“Long practice followed by far longer disuse,” said Loki. “I have spent fourteen centuries and more drifting upward through a tree, aware of little but occasional flashes of gatemaking, which I quickly extinguished.”

“Yet you did come out of the tree,” said Danny, “and apparently some time before I attempted a Great Gate.”

“But not before you made your first few dozen gates,” said Loki. “Your first few hundred, I should say.”

It was the Gate Thief’s admission that he had been aware of Danny for some time. That he had sensed, however dimly, that Danny was alive, a great mage in potential if not in accomplishment.

“I didn’t even know I was making the gates,” Danny admitted.

“Be careful what you say,” said Marion.

“He knows,” said Danny. “He has been watching me even before he knew that it was I whom he watched.”

“Aren’t we the lofty speakers now,” said Leslie. “I feel as if I’m in a school, studying Westilian style.”

“These gatemages and their linguistic show-offery,” said Marion in English.

“I am learning your English a little,” said Loki, and while his words were slow and stilted, his Ohio accent was nearly perfect.

“How?” demanded Leslie in English. “Who in Westil could possibly teach you? Do you have spies here?”

“He does,” said Danny, also in English.

Leslie stood up and paced to the kitchen counter, then turned around, as if somehow the sink had been besieged, and she were its sole defender.

“Me,” said Danny. “His spies are inside me—the gates I took from him. Thousands of them, and through them he can glimpse a little. He can hear.”

“How much?” demanded Marion. “What does he know?”

“I don’t know,” said Danny. “All his gates ever do that I know of is demand that any working gate be eaten up. If he had succeeded in swallowing my gates, then I could tell you just how much a mage can learn through his captive gates. But I’d rather have my ignorance than his knowledge.”

“If I could hear more, I’d speak better,” said Loki, reverting to Westilian. “In truth, I see nothing. I hear nothing. I am inside the womb of his mind. But there is where his language dwells, and his memory. I cannot search at will; but I can overhear his thoughts, when he makes them into language. I can see his memories, when he concentrates on them. I am not spying. Where he has imprisoned my outself, I have no choice but to see and hear what he shows me.”

But Danny didn’t believe Loki. The trouble was he didn’t know in which direction the lie was leaning: Did Loki see and hear far more than he admitted? Or had he seen and heard nothing at all until he passed through the Wild Gate, enhancing his powers and coming so much nearer to Danny himself?