“Not a clear answer.”
“If I were the sort to spy on you, I would deny it, and I would make you believe me. So what’s the point of your asking?”
“Because I want to hear the words.”
Anonoei sighed. “I leave a bit of my ba in you exactly as I do in everyone else. It’s hard not to. I care about you. I also need you and depend on you. It’s important for me to know how you feel about me, what you want, what you fear.”
Wad couldn’t help but smile. “Honesty-the cruelest deception of all.”
“You know that I’m not deceiving you.”
“Or you’re using honesty while disguising the fact that you’re making me take such delight in it.”
“Will you send me to Keel?” asked Anonoei. “I have to deal with his fear of discovery. He thinks Bexoi has set spies on him.”
“Of course,” said Wad. “But tell me, first: Have you ever placed your ba inside Queen Bexoi herself?”
“I’ve never been in her presence,” said Anonoei. “Both Prayard and I saw to that. So no. I’ve seen her from a distance, but never close enough, in my pre-gating days, to get inside her devious mind.”
“So the one person it would be most useful to watch, you can’t see.”
“But you can,” said Anonoei. “Through your little spy-gate.”
“That only shows me what she wants me to see,” said Wad. “I think she lives her entire life as if she expected me to be watching. She undresses and dresses as if she had an audience. She knows what I can do.”
“She has that kind of self-control? Every action is a performance, all the time?”
“Absolutely,” said Wad. “She plays her roles every moment, waking and sleeping.”
“Sleeping!” Anonoei scoffed.
“I think even her dreams are lies that go along with the persona she’s adopted. I think she believes her own lies as she tells them, and keeps on believing them.”
“If she believes them, are they lies?” asked Anonoei.
“A question I once asked Pope Boniface the Fourth,” said Wad. “He was busy converting all the pagan temples in Rome into Christian churches. I tried to explain to him how resentful the Greek and Roman Families of mages were about such treatment, and he told me that the gods didn’t exist. I considered myself proof of the contrary, and I showed him what I could do. I gated us both up into the Alps-very high mountains in Mittlegard. There we stood in the bitter cold of an Alpine winter, with him still dressed in his lightweight sleeping gown, and he informed me, even as he was freezing to death, that my existence was a lie. That I was tempting him as Satan tempted Christ.”
“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” said Anonoei.
“I realized that he really did believe that what he was actually experiencing-the cold of the mountain wind, the sight of high mountains and snow all around him-was a delusion, a vision I had created to deceive him. I told him that the snow and the wind and the mountains were real, that he was lying to himself, and I wasn’t even from the same planet as the person he called ‘Satan.’ He informed me that I was the liar, and that’s when I pointed out that I couldn’t be lying, because I believed what I was telling him, while he knew perfectly well that the cold was real, so he was lying to me.”
“Another circular argument.”
“He told me that this only proved I was a better liar than he was. He admitted he felt the cold, which showed how powerful the illusion was. My obvious shivering from the cold did not change the fact that it was a delusion. ‘If you lie to yourself, it’s still a lie,’ says he, ‘even if you do it so well that you believe it.’ A very wise man, for a Pope.”
“I take it ‘Pope’ is like ‘King’?”
“More or less,” said Wad. “I can meet with anybody I want. I can always get past the guards and bureaucrats.”
“Speaking of which,” said Anonoei, “I’m a bit concerned about Keel. He seems to be quite urgently afraid at this moment.”
“Then maybe that’s an excellent reason for you not to go.”
“Keep an eye on me, my castle-monkey, and extricate me if there’s any real danger.”
At that moment, however, Wad sensed that someone was coming to Westil through the Wild Gate. Several people. More and more. Yet Danny North seemed oblivious to the fact. Certainly he wasn’t sending them.
“This is actually a very bad time for me to send you anywhere, especially anywhere dangerous,” said Wad. “Someone’s coming through the Wild Gate.”
“What is the boy thinking? I thought you said he fully understood the danger of accidentally letting this Dragon through to Westil, hidden inside the body of some traveler.”
“Danny North isn’t doing it. Ah, now he’s finally noticed it, and he knew at once what was going on. One of his friends moved the gate.” Wad was impressed. “Clever girl, that Hermia. It’s very hard to move someone else’s gate without their noticing.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I have to go watch this end of the gate. As long as everyone turns around and goes straight back to Mittlegard, there’s no danger. But if somebody tries to stay…”
“That young windmage stayed,” said Anonoei.
Wad got out of bed and began to dress. “By the time Danny North helped me remember with clarity who our enemy is and what he can do, Ced was already here. I knew him well enough to be reasonably sure he was not possessed by Set.”
“And if some other arrival is possessed by Set-how will you know?”
“I won’t. So anyone who tries to stay, I get him back to the return Gate and push him through.”
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll possess you, if you come so close?”
“By ‘push’ I didn’t mean push,” said Wad. “Any would-be immigrant, I’ll gate him to a point where he’ll stumble directly into the Wild Gate the moment he emerges. I will never be near him. And Set can’t jump so easily from one person into another. Especially someone with a powerful inself. A ka that won’t just move out of the way.”
“You flatter yourself,” said Anonoei.
“Possibly,” said Wad. “But it’s not the same as what you do. He jumps in with his whole ka. But never having owned a body, worn the ape as his very self, it’s harder for him to get in. So I think I could keep him out.”
Anonoei rolled her eyes. “Send me to Keel now, please,” she said.
“It’s too dangerous,” said Wad. He was fully clothed now. “I’m going to be distracted, watching all these people come through. I need to see them so I can remember them later, if they get past me somehow.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Anonoei.
“Is Keel a timid, fearful man?”
“A very bold and courageous one.”
“So whatever he fears, the danger is probably real.”
“But my beloved Wadling, I’m me. Nobody can hold on to a notion of hurting me; I change their minds. I need you for transportation, not for rescue. Please respect my abilities as I respect yours. I’m not your prisoner anymore.”
“That is such a manipulative thing to say,” said Wad.
“If I were using magery to control you, I wouldn’t need to manipulate you with guilt.”
“Unless my conscience is entirely of your creation.”
“Alas, no,” said Anonoei. “There are times I wish I could put out your conscience like a sputtering candle.” She began turning around and around. “Please send me through a gate into Keel’s office. There’s no one there at this time of day.”
Wad still had his misgivings, but she was right-she could take care of herself. It’s not as if she was going to face someone as strong-willed as Bexoi or, for that matter, Wad himself.
He sent her, still spinning like a child dancing. If she tripped, it would be her own fault.
Then he went at once to a place near the stone circle where the Wild Gate lay. Sure enough there were people milling around on the top of the hill. No one had left the circle yet-but too many of them were gazing around them instead of going back. And some of them were trying to use their powers. From inside a circle with an active gate! Didn’t they know anything?