Gerd heard him, but the words felt empty. “Alf, I know you’re right, but I can’t bring myself to care whether one group of Chinese people is ruled by another group.”

“The Americans care, the world cares, so it’s a good demonstration.”

“Of what? For what?”

“That whatever nation has our protection is going to prevail in battle. It’s what we’ve always done.”

“And in the end, what difference does it make? More dead drowthers on one side than on the other. Rich and powerful drowthers strutting around as kings or emperors, making little token donations to priests who pretend to care about pleasing us. Alf, didn’t the centuries without gates teach us anything?”

“Taught us we don’t like being without Great Gates,” said Alf. “Which, to all intents and purposes, we still are.”

“Danny took us through his gate.”

“Last. Came to us last. There’s no loyalty in the boy.”

“He’s loyal to those who are loyal to him. When did he see any spark of loyalty from the Family, when he was growing up? And when he made his first Great Gate, who showed up to try to kill him?”

“Defend him, fine,” said Alf. “I even agree with you. But he has to get over it.”

“Whether he does or not,” said Gerd, “here we are on this mountainous island with barbarous food and unintelligible language, constantly fiddling with airplanes and weapons and tanks and even rifles and machine guns, and somebody said something about battery packs for night vision and communications, and it’s very boring work. I mean listen to what I just said: work! I might as well be the employee of some corporation.”

“Magery is work. Only drowthers think it isn’t.”

Gerd knew he was right. She hated hearing the hint of a whine in her own voice. But she was not happy. “Is this all we were hoping for? When we kept Danny alive? That our powers would be magnified so we could make drowther weapons work better so they could kill each other more efficiently? Didn’t we used to dream of going home to Westil?”

Alf came out of the bathroom, his mouth still full of toothpaste and the toothbrush in his hand. “When did we ever talk about going home to Westil?”

“Constantly!” said Gerd.

“We talked about going to Westil, because that would mean our powers would be fantastically increased, we would be gods again! But going ‘home’ to Westil? None of us has lived there for fifteen hundred years. I don’t even know if our version of Westilian language is even spoken there.”

“But we’d have enhanced powers there, too,” said Gerd. “And they don’t have all these terrible weapons. Or at least I hope they don’t.”

“Maybe they have worse ones,” said Alf.