The Gate Thief (Mither Mages)

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  To

  Rick Fenton

  and

  Gordon Lundrigan,

  my companions in

  spiritual, moral, and philosophical searches

  and my exemplars in shepherdry

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  1. Flying Children

  2. The Morning After

  3. Intervention

  4. Captive

  5. Assassins

  6. Angry Gate

  7. Amulets

  8. Search

  9. Visitors

  10. Confession

  11. Reunions

  12. Mittlegard

  13. Trust

  14. Loyalty

  15. Running on Automatic

  16. Frostinch

  17. Ka and Ba

  18. Clear Memory

  19. Treachery

  20. Worries

  21. Intimacy

  22. The Queen

  23. Resolution

  By Orson Scott Card from Tom Doherty Associates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  FLYING CHILDREN

  On a certain day in November, in the early afternoon, if you had just parked your car at Kenney’s burger place in Buena Vista, Virginia, or maybe you were walking into Nick’s Italian Kitchen or Todd’s Barbecue, you might have cast your gaze up the hill toward Parry McCluer High School. It could happen. You have to look somewhere, right?

  You might have noticed something shooting straight up out of the school. Something the size and shape of, say, a high school student. Arms waving, maybe. Legs kicking—count on that. Definitely a human being.

  Like a rocket, upward until he’s a mile above Buena Vista. He hangs in the air for just a moment. Long enough to see and be seen.

  And then down he goes. Straight down, and not falling, no, shooting downward just as fast as he went up. Bound to kill himself at that speed.

  You can’t believe you saw it. So you keep watching for a moment longer, a few seconds, and look! There it is again! Too far away to be sure whether it’s the same kid or a different one. But if you’ve got someone with you, you grab them, you say, “Look! Is that a person? Is that a kid?”

  “Where?”

  “In the sky! Above the high school, look up, I’m saying straight up, you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  Down comes the kid, plummeting toward the school.

  “He’s got to be dead,” you say. “Nobody could live through that.”

  And there it is again! Straight up!

  “That’s one hell of a trampoline,” somebody says.

  If you noticed it early enough, you’d see it repeated about thirty times. And then it stops.

  Do you think they’re dead? I don’t know, how could anybody live through that? Should we go up and see? I’m not even sure it was people, it could have been, like, dummies or something. We’d sound so stupid—hey, you got a bunch of kids getting catapulted straight up and then smashing down again? It can’t be what it looked like. Maybe we’ll see it on the news tonight.

  Three different people got it on their smartphones. Not the whole thing, but the last five or six, and one guy got fifteen of them. High quality video it wasn’t, but that actually made it more credible. All three videos got emailed to people. All three ended up on YouTube.

  Lots of comments: “Fake.” “Why do people bother making crap like this?” “You can see that the lighting’s different on the flying dummies.” “Cool. Something new and fun to do with your old G.I. Joe’s.” The usual.

  The local news stations aren’t all that local. Lynchburg. Roanoke. Staunton. They don’t give a rat’s ass about Buena Vista—the town never amounted to anything even before it died, that’s what people think in the big city. If those are big cities.

  And the footage is so implausible, the flying figures so tiny that it wouldn’t look like anything on TV screens. Besides, the fliers were so high that at the top, all you can see is a dot in the sky, not even the mountains. So it’s sky, clouds, and a dot—makes no sense. Has to be a bird. Has to be a trick of the light. So it doesn’t get on the news.

  But scattered through the world, there are a few thousand people who know exactly what could cause those kids to fly. Straight up, straight down, incredibly fast and yet no news stories about dead kids at a Virginia high school. Oh, yeah, it makes sense to them, all right.

  It’s an act of a god. No, not an “act of God,” to use the weasel-out-of-it words in insurance policies. Not God. A god.

  Or at least people used to call them gods, in the old days, when Zeus and Mercury and Thor and Vishnu and Borvo and Mithra and Pekelnik were worshiped wherever Indo-European languages were spoken.

  Nobody called them gods anymore, but they were still around. Weaker now, because they could no longer pass through the Great Gates that used to carry them from Earth to Westil and back again, greatly magnifying their powers.

  Only a gatemage could send someone from one place to another instantaneously, but there hadn’t been a gatemage since 632 A.D., when the last Loki of the Norse destroyed all the gates on Earth, disappearing through the last Great Gate and closing it behind him.

  In the North Family compound, only a few miles away from Buena Vista, one of the kids spotted the longest YouTube video only a few hours after it went up on the web, and within twenty minutes the most powerful mages in the family piled into a pickup truck and headed for the high school. They knew it was Danny North who had done it, Danny the son of Odin and Gerd, a boy who had seemed to be drekka until one day he up and disappeared.

  Now they knew that he hadn’t gone as far as they thought. Now they knew he wasn’t drekka at all, but a gatemage. And a strong one. Because the video didn’t show somebody suddenly appearing in the air, which is how gates usually worked. No, the flying figures could be seen as they moved upward. They were moving fast, yes, but it wasn’t instantaneous. They rose into the air, visible the whole way.

  That meant it wasn’t just any gate. It was an attempt at a Great Gate. A spiral intertwining of many gates at once, rising straight up from the surface of the Earth. And even if it only reached a mile into the air, it was one more mile of Great Gate than had existed in nearly fourteen centuries.

  Here’s the thing. Some of the gods on that pickup truck were heading for Parry McCluer High School in order to find Danny North and kill him. Because that’s what you did with gatemages—they brought nothing but trouble down on the Family, and if the Norths had a gatemage and allowed him to live, all the other Families would unite against them and this time they wouldn’t be allowed to survive the war that was bound to start.

  The Norths had to be able to show Danny’s dead body to the other Families—it was their only hope of survival. If history had taught them nothing else, it taught them that.

  But other gods on that truck had a different plan entirely. Danny’s father and mother had known perfectly well that Danny was a gatemage—it was in hopes of creating a gatemage that Gerd and Alf had married each other back before Alf became head of
the Family and took the name Odin. The two most powerful mages in generations: lightmage Gerd with her power over electricity and light; stonemage Alf, with his strange new talent for getting inside the workings of metal machines. Everyone expected a child of theirs to be extraordinarily talented.

  But Gerd and Alf had studied the genealogical tables and they knew that gatemages, rare as they were, came most often to couples with very different affinities. Like stone and lightning, or water and fire. And never to beastmages. So they hoped. And when Danny showed no sign of being able to do magery, or even raise a clant—even the most minimal abilities—they hoped even more. Because yes, he might have been drekka, worthless, devoid of power; but he might also be a gatemage, unable to raise a clant because his outself was fragmented into all the potential gates that he could make in his life.

  And a year ago, when Danny ran away, Thor had used his clant to converse with Danny before he got too far away, and had confirmed that yes, Danny was making gates and yes, Danny finally knew what he was.

  So the gods on that truck were evenly divided between those intending to murder Danny before he could make a gate and get away, and those determined to enlist his power in the service of the Family.

  They got there too late. Danny had already made a Great Gate, and the Gate Thief hadn’t eaten his gates. Danny had friends—Orphans who didn’t belong to any Family—and some of them had passed through the Great Gate and returned. It made their power irresistible. The Norths were sent home in utter and ignominious defeat.

  But none of them had been killed. It was a good sign that Danny and his friends had refrained from doing any serious damage. They still might be able to work something out—especially if they eliminated the faction of the North family that still wanted Danny dead. Times have changed, Uncle Zog! We can’t kill our gatemage, Grandpa Gyish!

  We have to get Danny to let us pass through a Great Gate! You saw how powerful his friends became—a Cowsister took your eagle right out of the sky, Zog! A mere Cobblefriend was able to open up a rift in the ground and swallow our truck! Imagine what Odin will do with his power over metal and machinery, what Gerd will do with electricity, when they pass through a Great Gate.

  And imagine what the other Families will do to us if Danny lets any of them through a Great Gate before us. No, that’s not a reason to kill him—how will we even get near him now? He’s warned, he’s ready, he’ll just gate away from us. You know the stories. The winged feet of Mercury, seven-league boots—gatemages can be gone before your attack comes close to them. Or they can suddenly appear behind you and kill you before you turn around.

  Gatemages are slippery! Once they come into their power, you can’t kill them. Even if you sneak up on them somehow, passing through a gate heals any wound. We’re no threat to a gatemage. We need him—alive and on our side. So we have to talk to Danny. Appeal to his family loyalty.

  And if you can’t stop trying to kill him, then we’ll have no choice but to put you in Hammernip Hill. For the good of the family.

  You understand, yes, you do—you’d do it yourself. There’s a gatemage in the world, one who created a Great Gate and wasn’t destroyed by the Gate Thief. And that gatemage is our own Danny. He knows us, he grew up among us. He has roots in our garden. We need to play that up. We need to bring him back to us. Not irritate him with foolish attempts to murder him. Get it? Are you going to leave him alone? Keep him safe? Make friends with him?

  Yes, you say so now, but can we trust you? Stay away from him. Let Odin and Gerd do the negotiating. Or Thor. Or Mook and Lummy. People he likes and trusts. Don’t let him see you. We want him to forget all the nasty things you did to him growing up.

  * * *

  THE NORTHS WEREN’T the only Family that spotted those YouTube videos—they were just the closest. The Illyrians, for instance, were already aware that there was a gatemage in the North Family. That’s why they were spying on the Norths constantly.

  And when their own gatefinder, Hermia, went missing, their suspicions were confirmed. For a while, they thought the Norths’ gatemage had killed her—gated her to the bottom of the ocean, for instance, or out into space. But then one of their clants had spotted her, still very much alive, and she was using the gates.

  Now the YouTube videos confirmed that the Norths’ gatemage was powerful—a Gatefather, able to raise a Great Gate all by himself, or perhaps drawing partly on Hermia’s abilities—and it was time to get Hermia back under Family control. Chances were good that the Norths’ gatemage could be turned, recruited into the Argyros Family. Hermia was their tool to accomplish that. To get Illyrian mages to Westil and back again.

  Once mages were restored to their full power, who could stand against them?

  Left to themselves for fourteen centuries, the drekka had made a mess of things, and they were only getting worse. It was time for Earth to be ruled by gods again.

  2

  THE MORNING AFTER

  It was early morning, and Coach Lieder was still at home, Danny had run here from the tiny cottage where he lived alone. He could have created a gate, but that would have made a mockery of his decision the night before, after confronting his family, not to make any more gates at the high school. Technically, Coach Lieder’s house wasn’t the school, but since his promise had been made only to himself, who would he be fooling?

  Besides, he had hardly slept last night. He needed the run in the brisk—no, cold—morning air. It was better than coffee, when your goal was to become alert rather than jittery.

  He knocked lightly on the door, avoiding the doorbell in case someone in the house was still asleep. He also waited patiently before giving another couple of raps. Then the door opened.

  Coach Bleeder—sorry, Coach Lieder—stood there in all his half-dressed glory. Apparently he slept in boxers and an old tee-shirt—no one would change into such an outfit first thing in the morning. And he looked bleary-eyed, tense, worried. This surprised Danny, since at school Bleeder usually showed only two emotions: contempt and anger. Now Lieder seemed vulnerable somehow, as if something had hurt him or might hurt him; as if he were grieved, or expected to grieve.

  “You,” said Coach Lieder. And now the contempt reappeared.

  Danny expected Lieder to say something about the rope ladder incident yesterday in the gym. But he just stood there.

  “Sir, I know it’s early,” said Danny.

  “What do you want?”

  Well, if he was going to act like nothing happened, that was fine with Danny. Only now he had to have a reason for being there. Instead of doing damage control from showing off his godlike powers in the gym, what else could plausibly have brought Danny here? “I wondered if you could time me.”

  Lieder looked puzzled, suspicious. After all the months in which Danny had taunted him by never letting Lieder time his fastest runs, it was natural that Lieder would suspect a trick.

  “I’m tired of the game,” said Danny. “I’m in high school. I should care about high school things.” And even as Danny said the words, they became true. It might be fun to be a high school athlete, even if Lieder was a complete jerk.

  “Like waking up your teachers?” asked Lieder coldly.

  Had Lieder really still been asleep? It was early, but not so early that someone coaching the first team of the day at seven shouldn’t already be up and dressed.

  “I stepped off a hundred yards,” said Danny. Actually, part of his gift was a very good sense of distance, with reliability down to a foot in a hundred yards, or a twentieth of an inch in a foot. “Do you have a watch?”

  Lieder held up his left wrist. “I’m a coach, I wear a stopwatch.”

  Danny jogged easily down to his starting place. “Ready?” he called.

  Lieder, looking annoyed, put his finger to his lips. Then he put his right hand to his watch, looked at Danny, then nodded.

  Danny took off at a sprint. A hundred yards wasn’t that much—it’s not as if he had to pace himself. He gave it everything�
��or at least, everything he had at six-thirty in the morning after a night of no sleep.

  When he came parallel to the walkway leading up to Lieder’s door, Danny burst through imaginary tape and then jogged to a stop and faced Lieder expectantly.

  “Can you do it again?” asked Lieder.

  “Do you want a couple of miles?” asked Danny.

  “Just those hundred yards again.”

  So Danny jogged back to the starting point, waited for the nod, ran again. This time he let his after-race jog take him up to Lieder’s porch.

  “Do I make the track team?” asked Danny.

  “On probation,” said Lieder.

  “Because I’m only marginally fast?” asked Danny. “Or because you want me to suffer a little for being such an asshole so far this year?”

  “Everybody starts out on probation, till I see whether you’ll listen to a coach.”

  “So I’m not fast after all?”

  “Even the fastest can get better,” said Lieder. “The fast ones are worth the time you spend working with them.”

  “Just tell me. Am I any good?”

  “You’ll be starting for us,” said Lieder. “Now can I finish my breakfast?”

  Danny grinned. “Knock yourself out,” he said.

  Lieder closed the door behind him.

  As Danny headed back down to the street, Lieder’s door reopened. “Have you had breakfast?”

  “I don’t eat breakfast,” said Danny.

  “From now on you do,” said Lieder. “My athletes eat.”

  “I’m not an athlete,” said Danny. “I’m a runner.”

  Lieder stood there, looking angry, but hesitating.

  “I have to stay light if I’m going to be fast,” said Danny.

  “You’re either on the team or you’re not.” Lieder glanced into the house, then faced Danny again, looking like he wanted a fight after all.

  Danny could see that Lieder wanted to yell at him. Something was keeping him quiet. There was someone in the house he didn’t want to wake. Or someone he didn’t want hearing him yell at a kid.