“Meaning that you choose not to stop,” said the Gate Thief.
That, too, was true, and Ced felt the shame and guilt burst within him, and in front of this powerful stranger he broke down and cried. “You should have killed me in my sleep,” he said. “I have so much blood on my hands. Not soldiers’ blood from a war-the blood of children who died in the collapse of roofs or were swept away from their parents in the wind and dashed into trees or rocks or plunged into ravines. The blood of the parents who died reaching for them, or later, searching for their little bodies. I should be dead-I owe a hundred deaths already.”
“Twenty deaths, in fact,” said the Gate Thief. “Your shame makes you exaggerate.”
“Twenty,” Ced repeated, and he wept again.
The Gate Thief’s hand was on his shoulder. “I take it that you tried to stop.”
“The voices of the wind won’t leave me alone. How do I make them still, so I can think?”
“You don’t,” said the Gate Thief. “You sing with them, so the voice becomes your own, their movements a part of your own breath. What you feel, when you feel all the winds of the world, is your own outself, spread as thin as air, and because you’re the only windmage who has passed through a Great Gate in this age of the world, you meet no other there to challenge you. The winds are yours. If you love them, Ced, the winds are you.”
“How does a gatemage know so much about how windmagery works?”
“Because all the magics of the world are one,” said Wad. “And because I loved a windmage once.”
“Your wife? I had a wife.” Ced thought of poor broken Lana, and how grief and relief warred within him when she left.
“My mother,” said Wad.
He had a mother. He was once a child. He’s a human being, like me. And also a monster-like me.
“What are you going to do with me?” asked Ced.
“I want you to learn how to use your power to protect this world,” said the Gate Thief.
“Protect it from what?”
“From the monsters. From the gods.”
“Gods?”
“You called them the Families, there on Earth. They’ll be here soon, and they’ll be every bit as strong as you, and every bit as unprepared to control it. But unlike you, they’ll have no consciences. They won’t care what their magery costs the common people of this place.”
“My caring doesn’t bring them back to life,” said Ced.
“But if you learn to master your power, you’ll be far stronger than they are-at least for the first while-and perhaps you can protect the people. Prevent a little of the horror that would otherwise come. Would you like to do that?”
“I can’t even prevent my own damage.”
“You prevent it every day, every hour that you aren’t raising a wind. You prevent it when you go among them, not to threaten them with storms if they don’t obey you, but to help undo the damage that you’ve done. Why do you think they love you? Because you don’t think that you’re a god. Or maybe because you think that godlings should be kind.”
“They love me?”
“This is a world long ruled by gods. When I closed the Great Gates, I weakened them, and as the old mages died, the new ones had only a fraction of their power, and life got better here. Now what counts as a great mage is a person of relatively petty power. But the mages of Mittlegard will come here with power unseen in this place for fourteen centuries. They’ll bring their wars and rivalries with them, and then provoke more, as the mages here attempt to resist them, and fail. Only you can stand before them as an equal. As their master, if you prepare, if you’re readier for war than they are.”
Ced remembered an old line from a movie. “I’m a lover, not a warrior.” He thought it might have been Rodney Dangerfield who said it. The man who got no respect.
“If you love something, then there’s something to fight for,” said the Gate Thief. “I think you’ve come to love these people.”
Ced wasn’t so sure. Guilt was surely not identical with love. But maybe there was a little overlap.
“But this is a different kind of war,” the Gate Thief went on. “The lover has to stay alive inside the warrior. Because I don’t want you to destroy them, Ced. I want to master them, but then to win them over to our side.”
“Our side?” asked Ced. When had they become allies? Aloud, he said, “If the mages from the Great Families join us, who would we be fighting against then?”
“Someone worse,” said the Gate Thief.
“The Families are monsters,” said Ced. “They train their children to be monsters, and I can’t imagine anybody worse.”
“I can,” said the Gate Thief.
“Who?”
“Mitherkame and Mittlegard are not the only worlds with people on them, and not the only mages capable of becoming monsters.”
Ced felt tired. “I don’t want any part of it.”
“I know,” said the Gate Thief. “What you wanted was to pass through a Great Gate and find out what it would do to your power.”
“And it made me a monster.”
“It made you a great mage,” said the Gate Thief. “Your inexperience and lack of self-control led to the monstrous things you did. You can learn to control them. You can help the Families learn to control their greater powers. Only then will we have a chance against the Eater of Souls.”
Ced thought of how Danny and Hermia had spoken of the Gate Thief-the legendary enemy, the Minotaur, the terrible monster that they would have to face.
“Why are you laughing?” asked the Gate Thief.
“You said ‘Eater of Souls’ exactly the way people say ‘Gate Thief.’”
The Gate Thief nodded. “I was the thing that Danny North feared most.”
“You destroyed every gatemage you found for a thousand years.”
“No I didn’t,” said the Gate Thief. “I never touched a gatemage until he tried to make a Great Gate. All they had to do to stay safe from me was to confine their gatemaking to their own world. Why wasn’t that enough? Why couldn’t they be content to gate from place to place, to heal anyone who passed through their gates? Why wasn’t such a wonderful power enough for them?”
Ced thought of his own experience with power. “Because if it’s there, you have to reach for it.”
“Monkeys in the trees,” said the Gate Thief. “Always hungry for the fruit that’s out of reach.”
“What’s your name?” asked Ced. “I think of you as the Gate Thief, but that’s only your job title.”
“They call me Wad, in the place I lived most recently.”
“And what did your mother call you?” asked Ced.
“She called me Loki-but that was a job title, too. It’s the name given to the most powerful gatemage of the North family. It was under the name of Wad that I last tasted hope. It’s the name that my friends call me.”
“Tell me about this monster worse than the mages of the Families,” said Ced. “Tell me about the Eater of Souls, so I can decide whether I’m qualified to call you Wad.”
“I don’t know if it’s one being, or one of many. It could be the same one, coming back again and again, because if I understand correctly what it is, then it never dies and is very hard to kill.”
“But what is it?”
“A manmage,” said Wad. “But not the kind we’re warned against. Not like the manmages of Dapnu Dap, who once ruled the world of Mitherkame by seducing and flattering and eventually riding men and women as their heartbeasts.”
“They sound bad enough.”
“You can still find their bodies, when a manmage’s outself is riding a heartbeast. You can kill them. But from what I learned before I closed the gates, the god Bel doesn’t do this. He takes over the man’s body, and it isn’t his outself that comes to control it, it’s his inself.”
Ced tried to understand it. “So he has nothing left in his own body?”
“I don’t know if the Belmages ever had bodies. I don’t know what life is like in the world they come from. But they passed through gates into our world, never in large numbers-and as I said, it’s possible that it only happened once, and there’s only one. Because when one body dies, it doesn’t kill his inself. He simply jumps into someone else, displacing their inself, becoming that person.”