“Take them back if you can,” said Danny. “But I warn you that I know enough now, and have power enough, that I can take the rest whenever I want.” Danny was telling the truth as far as he knew it, but he also had no idea of what defenses Loki might retain, especially now that he had passed through a Great Gate.
“You misunderstand me completely,” said Loki. “And I have no desire to hide from your friends the thing I came to get, the thing I need so desperately.”
“If not your gates, what?” asked Danny.
“Your trust,” said Loki.
Danny looked at Anonoei. “Is that why he brought you? To use your manmagery to make me trust him and not you?”
“If that were his plan,” said Anonoei, “is it working?”
“No,” said Danny.
“Then I think you can safely conclude that this is not his plan. Whatever he wants from you, he hasn’t told me anything.”
“Trust isn’t a prize in itself,” said Danny. “What do you need my trust for?”
“There is a war much older than you, much older than myself,” said Loki. “A war as old as humankind. Between the Belgod and the Mithermages.”
Danny waited.
“I need you to take over my work,” said Loki. “I know you don’t trust me, and the very fact that I said this much has raised your suspicions even higher. Yet the war must be fought or lost, and I don’t have the gates to do it. The job of protecting against the Belgod is yours now.”
Danny thought again of the runes he had read in the Library of Congress. “Hear us in the land of Mitherkame, hear us among the great ships of Iceway, among the charging dunes of Dapnu Dap, among the Mages of the Forest and the Riders of the Wold.”
He was reciting in the old language of the inscription, a language Loki had to know: Fistalk, or something near it. The language of the Norse as it had first been bent and twisted by the Semitic language of the Carthaginians.
“This is very old,” Loki murmured. “Where did you learn it?”
Danny went on reciting. “We have faced Bel and he has ruled the hearts of many. Bold men ran like deer from his face, but Loki did not run.”
“I am not that Loki,” said Loki.
“You know the tale, then?” asked Danny. “Is this the war that you’re still fighting?”
“He thought he had won, just as I thought I had won. But we never win. He can’t be killed, and he outwaits any wall we raise against him. Eventually it wears down. He keeps returning.”
“Was he dropped into the sun?” asked Danny. “Did he somehow live through that?”
“His body died, of course,” said Loki. “But his inself can’t be killed, any more than yours or mine can die.”
“But we do die,” said Danny.
“Our bodies die,” said Loki. “But you know our outselves can outlive the body-those are the ancient gates that I kept captive for so long. They’re still alive in that Wild Gate.”
“But without an inself,” said Danny.
“Don’t be a fool,” said Loki. “They only live because the inself also lives. Wherever it is, the outself draws its life from there. The Wild Gate is filled with the rage of those inselves, so angry that I took their gates from them.”
“So the inself of Bel did not die with the body.”
“It took him a thousand years to return to Mittlegard, and his rage was terrible.”
“What did he do?” asked Danny.
“Not as much as he intended,” said Loki. “He conquered everywhere, but I closed all the gates against him. He couldn’t possess any of our mages and follow them to Westil because there were no gates. And so our mages were able to defeat him.”
“How would you know?” asked Danny. “After the gates were gone, you were gone as well.”
“If he had not been prevented, you would not be alive to talk to me. The language of Westil would have died in this world. There would have been no Gatefather from any Family to create a Great Gate. I knew, because you existed, that for fourteen centuries I had kept him trapped in Mittlegard.”
“And you fear that now he will break loose and come to Westil through the gates I make?”
“I know he will,” said Loki. “And since I can’t prevent him, and you don’t know how, then I beg you to trust me. Let me teach you how to do the things that in all of history before me, no one learned to do. You alone can learn them.”
“The eating of gates,” said Danny.
“The poem you were reciting to me,” said Loki. “That Loki ate gates, as did the Persian Gatefather whom Belgod had captured and turned to his purposes.”
“What is it that you do, then, that you would teach me?” asked Danny.
“Don’t believe him,” said Marion. “He’s promising you power. It’s like the temptations of Christ.”
“It’s exactly like the temptations of Christ,” said Loki. “Only not the way you think.”
“You’ve heard about the Christian god?” asked Leslie, incredulous.
“I exiled myself from Mittlegard in 632,” said Loki impatiently. “The Roman Empire had fallen, Christians were all over Europe, Byzantium ruled the East, of course I know about the Semitic gods. I studied in Egypt, I had all the gospels, I had the ancient Coptic lore. What do you think I want to teach this boy?”
“How should we know?” said Marion. “If we knew it, we would have taught him ourselves.”
“Teaching you is the most dangerous thing that I can do,” said Loki, “because once you know it, if the Belgod captures you then all is lost and Westil is undone.”
“Don’t teach me, then,” said Danny.
“But only you have the power to stand against him. Look at me! Think what I did! If I had the power to stand against him, do you think I would have eaten all the gates and run away?”
“I have no more power than you,” said Danny.
“You have a thousand times my power,” said Loki, “and that is what it’s going to take. My knowledge and your power. But you have to trust me, and I don’t know how to win your trust, because you know better than anyone what liars we gatemages always are.”
“I don’t always lie,” said Danny.
“Only when you speak,” said Loki.
“I’m not just like every other gatemage,” said Danny. “I made the choice not to lie.”
“Too bad,” said Loki. “Because unless you can lie, with the expertise at lying that comes from long practice, you will lose against the Belgod, because he is the father of lies, and yet you must deceive him or you are doomed.”
“Do the job yourself!” cried Danny.
“I couldn’t do it even if you gave me back my gates!” Loki answered him. “Even if I ate this Wild Gate, as long as you are alive in the world, he’ll lay his traps for you until he has you and then you can make a thousand gates to let him through, and he’ll use your millions of gates to rule both worlds and none will ever stand against him, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand, not in a billion years.”
Danny didn’t know whether to believe him or laugh. So he made a joke. “Well, there is the heat death of the universe.”
“I have no idea what that means,” said Loki.
“The ultimate result of entropy,” said Danny.
Loki looked at him blankly.
“The end of everything.”
“Fool,” said Loki. “There is no ‘end of everything.’ What you call dying or ending is nothing but changes in the shapes of things. Who told you such nonsense? Only Belgod benefits from telling such a lie.”
Danny leaned on the table, burying his face in his hands. Even as his body spoke of weariness, though, he remained alert, in case Loki tried to do something sneaky while Danny was thinking about the distracting things that Loki was telling him.
And in that moment, Loki struck.
Danny could feel it inside himself, in his hearthoard, the place where he held captive all but eight of Loki’s gates. A shifting of the hundred thousand gates that were Loki’s outself, for now he could feel them all and knew the number without counting them. A hundred forty-three thousand, nine hundred and ninety-four gates, and every one of them moved within Danny and became …