“And I only know what I’ve tried,” said Danny. “All those years I tried to figure out how to lock gates and how to take them back inside myself, and I couldn’t figure any of it out until I saw it done.”
“Somebody had to be the first gatemage,” said Marion. “And from what Hermia says-if you can trust a Greek-”
“It’s only a problem if they’re bearing gifts,” said Danny. “And she’s Pelasgian.”
“From what she says you may be the most extravagantly gifted gatemage ever. So you’re going to have to break new ground to reach your potential.”
“Parents always think their children have more potential than they actually have,” said Danny.
“What about gatemage surgery?” asked Marion. “Those tracking devices inside Hermia-can’t you gate them out of her?”
“I have a map in my head of all the gates I’ve made,” said Danny. “But I can’t map the inside of a person’s body. Going through a gate heals people of any injuries or dysfunctions, but if I start making gates to remove bits of Hermia, it would only be by chance if I found the tracking devices her family installed in her.”
“At least now I understand why you want to gate up to the roofbeam to hang a rope-it’s something you know you can do.”
“Don’t you mostly do things you know you can do?” asked Danny, a little resentful now.
“Yes,” said Marion. “Tell me. If you took one end of the rope down here, then gated to the roofbeam, would the rope just follow you and string out from here to there, or would it get cut off where the gate began?”