The Lost Gate (13 page)

All right, Danny wanted to say. All right, we'll do it your way.

But after a moment or two, the sense of being abandoned left him. He had done all right in the Wal-Mart before he met Eric. He would do all right here. And Eric's company wasn't worth giving up any choice in what they did. Either Eric would come back or he wouldn't. Meanwhile, Danny wanted to see the Mall.

Their ride had left them off not far from the Vietnam Memorial, so Danny walked the length of the Mall. He could see that other people's eyes filled with tears—and not just the ones in their fifties and sixties, who would have known some of the names on the wall. And there were little artifacts left at the base of the wall—flowers, plastic and real; one little plastic army man; letters and notes and cards. But to Danny, this all meant nothing. The wars and suffering of drowthers rarely had anything to do with the Families, except when they were using the drowthers as puppets to act out the Family battles. Drowthers simply did these things—fought over things that never seemed to be important. The pride of nations? Who would get to rule over this or that obscure people? Freedom? What difference did it make to drowthers whether they were ruled by this set of clowns or that one? None of them were free, because they couldn't do anything.

Danny felt a twinge at this thought, because it hadn't been that long since Danny himself thought he would probably end up one of them—if he lived at all. But now he was full of his power as a gatemage. Of course, Danny had no idea whether he was a weakish Pathbrother or a powerful Gatefather—but whatever he was, even if he had been only a meager Sniffer like the Greek girl, he was far more powerful than any of these people gathered at the Vietnam Wall.

At the same time, he had studied history from American books; he had followed the news, when that was possible, from American websites. It didn't make him feel the ancient anguish of these people for their war dead. But it made him
wish
that he felt it.

What was the Family's equivalent to this wall? Hammernip Hill?

Danny walked west, as if lost in his thoughts, though he didn't actually have anything in his mind coherent enough to be called “thought,” until he reached the Lincoln Memorial. He climbed the stairs, walked into the lofty chamber, and looked up at the heroic-scale statue of a man sitting in a chair. Or was it a throne? An ugly man, gaunt as a zombie in a bad movie. Just a statue anyway, not the man himself. A face that was on every penny—the cheapest coin.

This is the god that the drowthers worship, thought Danny—echoing, he realized, the contempt that the Aunts had for drowther heroes.

So, in defiance of
their
dismissal of all that the drowthers valued, Danny stayed and read everything that was inscribed on the walls.

At first, by reflex, he mocked. Government of the people, by the people, for the people? What were these people, and who cared who governed them!

But Danny had now spent two full days among the drowthers. He had asked them for money and food and rides, and half the time they had shared with him what they had. Why? No one in the Family would do that for anyone who was not one of the Norths. Danny doubted anyone but, say, Auntie Uck would even notice that some drowther kid was asking for a few bucks.

Of course, Danny had lied to them every time—but even if what he said was true, what business was it of theirs? Why should they care whether somebody else's kid was hungry or got home?

The god of these Americans wasn't one of the old pantheons of the Norths or the Greeks or the Indians or Persians or Gauls or Hittites or Latins or Goths or any of the other bands that had been thriving until Loki closed the Gates. The god was the people themselves. Imagine—a nation that worshiped each other. Not individually, but as an idea. The highest ideal was to make sure that every other drowther in this place had his freedom and enough to provide for his family. Other people
mattered.

Danny had been on the receiving end of his family's callousness. And he had just run away from the fiercest sort of thoughtless cruelty—the end of his life because he was the wrong sort of mage. This Abraham, this Lincoln—would he have fought for the rights of such a one as Danny? A gatemage who had the misfortune of being born when gatemages were treated as the enemies of the gods?

What would it have mattered if he had? There was little enough a drowther like Lincoln could do for Danny, even with a whole nation—or half of one, anyway—arrayed behind him and armed for battle. Any drowther's life could be snuffed out whenever a powerful mage noticed he was alive.

Besides, the drowthers themselves snuffed out Lincoln's life without even waiting for the gods-in-residence in the North Family compound.

Too much thinking. Too much time spent standing in one place. The need to run came upon him.

Danny whirled around and ran from the building. He nearly flew down the steps, three at a time; barefoot as he was, with his feet horned and callused, he was surefooted, he could feel everything he stepped on yet feared nothing. No one here could catch him; the ground could not hurt him. Danny ran the length of the reflecting pool, ran around the hill of the Washington Monument, then dodged his way across the few streets that crossed the Mall. He ignored the White House when he passed it on his left. It was the opposite end of the Mall he wanted. Not the Capitol—what was the Capitol to him? What was
behind
the Capitol: the Library of Congress.

He was a little out of breath when he got there, but only because it was uphill most of the way, and he hadn't eaten anything since morning, and Eric had all the money—that had been a bad plan, hadn't it? Besides, he had his backpack on, which changed his gait a little, which wearied him.

It was only as he approached the entrance to the library that he realized that he was still dressed for begging. And barefoot! Drowthers had a thing about shoes.

Where could he change clothes?

He jogged around behind the building—a surprisingly long way—till he came to a long street with row houses lining the other side. Most of them had stairways up to the front door, and several of them had basement entrances under the stoop. Danny looked for a house that looked unoccupied at the moment, then lightly vaulted the iron fence and ducked under the stoop. It didn't take him long to swap clothes. Now he looked newer. Closer to normal. And he had shoes on.

The trouble was, he was still a kid. Would they even let him in?

The answer was simple enough.

No.

“What do you think I'm going to do, steal stuff?” asked Danny.

“Or color on the walls,” said the security guy—but with a smile, as if to say, I don't make the rules and I know they shouldn't apply to you, but that's how things are.

And Danny couldn't explain: I'm hoping that somewhere in here—the Library that has everything—I'll be able to find something about gatemages. Even if it's written about as a collection of folklore or ancient legends, I need to find out what I'm supposed to be able to do and maybe find some clue about how to do it. Gatemages are supposed to be really powerful and dangerous, but except for getting out of tight situations, I can't think of anything remotely perilous that I can do with my gatemaking. So I need a
book.
I need a
clue.

He thought of the library in the old house in the North compound. All the answers he wanted were there, he knew it. And what would any book in the Library of Congress be able to tell him? The best he could hope for would be ancient legends, treated by modern authors as mere folklore or even fantasy, but containing some kernel of truth that might guide him.

Every other kind of mage got training from others with his skill. Treemages were introduced to the trees by a Treefriend, beastmages to their beasts by an Eyefriend or Clawbrother.

The unfairness of it, the frustration, it all struck home at that moment and he felt tears come into his eyes. He brushed them away.

“Crying isn't getting you in here,” said the security guy. But he wasn't smiling now.

“I know,” said Danny. And, though his emotion had been real, he immediately thought of ways he might exploit it, lies he might tell. In the next moment, he rejected the lies. This drowther was a decent guy. It was his job to keep out unaccompanied children who might damage things. If he let Danny in he would be risking his job. Why should Danny bring so much trouble into
his
life? Especially considering that there was another way. For a gatemage, there was always another way into or out of a place.

Danny stepped back from the security gate and peered through into the room. There were no visible books, but he could see that there was a kind of alcove. Leading to restrooms. He fixed the location in his mind so he could come back to it later, by other means. Then he turned and left.

Outside the building, he stood for a while looking up at the Capitol dome. Drowthers might have no magery, but they built
this.
What mage had ever
built
anything? All right, yes, mages worked with the natural world, so great artificial things like this building were not even interesting to a mage. But still—without any particular powers except the skill of their hands and the thoughts in their minds, the drowthers had built great and beautiful things. Ugly things, too—but the Aunts always spoke of drowthers as if all they ever made were wars and stinks and stupidity. But it was not true. Drowthers also sometimes made things that were beautiful or mighty or clever or useful, or all of these at once.

Maybe Loki noticed this, too. Maybe Loki came to care about the drowthers and realized that if he closed all the gates, tying the gods to the place they were in and taking away the vast increase in power that came from gating between the worlds, then the drowthers could come into their own. The world would belong to them, and not to the mages anymore.

But he still had to learn how to be a gatemage. Because he
was
going to open a gate to the other world. To Westil, the ancient homeland of the mages. Loki might have been moved by compassion for the drowthers, but it had been nearly fourteen centuries, and the drowthers had come into their might and power. Surely now a Great Gate could be opened. What else was Danny born for, if not for that?

I'm not another Loki, he thought. I'm the anti-Loki, the opposite. What he closed, I'll open. What he broke, I'll fix. What he hid, I'll find.

He opened a gate into the Library of Congress and found himself standing in the restroom alcove. He could see, not all that far away, the guard who had denied him entrance. But the man's attention was directed toward the outside and the other guards near him. He was not scanning for intruders who had somehow slipped in behind him.

As long as he was there, Danny used the restroom. It felt good to wash his hands and face. Days without washing were good for begging, bad for personal comfort.

A man came into the restroom and stopped and looked at Danny. No, not at Danny, at his backpack.

“How did you get that in here?” he asked.

Danny remembered the signs outside, that all bags and backpacks had to be scanned. Nothing about their being prohibited. But apparently the fear of book-stealing meant that it was suspicious for a kid to have a backpack with him in the restroom. And this guy looked like the kind of jerk who would be delighted to drag Danny out by the ear and have him arrested for stealing, simply for the sheer pleasure of adding to the sum of human misery in the world.

So Danny opened his backpack, showing that there was nothing inside but clothes.

The man nodded. “All right, but check that bag at the desk before you go anywhere else.” Then the man went into a stall, dropped his pants, and began to stink up the place.

Danny's first impulse was to flee—to make a gate to the outside, or at least to get out of the now-unpleasant room and into a place with cleaner air. Instead, he stood there contemplating the problem of the backpack. He couldn't have it with him, but he didn't want to lose it. He could go back outside and hide it somewhere and then return, but he ran the risk of someone finding it and stealing it while he was gone. Besides, it just felt … wrong. Inelegant, perhaps, as Auntie Tweng used to say of kludgy solutions to math or programming problems. “Yes, it works,” she would say, “but it's not elegant. Truth is simple and elegant. That's how you know it when you see it.”

What Danny needed to do was find a place to put the bag where no one would find it. Couldn't a gatemage open a way into some small compartment—like the paper towel dispenser?—and push something through it?

Danny had never yet made a gate without pushing himself through it in the process. But he certainly couldn't push himself into the towel dispenser, not without blowing it all up when he tried to put himself into the same space as the wall—or breaking every bone in his body to make himself fit.

So he stood there, ignoring the man's groans and stinks as he continued to relieve himself copiously. Danny thought: The guy really
is
full of shit.

He stood in front of the paper towel dispenser and contemplated it. It was embedded in the wall, a tall metal contraption that was mostly wastebasket below and towel dispenser above. The wastebasket was overflowing. Still, it was the obvious place to stash the backpack. Danny thought of just jamming it down into the trash, but by now he was committed to at least trying to create a gate without going through it. A tiny gate that would simply let him push the backpack through a thin sheet of metal into a narrow enclosed space.

What could go wrong? The worst that could happen would be a huge nuclear explosion when the atoms of the backpack tried to occupy the same space as the atoms of the dispenser, the wall, and the trash. And in that case, he wouldn't care anymore. Heck, he wouldn't even be in trouble, because they'd blame it on some terrorist or foreign power and it would trigger a devastating war that would slaughter millions or billions of drowthers. Doing some stupid impulsive thing that caused the death of drowthers was practically a family tradition. The only unusual thing would be that Danny would die as a consequence of his own stupidity.