Go wherever I want, the boy said, but Wad knew that he could not. He did not have gates enough inside him now to make a Great Gate, so he could not go to Mittlegard. But then he realized that he could. That there was a Great Gate, a wild one, controlled by no mage now. Danny North could not lock it and so anyone who knew of its existence could make use of it. Wad could pass through that Wild Gate and go to Mittlegard and back again, restoring what power he had left to its full strength. It would not get him back his gates—Danny North still had those safely locked inside a place where Wad could never go against the young Gatefather’s will. But it would sharpen his faculties, bring him back to the state he had once been in, when he saw all the gates in the world, even the gates of the Semitic gods, and he ate them all.

Unlike Danny North, he had not been fool enough to try to use the captive gates, but he had found them and held them. He could make himself that strong a mage again. He could restore his own vision, the range of his seeing.

And if he could take himself to Mittlegard and back again, he could take Anonoei as well.

But perhaps not. Wad was a gatemage who knew how to rule over the lost and disobedient outselves that were woven into the Wild Gate. Anonoei could not resist them. Manmage that she was, she would know that they were there, but not the form they took. They might entice her out of herself. They might entwine her in the Great Gate. And because she was a manmage, they would only be fulfilling the law by taking away her power.

No, if Wad were really to strengthen her so she might be a match for Bexoi, he would have to get Danny North to help him hold the Great Gate open for her. He would have to teach him what to do, to train the man who bested him so that he could never be defeated and Wad could never get his lost gates back.

How could he give even more power and wisdom to the mage who had shattered him?

Because I deserved the shattering, thought Wad. He was an instrument in the hands of spacetime and so I got what I deserved. I misused my power and so I lost all but a tiny shred of it. And I will have to go as supplicant to Danny North, to get him to help me make amends for how I raised the monstrous Bexoi to be mistress of Iceway.

All of this came to him between Enopp’s words and Wad’s answer to him.