“I’ve befriended him and stopped his storming all over Westwold,” said Loki. “I have him studying with a treemage to learn how to still his inself so he can control his powers and use them with finesse.”

Still only a partial truth, Danny saw. “Do we have to talk alone?” he asked Loki.

Loki studied Danny for only a few moments, but in those moments Danny felt the Gate Thief’s gates stir within him. “You have something that I need,” said Loki.

“Take them back if you can,” said Danny. “But I warn you that I know enough now, and have power enough, that I can take the rest whenever I want.” Danny was telling the truth as far as he knew it, but he also had no idea of what defenses Loki might retain, especially now that he had passed through a Great Gate.

“You misunderstand me completely,” said Loki. “And I have no desire to hide from your friends the thing I came to get, the thing I need so desperately.”

“If not your gates, what?” asked Danny.

“Your trust,” said Loki.

Danny looked at Anonoei. “Is that why he brought you? To use your manmagery to make me trust him and not you?”

“If that were his plan,” said Anonoei, “is it working?”

“No,” said Danny.

“Then I think you can safely conclude that this is not his plan. Whatever he wants from you, he hasn’t told me anything.”

“Trust isn’t a prize in itself,” said Danny. “What do you need my trust for?”

“There is a war much older than you, much older than myself,” said Loki. “A war as old as humankind. Between the Belgod and the Mithermages.”

Danny waited.

“I need you to take over my work,” said Loki. “I know you don’t trust me, and the very fact that I said this much has raised your suspicions even higher. Yet the war must be fought or lost, and I don’t have the gates to do it. The job of protecting against the Belgod is yours now.”

Danny thought again of the runes he had read in the Library of Congress. “Hear us in the land of Mitherkame, hear us among the great ships of Iceway, among the charging dunes of Dapnu Dap, among the Mages of the Forest and the Riders of the Wold.”

He was reciting in the old language of the inscription, a language Loki had to know: Fistalk, or something near it. The language of the Norse as it had first been bent and twisted by the Semitic language of the Carthaginians.

“This is very old,” Loki murmured. “Where did you learn it?”

Danny went on reciting. “We have faced Bel and he has ruled the hearts of many. Bold men ran like deer from his face, but Loki did not run.”

“I am not that Loki,” said Loki.