“This is starting to sound like theology,” said Wad. “Justice and mercy. An eye for an eye. Not Christianity, with all its talk of forgiveness, but the older law, tit for tat, eye for eye, where the law always rules and can’t be tricked.”

“Why should I care what it sounds like? If it’s true, then it would be surprising if the idea didn’t crop up everywhere, in one form or another.”

He had a point, but Wad knew that there were rules, and somehow Danny North wasn’t following them. “How can you be a clant, when I have all your gates and you have none?”

“I’ve never made a clant, so I don’t know if that’s what I did. I asked a lot of particles to form themselves into a second body for me. And they did, so here I am.”

“Then you passed this clant through a Great Gate?”

“There is no Great Gate,” said Danny North, “and I didn’t pass the clant from Mittlegard to here, I made it here. I made it right here in this room. I made it out of the air in the room, plus the light and heat of the fire, plus my inner knowledge of how my body works, of what it truly is. And the prets in this place saw what I needed to make, and they helped me make it.”

“So you formed a clant, clothes and all, right here? Just now?”

“You can marvel at my newfound talents later,” said Danny North. “This baby’s due, and we need to resolve who’s going to have the use of the mother’s body before it’s born.”

Chapter 10

10

Anonoei listened to everything that was said, not because she really understood what Danny North was going on about, but because she had nothing else to do. Bexoi was asleep, or in some other kind of trance, and so her thoughts, when they rose to the level of consciousness, were something to pay attention to. Anonoei was desperately lonely. She could hear what Bexoi’s body heard, see what she saw; but her eyes were generally closed, and since Bexoi wasn’t doing anything, it was like being a passenger alone on a boat that was trapped in the winter ice.

So Wad’s conversation with Prayard had passed the time, at least, and then when Danny North appeared, things got interesting. Anonoei heard things which, if she had a body to allow her to feel anything, would have made her hopeful. But there were no emotions without the body. She could understand things, but dispassionately. Oh, this might be possible. Oh, that might not.

Do I even care whether I live or die? Am I really alive here in Bexoi’s body? Did the vital part of me perish in the flames of my original corpse, and now I’m just a shadow, less real than the clant of a gatemage?