Veevee smiled. “‘They’ll be singin’ in that land, voices ringin’ in that land. There’ll be freedom in that land where I’m bound.’”
“Nobody’s ever heard of an obedient gatemage,” said Stone.
“Serves you right, Danny,” said Leslie.
Danny silently raised his feet, leaned back, closed his eyes. He began to spin. Twenty gates at once this time.
Only this time he wasn’t alone-there were all the other mages’ gates inside him, and many of them, most of them, were clamoring, demanding that he use them to make the gate.
One by one he drew them in, until now he was spinning a score of other mages’ gates along with his own. He couldn’t tell if they were making the Great Gate stronger, by adding more threads to the connection, or weaker, by adding new textures that didn’t fit well with his own. Danny knew nothing about what he was doing. Yet it seemed fair to him to include the outselves of these long-dead mages, which had been stolen from them because of their attempts to make Great Gates.
You lost your magery by doing this. Did I capture you to keep you imprisoned, or to set you free and let your power live again in the world?
Free free free, answered the gates inside him.
Me me me, demanded so many gates that he had not yet used.
Enough, thought Danny. Twenty of mine and twenty of you.
He was spinning rapidly now. Not as fast as he had been spinning in the gym, but it was enough. This time he could feel the power in it, this time he understood that what mattered was not the speed of the spinning, but the intertwining of the gates. It truly felt like a rope-four great strands, each consisting of ten gates. Because he had made a Great Gate before, and learned so much in the making of it, he could understand it better this time.
Two of the strands were made entirely of Danny’s gates, and the other two were made of the other mages’ gates. He wove all of his into the return gate, whose tail would be here in the barn to bring them home, and all of theirs into the gate of sending, whose mouth would be here. They spun themselves together like forty slender tornadoes, all of them spinning on their own, weaving their own patterns.
And then he cast them upward and outward, with all the strength of his inself, and felt rather than heard the song of rejoicing as the strangers’ gates leapt out into space, into time, carrying his own gates with them.
They connected in another world. The Great Gate was made.
“Now,” said Veevee.
“Untie me,” said Danny, still spinning.
Strong hands stopped his spin; other hands loosened the noose and pulled it over his arms. He still hadn’t opened his eyes. He didn’t need them. It was with another sense that he saw the Great Gate. It was very different this time, as if the earlier gate had been woven of one color of thread, while this one was of many bright colors that combined and recombined. Gate of many colors, thought Danny. What does it mean to have a gate of many colors?
He felt Veevee and Hermia take him by the hands. The mouth of the gate was wide. Danny stepped into it. Joined to him, they did not need to step; they were with him as the gate gathered him in and there they were, in bright sunlight on the other world.
Danny opened his eyes. The light was dazzling after the relative darkness of the barn. But he could see that they were surrounded by tall stones, rough-hewn, set on end into the grassy ground at the brow of a gently sloping hill.
“Stonehenge,” said Danny.
“A gatecatcher,” said Stone.
“Fool,” said another voice. A stranger’s voice. A man.
Danny turned to where the voice had come from. But it wasn’t the voice that told him who the man was. It was the inself. It was the few gates the man had inside him.
“Gate Thief,” said Danny. “Why are you here?”
“Fool,” said the Gate Thief. “To use those angry Wild Gates.”
“They wanted-”
“Centuries in prison have made them uncontrollable. Insane.” The Gate Thief spoke Westilian with a strange accent, but Danny understood him perfectly.
“They wanted to be part of the Great Gate,” said Danny. “Are you here to do battle with me again?”
“He wants to come through the gate,” said Veevee.
“He’s here to kill you,” said Hermia.
“You know nothing,” said the Gate Thief. “Someone has to teach you.”
“Lock the gate behind us, Hermia,” said Danny.
“Do we have to go so quickly?” asked Veevee. “This is Westil, and the sun is so bright I can hardly claim to have seen it.”
“I don’t want him to follow us,” said Danny.
“You’ll be back here soon enough,” said the Gate Thief. “Begging me to teach you how to undo this terrible thing you’ve done.”
“Why did you eat all the gates?” demanded Danny, his curiosity overpowering his good sense, making him stay long enough to ask.
“You know why,” said the Gate Thief. “My captive gates have told you.”
“They say the name of Bel.”
“Bel, the gatemage from the other world,” said the Gate Thief. “The world of soul stealers. The world of manmages. Fool.”
“Let’s go,” said Hermia. “Who knows what he’s plotting to do while he keeps us talking?”
Meanwhile, Stone knelt in the grass, his hands splayed out, digging into the soil. “It’s so alive,” he whispered.
“It’s you that’s alive,” said the Gate Thief. “Coming through the Great Gate has made you strong. All of you too strong. You have nothing to fear from me.”
“That’s what he wants us to believe,” said Hermia.
“Gatemages are such liars,” said Veevee-rather proudly, Danny thought.
“What do I call you?” asked Danny. “Loki?”
“Wad,” said the Gate Thief. “It’s my name since I came out of the tree.”
Danny had no idea what that meant. “I’m not giving you back your gates,” said Danny.
“I don’t need them,” said Wad.
“Do you know what happened to Ced?” asked Stone. “He came through the earlier gate and he stayed.”
“A windmage,” said Wad. “I know where he is.”
“Is he safe?” asked Stone.
Wad laughed. “Is Westil safe, with him here? The most powerful mage in the world now-the winds that he blows!”
“Is he causing harm?” asked Veevee.
“He doesn’t know how not to cause harm,” said Wad. “Any more than you do. And there’s no one to balance him, no one to teach him. That’s what you’re doing here. Setting monsters loose in the world.”
“Becoming monsters ourselves, by that reckoning,” said Danny.
“We’re all monsters,” said Wad.
“Let’s go back,” said Hermia.
Danny could see him clearly now, standing between two stones, leaning on neither. A slight man-like Danny, he was neither tall nor short, neither strong-looking nor weak. And his face was neither young nor old, but ageless, with eyes like deep water, gray as the belly of a thundercloud, looking into Danny with such sadness, such anger, such understanding.
“Don’t look at him,” said Hermia. “He’s too strong for us.”
“I’m weak,” said Wad. “You have most of my outself inside you now. What do I call you?”
“You don’t,” said Danny. He gathered the mouth of the Great Gate around himself and they were in the barn again.
The sunlight was gone. The stones. The grass.
Stone knelt, his fingers pressed against the floor. He was weeping. “It’s a desert here, compared to there,” he said.
“We met the Gate Thief,” Veevee told Marion. “He was almost as pretty as Danny, and as old as the stars.”
“I can’t lock the other gate,” said Hermia. “The outbound gate, the one you made from the hearts of strangers.”
Danny could see that she had locked the return gate, and was trying to close the other. “You can’t control it because there are twenty mages in it,” said Danny. “You have to close them one at a time.” He began pinching off the gates.
But by the time he got to the third gate, the first was open again. “It won’t stay closed,” he said.