Orson Card - The Gate Thief

Yet he could also feel the wind.

He had always felt the wind, even in his sleep, it would wake him by whistling through the eaves and trembling the windows, and he would get up and open the door and go out into the wind. Mother would hear him and rush out after him and gather him up and say, The wind is a terrible thing, Cedric, it carries birds far from shore and sweeps nests out of the trees. But Cedric would say, It never hurts me, Mother. I love the wind.

Yet he had never really felt the wind until now, today, as he stood in this gentle wind on a grassy hill in Westil. He felt it shape itself around the standing stones and sensed all the eddies within the circle. He was aware of the play of the breeze in the wool of the nearest sheep, and the sweep of it through the grass exhilarated him.

It’s not the breeze of Westil that’s different, Ced realized. It’s me. I’ve been through the Great Gate, and now I have all the awareness of the wind that I ever wanted. Now I’m the mage I always was in my dreams.

He couldn’t resist the temptation now; it wasn’t enough to feel the wind. He had to shape it. He had been studying with Norm Galliatti, an Orphan Galebreath in Medford, Oregon, and he had raised his abilities from making tiny whirlwinds and raising a slight breeze on a still day to the point where he could direct a breeze, narrow it like a dart, blow out a candle from a hundred yards, change the flight of a ball in midair.

But here … just by thinking of doing it, it happened. A whirlwind rose all around him, spinning inside the circle of stones, whipping his hair and clothing, and it was so much larger and stronger than anything he’d ever been able to do before that he laughed aloud, then cried in joy. Oh, Mother, can you see me? O Bird of my Youth, O my Hummingbird, Calliope, are you watching now? See what I can do!

The whirlwind created so much suction inside it that he rose up into the air, but he was in no danger. This was no tornado, snatching up creatures and flinging them here and there, randomly. No, the air that spun around him knew him, cared for him, carried him. The wind rejoiced in him as much as he rejoiced in it. Here you are, it was saying. We are sheep too long without a shepherd, cows with udders full and no dairyman to ease us, till you came.

Carry me, he thought. Carry me away from here. Show me this world.

The whirlwind raised him higher and he could see now over the nearby groves of trees. There was a shepherd’s hut just beyond the river, and out of it stepped the shepherd, looking upward at Ced as the whirlwind bore him along the river’s course, downstream because that’s what Ced felt like, but the wind might have carried him anywhere.

Now I know why people called us gods, if we Mithermages of Westil could pass through Great Gates and to this . When they painted Hermes with wings on his feet, was it a windmage like me that they remembered?

Ced had only to think of going to the crest of a rocky outcropping, and the whirlwind bore him there and gently set him down. What had once been such a labor to him, just to make a whirlwind go where he wanted it to go, was now effortless, and he could ride within it. Here is how a magic carpet flies. This is the wheel Ezekiel saw in the middle of the air.

But now that he was on solid ground, Ced stretched out his arms and gathered more and more wind into the vortex. He moved it away from himself and made it spin and spin and spin. The top of it rose up, and at the base it began to gather dirt and dust and bits of grass and old leaves and insects from the ground and now the whirlwind became darker, more visible as a column, more like the television image of a tornado, only it wasn’t in the distance, it was here, and he was in control of it.

This is the real god, thought Ced.

No: In his mind he was speaking to the wind itself. Thou art the god, O whirlwind of my making. I have wakened thee.

With the realization that the wind was alive and could hear him, Ced crossed a threshold. His outself went into the wind. It became his clant. It became his heartsblood, and he was riding in the wind the way his mother flew in hummingbirds, riding it and guiding it, both as companion and controller, passenger and pilot.

He never left his body; he still stood watching the tornado from the tor. Yet he also was the tornado, not seeing through it, for tornados have no eyes, but rather feeling it with the kinesthesia of his body, the way a person can sense with eyes closed just where the hands are, and what the fingers are doing. He could feel the location and dimension and speed and strength of the tornado just as he could tie his shoelaces in the dark, the fingers moving smoothly through well-remembered patterns.

He rode the tornado for a hundred miles before he was sated with the joy of it. Enough, enough, enough. He let go of the wind and immediately felt it slacken and fade, the air also rejoicing with the memory of such rapid, powerful flight. His outself returned to him. He stood, whole again, and yet bereft because the wind was just a gentle breeze again. He had been a giant; now he was only a man.

He climbed down from the outcropping of rock. It wasn’t easy-a windmage can fly to a place where a goat can’t climb. But there was a grassy way, a step here, a jump there, that let him get down from peak to riverside.

Then he began to walk downstream, looking for people. But he found none.

Instead, he met the wreckage of a village, the houses torn up by their roots.

He had to raise a little whirlwind to lift him over the tumble of a broken forest, with trees uprooted and cast upon each other like a game of pickup sticks.

And then he came to a city where the trapped cried out from inside collapsed walls, where men and women keened aloud over the bodies of the dead, and children wandered looking terrified and lost.

He could not understand their language, though he recognized that it sounded somewhat like the language his mother sometimes spoke to him in snatches, the language she spoke to the birds that gathered around her when she fed them or sang to them in the yard.

None of them seemed to think anything of this stranger among them. They were too caught up in their own misery and fear, in the struggle to release the victims trapped in the fallen buildings. Ced joined in, helping to pull away the wreckage, to lift the broken bodies, to carry the living to safety.

I need you to heal these people, Danny North. I should not be here alone. I can’t be trusted. It’s too much power. Look what I did without even realizing it. I felt the devastation of this town as a kind of crunching underfoot, like tramping over fallen acorns on the pavement near a city oak. But it was these buildings I was kicking aside, and in the wind of my passing I never heard my victims’ pleas and cries, for the wind sings and screams, but it has no ears and never listens.

I have ears. I have eyes. Yet I was far away on a rocky hill, standing there in the ecstasy of power. It was a drug.

I have been a god for only an hour or two, and look what I have done.

Yet as Ced struggled to save people in the aftermath of his tornado, he also felt a dark and terrible pride. On the one hand, he wanted to weep and beg forgiveness, to take responsibility and bear the consequence: I did this. I will help undo the damage, as much as I can.

But the most powerful feeling deep inside him was much simpler, and filled with the fire of pride:

I did this. Look what I can do!

Danny thought he was going to Laurette’s house that night for a birthday party. Not the teen-movie cliche of a party so huge that it overflows the house and infests the neighbors’ yards and results in the police being called. It was just a get-together at Laurette’s house in honor of Xena, Laurette’s friend and, since he arrived at Parry McCluer, Danny’s.