The Lost Gate (35 page)

“Maybe we're onto something and maybe we're not,” said Danny. “We set out trying to close gates, and we ended up capturing them and moving both ends. Is that ‘eating a gate'? The thing is, it was my own gate I ‘ate,' so I already knew where both ends were. And all I did was bring them into the same room as me. I didn't
eat
them.”

“Yes you did,” insisted Veevee.

“Okay, maybe that's all that's meant by ‘eating' a gate. But there still has to be a way to close a gate—or what would being a Lockfriend even mean?”

“But we know what the last Loki did, don't you see? He
took
all the gates in the world—just the way you took that public gate—and he ate them. Moved them. They aren't where they used to be—but that doesn't mean they aren't
somewhere.
”

Danny saw it, too. “But what good would it be to find them? They're out of place. They've been moved. They don't lead whence or whither they did before.” Then he grinned, because in all the world, only another gatemage would delight in using the old words as much as he did.

“Are we looking for those stolen gates?” asked Veevee. “What's our project here, to restore all the gates that Loki stole? I don't think so!”

“Loki stole gates,” said Danny. “But what about this Gate Thief who tears the outselves out of gatemages? Just strips them so they can never make another gate.”

Veevee read aloud from the sheet with Danny's translation of the four runic inscriptions. “The jaws of Bel seized his heart to carry it away.”

“Is that the Gate Thief?” asked Danny. “The ancient god of the Carthaginians? Gatemages can break their outselves into fragments, leaving bits here and there as gates—but we
must
hold the rest of them inside us somehow. Maybe Bel can find the unspent hoard of the gatemage's outself and swallow it up in a gate. Maybe he just moves it out of the gatemage's reach, as if he had spent his whole outself on gates and then forgotten where they were.”

“Do you think it might be vengeance?” asked Veevee. “Maybe this inscription—maybe we're still living in that story. Maybe Bel has taken thousands of years to get even.”

“Or maybe it wasn't Loki who closed all the gates back in 632
A.D.
,” said Danny. “It's not as if anybody saw him do it. It's not like he left a note. What if Bel recovered from what that earlier Loki had done to him, and then came back and ate all the Westilian gates as retaliation—and then found the newer Loki and stripped him or even killed him. Maybe we've been blaming him all these years, and it wasn't his fault, he was the
victim.
”

“Wouldn't that be ironic,” said Veevee. “Yet it
would
make a perverse kind of sense.”

“Especially if we think of spacetime as a trickster,” said Danny. “Loki gets blamed for his own demise, and so the Westilians deprive themselves of the only kind of mage that could fight Bel.”

“Oh, that bastard spacetime,” said Veevee. “You gotta love his sense of irony.”

“And ever since then, Bel—or the fiftieth-generation mage
called
Bel—watches the Westilians and eats the whole outself of any gatemage who tries to make a Great Gate.”

“You think he's
still
getting vengeance thirteen hundred years later?”

“Like the Families don't hold grudges at least that long?” said Danny.

“Yes, why shouldn't Bel be as mentally unstable as those inbred Families,” said Veevee.

“I'm the result of one of the most ridiculously inbred marriages ever,” said Danny.

“Sorry, I really didn't mean to insult you,” said Veevee.

“I'm not insulted,” said Danny. “I was proving your point.”

She jumped up and gave him a hug and kissed his cheek resoundingly. “If you were any smarter or funnier or cuter I'd eat you alive.” Then she giggled. “Oh, this whole thing has given completely new meanings to sayings with ‘eat' in them. ‘Eat your heart out.' ‘Eat
this
.' ‘Eat me.' ”

Danny joined in. “ ‘Have your cake and eat it, too'?”

“Have your
soul
and eat it, too, you mean.”

“You eat everything on your plate or you won't get dessert,” said Danny.

Veevee shook her head. “I think I already did all the funny ones.”

“Maybe,” said Danny, a little embarrassed.

Veevee laughed and gave him a tiny light punch on the arm. “Eat like a king!”

“I could eat a horse!” said Danny triumphantly.

“You really could, couldn't you,” said Veevee in delight.

“We still haven't made any progress toward closing and locking gates,” said Danny.

“I think we've made a lot of progress for only our
first session,
please remember,” said Veevee. “And now here in my kitchen I've got this public gate that goes nowhere and I still can't get down to the beach.”

“The nice thing is, the public gate is still mine—I moved it using another gate, but I can just as easily put it back where I found it.”

“Except not starting from the balcony,” Veevee reminded him.

“Where, then?” asked Danny.

“My bedroom,” she said. “Look, right here—inside my underwear drawer.”

“What?” said Danny, following her into the bedroom.

“It's not like I have to
walk
into the gate. I just find it with some body part and push my way through, right? So put it inside my dresser, so I can open the drawer, put my hand in, and have access to the gate. But nobody else can ever stumble into it accidentally.”

“Right,” said Danny. “And when you come back to your room, you end up inside your drawer and your dresser explodes around you.”

Veevee giggled. “Oops,” she said. “I forgot it went two ways.”

“Let's not put it in your shower,” said Danny. “You don't want to accidentally step through it and end up wet and starkers on the beach.”

“You prankster, you were tempted to do it, weren't you!”

“I can't fool somebody who can see the gates,” said Danny.

“Oh, well. It would have been a funny prank. It still might be, someday. To play on someone who
isn't me.
”

Danny put the entrance to the gate right up against her linen closet shelves. Nobody was going to press their body into that space, and when she came back to the room, she'd simply appear in front of it, facing away. Veevee tried it out, both ways, several times. “Very convenient,” she said.

“Just remember to check your shower before you get in,” said Danny.

“I know how you think,” said Veevee. “You just told me to check the shower because you want to distract me so it doesn't occur to me that you really placed a public gate just above my toilet seat.”

“Never crossed my mind,” said Danny. “But I wish it had.”

The grocery delivery arrived. Danny helped her put things away. Then she made him a couple of sandwiches—one cucumber and watercress on white bread, and one peanut butter and honey on whole wheat. They were really good. Why couldn't any of the Aunts have been like Veevee?

He returned home through the gate to the Silvermans' with half the peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich still in his hand. Leslie eyed it suspiciously.

“That's what she's feeding you?” she asked.

“I had to steal it,” said Danny. “She won't let me eat or drink or use the bathroom or anything.”

“Ha ha,” said Leslie. Then, more seriously, “Do you think she'll help you?”

“We're making progress,” said Danny.

“Just keep safe. That's all I care about,” said Leslie.

Danny realized that she was telling him the truth. It touched him, to think she actually cared about him—enough to let him go study with the woman she probably hated worst in the whole world.

Danny gave her a hug and kissed her cheek.

“You still have the stink of her deodorant on you,” said Leslie. But she hugged him back.

15

T
HE
Q
UEEN
'
S
S
QUIRREL

It was in the kitchen that Wad first heard the rumors that Anonoei was plotting to kill Queen Bexoi. It began with Hull quite out of temper, though she wouldn't tell anyone why. But she was storming and stomping around the kitchen, ready to snap at anyone who asked the most innocent question, and as for those who made mistakes, they were doomed. Hull was generally not a violent person, but brooms were laid against backs and an iron pot was thrown and dented against a stone wall.

Wad knew that it was time for him to intervene, for though the pot was badly aimed, it had been thrown hard and if it had struck the head of poor Gunnel, he'd have been dead or a halfwit, which Wad knew would consume poor Hull with grief.

“Pardon me,” said Wad softly.

“Speak up, you Wad of half-risen dough!” shouted Hull.

Wad spoke even more softly. “I think we have a fungus infestation in the shade garden.”

“Do you think I'm an idiot?” demanded Hull. “Do you think I don't know you're trying to get me out of the kitchen to calm me down?”

“The undersides of the basil leaves are white with it, like an upside-down snowfall,” Wad persisted, even more softly.

“Then pull them out and burn them, you fool! Don't bother me with it.”

“You told me your grandfather once found a way to kill fungus,” said Wad.

“You scheming little squirrel,” said Hull. “As if you actually knew what was for my own good.” She stalked out of the kitchen and headed for the shade garden.

Wad loped after her, passed her, and had the door to the garden unlocked and open for her when she arrived. Hull came in and slammed the door shut behind her. “Well?” she said.

Wad just looked at her.

“I know you can talk, Wad. Don't play dumb with me.”

Wad smiled slightly.

“I wasn't really aiming at Gunnel's head!” Hull said.

“What if you missed and hit him?” asked Wad softly.

“Then I'd feel worse than I do right now, which is hard to believe.”

Wad's silence was another question.

“They tried to put poison in the Queen's tea,” said Hull. “They thought because I'm fat and getting old that I wouldn't see the movement behind my back. But I saw, and I turned and told him to drink the tea himself or I'd pour it down his throat. So he picked it up with trembling fingers and threw it on the floor.” She laughed. “It was a tin cup and it didn't break, and a minute later I had that cup up to his lips and him pressed against the wall and he started to cry and begged me not to make him drink, that it wasn't his idea, that he was only trying to serve the King.”

“How would it serve the King to kill his wife when she's pregnant with his first legitimate heir?”

“They don't want a legitimate heir!” said Hull.

“Who is ‘they'?” asked Wad.

“And what will you do about it if I say?” she retorted.

“I don't know,” said Wad. “Who?”

“I don't know either,” Hull confessed. “ ‘They'll kill my family if I say,' he says to me, and what can I do then? I'm too merciful, that's what I am. But if the Queen dropped dead of poison, who would they blame? Me, who was carrying the tray myself! Who else? I could protest all I wanted, but there was two they intended to kill with that poison—the Queen and me. Not that anyone would care about me. I barely care about myself. But I'd never forgive them forcing me to die with a traitor's and assassin's shame on me, when I don't deserve either name!”

Wad stepped right up to her and put his arms around her. She noticed that he was a little taller than he had been when he first came to Nassassa nearly two years ago. But still not as tall as he ought to be, after all this time. “Using my grandfather's name to force me out of my own kitchen,” she murmured. “Shame on you.”

“I didn't say his name,” whispered Wad. “Because I don't know it.”

“You invoked his memory and made me stop ranting and throwing things, and I
wanted
to rant and throw things!”

Wad shook his head against her shoulder.

“I did so! I may not have wanted the
consequences
of ranting and throwing, but I certainly wanted things in that kitchen to hit other things, and hard!”

“Then next time throw at me,” said Wad. “I won't mind.”

“Oh, and what would you do, gate out of the way? Show everyone what you are?
If
you still are?”

“I wouldn't gate away,” said Wad. “I'd let you hit me. Then you'd stop.”

“Why? Because you think I love you?”

Against her shoulder, Wad nodded.

“Presumptuous little squirrel. Nobody loves squirrels! They're too clever, you can't stop them from stealing!”

“I don't steal,” murmured Wad.

“I don't know who tried to kill the Queen,” said Hull. “Whoever it was had that weak-kneed coward's family in their power and any man who has children, he's no longer free, they can control him, and that's the truth. And no, I won't tell you who the weak-kneed coward was, either!”

“Are you afraid I'll kill him?”

“I'm afraid that someone will find out that you know, and kill you for it.”

“And I'm afraid that someone will kill
you
for it, because by now they certainly know that
you
know.”

Hull pushed him away a little. “They wouldn't dare,” she said.

“If they dare to try to kill the Queen…”

“Who would put blood in the King's bread!” said Hull.

“Tell me,” said Wad. For in truth it surprised Wad that there could be any conspiracy that he didn't already know about.