Orson Card - The Gate Thief

She could feel Wad’s torment as he wrestled against the impulse she was sending him.

I am Anonoei! Yet how could her wordless ba make such a strange thought clear in Wad’s mind? The ba dealt only in emotions and kinetic memories.

It was emotion, not identity that she needed to send into him. All her love for him.

The trouble was that she did not love him. Not so very much. Enough, yes, to share his bed. But he was also the torturer who had damaged her children. She had managed to thrust her rage into another compartment in her mind, to save it for another time, when it might more usefully be expressed. But it meant that she could not thrust into Wad her love for him because there wasn’t enough of it. Nor could she control him enough to remind him of his love for her , because she knew that he did not love her so very much, either.

But she loved her children. And she knew that he had loved his own child. And there was a living child-still, for one moment more-in the belly of this woman. A child who did not deserve to die, whatever the mother might have done.

Love of a child. Anonoei’s love for Eluik and Enopp. She also reached for his own memories of holding his son, Trick, of playing with him, talking to him. Anonoei had no idea what Wad had said to his son, but she knew that he had talked to him, and she could touch those memories and rekindle them. And she could make him think of the belly of the dying woman lying on the floor of Keel’s office.

She felt his decision at the very moment he passed a gate over her body-for it was hers now, as surely as it was Bexoi’s. The gate did not drive her out of the body; nor was Bexoi any longer trying to die.

“It’s the baby that I’m saving, not you,” said Wad. To her? Of course not. To Bexoi.

“I’m Anonoei,” she said.

But no sound came out.

Nothing.

For Bexoi’s ka was fully in this body, and so was Anonoei’s, and Bexoi would not let the body act on Anonoei’s intention to identify herself as present in this flesh.

Bexoi wanted her gone. Sole control of this body, that’s all that she would settle for.

I should have let her die.

But if I had, would I have been able to keep the flesh alive? Do I still need Bexoi to maintain my life? It doesn’t matter whether I do or not. She’s here, and the opportunity to let her die is gone, now that the body is healed. Does she choose to block me from speech? Then I choose to block her .

“A simple thank-you would do,” said Wad. “Or even a curse-I have no fear of your curses. Or are you trying to work up the strength to burn me to death the way you burned Anonoei? She was worth ten of you, you know. A better mother than you-and not just because she never arranged for the murder of her firstborn. Burn me if you can. See what happens.”

And then he wept.

Maybe Anonoei loved this man more than she had supposed.

Anonoei wanted to look at him. To use these eyes to see him, these hands to reach for him. But Bexoi blocked her.

The weeping stopped. Wad spoke again, whispered. “You knew that I couldn’t kill your baby, even though you killed mine. You knew there was a line I wouldn’t cross. But once the baby is born, anyone can nurse it. Do you understand?”

Anonoei understood, and so did Bexoi. If they did not manage to end their struggle and find a way to make this body speak aloud, then after the birth of the baby, she would die. They would die.

But there was still a little while before the baby was due.

Wad rolled the body over so it was lying on its back. He pried open an eyelid. The reflex for the eye to focus was under the control of the ape-brain, not the two kas that warred within it. So Anonoei saw and therefore remembered that Keel still hung, alive, from the rafter overhead.

Look up, she said to Wad. And then she filled him with the kinetic memory of looking up.

And so he looked.

“Keel,” he said.

In a moment he had gated himself to the rafter and the open eye watched as Danny untied the man, as he caught Keel in a gate so he landed on the floor after the fall of half an inch rather than ten feet.

I am not utterly helpless in this flesh, thought Anonoei. I am still a manmage, I can keep communicating with the portion of my ba that already dwells in him.

There were other splinters of her outself that connected her to Eluik and Enopp, and to the couple in Mittlegard who were looking after them. Her connection with the Gatefather Danny North, with Bexoi’s nephew Frostinch, with King Prayard-all these persisted, along with her links with the enemies of Bexoi. Bexoi would probably be able to block her from making new connections, but she could not interfere with the ones that still existed from before. They were part of Anononei’s self, her ka-and-ba, and Bexoi had no part in them.

So while Bexoi was fully trapped inside this stalemated, unmoving body, Anonoei could still influence the actions of dozens of people, could still reshape events, at least a little.

That’s a tiny bit of justice on my side.

Wad listened as Keel told him how Queen Bexoi and two soldiers arrested him and brought him to his office and hung him from the rafter. There was no explanation, no threat. Keel had kept quiet, expecting her to ask him questions, to accuse him of something, but not a word was said until Anonoei arrived.

“It was hard for me to concentrate on what they were saying,” said Keel. “The Queen called Anonoei a manmage, which is true enough. I don’t think the Queen knew that the manmage who was interfering with people like me was Anonoei until she appeared here. Bexoi said she had studied manmagery because manmages and gatemages were the only ones who posed a threat to her. Bexoi kept waiting for you to come. I think she was using Anonoei as bait.”

“I was busy,” said Wad. “I didn’t realize that Anonoei was calling me until too late.”

“Bexoi is a firemage.”

“I know,” said Wad.

“The way she burned up Anonoei, it was…”

Apparently there was no word in his mind for what it was.

Keel broke into convulsive sobs. “I thought I was going to die.”

“Why was Bexoi burned as well? Her fires never harmed her before.”

“Anonoei threw herself on her at the last moment and held her close,” said Keel. “That’s how it looked to me, at least.”

“That shouldn’t have made any difference,” said Wad. “Bexoi could stand in a furnace that would melt granite and the heat would never reach her.”

“Then Bexoi must not have burned,” said Keel.

“Getting some sarcasm back, I see,” said Wad.

“You’re the kitchen boy. Hull’s errand runner.”

“I am,” said Wad.

“And you’ve been a gatemage the whole time.”

“It made me a better errand runner,” said Wad.

“Why hasn’t the Gate Thief eaten your gates?” asked Keel.

“Do you really want even more of the kind of information that will make me need to kill you?” asked Wad.

“If you didn’t kill Queen Bexoi when you had her in your power, you won’t kill me,” said Keel.

“You don’t know what I’ll do,” said Wad.

“I know that if you’re Queen Bexoi’s friend after all, I’ll kill you if I ever get the chance.”

“I’m not her friend,” said Wad.

“She told Anonoei that the gatemage was once her lover. Was that you?”

“I put a baby in that belly once,” said Wad. “The boy that she named ‘Oath’ was mine.”

Keel’s body shook again, but now with laughter. “Poor Prayard. Cuckolded by a kitchen boy.”

“By a spy that he often resorted to himself.”

“So he knows you,” said Keel.