“But how do you know that the Sutahites are the cause, or that bringing Set to Westil would be so terrible? Think what the lack of gates has done to all the mages of both worlds, all because you fear something that may not be all that terrible.”

“I saw the difference between the worlds back when their levels of technology were more nearly the same,” said Wad. “I had a century and more to study the situation, to see how the Semitic religions brought Sutahites to ever greater power and influence. They might call Set the devil, or Satan, or Lucifer, but it was the Sutahites who most readily answered their prayers, prompting them to do this or that terrible thing. I knew what I was doing when I did it.”

“But you Westilian mages, you Indo-European gods,” said Hermia, “look at the terrible things you did.”

Wad knew he could not relieve her ignorance in the little time they would have together. But still he had to try. “Hermia,” he said, “the Eddas, the Upanishads, the Iliad, all the writings about the deeds of the Mithermages—they weren’t written by us. They were written by drowthers who thought we were immortal, who thought we had far more control over the natural world than we really do. They thought we cared what happened to drowthers, that some ignorant ‘mortal’ could provoke a war among the gods. We could have meddled far more than we did, and we would have, if we had cared.”

Hermia looked thoughtful. “Well, you have a point. Those writings all seem to assume that the Families cared what the drowthers did to each other. Or they consist of drowther fantasies about how we interact with each other.”

“There was savagery in Mittlegard before I closed the gates,” said Wad. “But what I saw was that as Set gained power and experience, the Sutahites became far more effective at goading drowthers and mages into doing unspeakable things. And then came the day when I learned that Set could not be expelled from a person by passing him through a gate. That meant that if Set possessed someone who knew where a Great Gate was, he could pass over to Westil, bringing millions of Sutahites with him. The people of Mittlegard had hundreds of generations of experience, learning how to ignore the Sutahites, resist them, defy them. But the Westilians had no such experience.”

“So you closed the gates.”

“No, I ate the gates,” said Wad. “I gathered them into myself and held them, and if anyone on either world even tried to make a Great Gate, I stripped them of their gates, because Westil is not capable of coping with an onslaught of Sutahites.”

“So the real danger is the Sutahites, not Set himself,” said Hermia.