What he was really doing was following the voices.

He had learned to ignore the clamor of the captive gates; they were not so much voices as inchoate longings that did not speak to anything in Danny’s experience. They felt distant to him, though in the abstract he felt bad about their long captivity. That vague compassion had been, he supposed, the reason he had included the most eager of them in the Great Gate he made in Silvermans’ barn. Hadn’t that turned out well.

The voices that had been Loki’s own gates, however, were a different matter. At first their nagging chant had been like the pulse of a large beast, another heart beating somewhere in his body. Gate, gate, gate, they intoned; and when he made the Great Gate, they had seemed to panic. But them, too, he had pressed down and kept at bay, so that he could concentrate on other things. He thought that it must be rather like tinnitus, the unceasing whine that some people hear constantly in their ears. You just learn to blank it out.

But in the days since Loki had given his gates to him, everything had changed. The constant throb of gate, gate, gate was gone. At first, what remained had seemed to him like silence, except for the distant clamor of the captives that remained inside him.

It was not silence, though. It was something different. These gates that had once seemed almost insane in their monomania were now attentive, observant. Danny felt himself being watched. But not in an unfriendly way, not by a stranger. Rather it was as if his own inmost mind, the part of his mind that watched his conscious thoughts and responded to them, had been joined by others. They did not judge him, but they had suggestions.

That was what had taken him a while to understand. They did not speak in words. Even the gate-gate-gate of the past had not been in actual language. It was deeper than language. He knew the meaning of the pulse of desire. But he could not have named the language it was being spoken in, and then concluded that it was no language at all. It was self-speech. As was their conversation now.

Voices, then, but not words. And yet remembering their suggestions, even a half-moment later, he thought of them as words. His own words. His own language. Just as his conscious mind translated the impulses that came from his deep observer-mind into language the moment they surfaced into consciousness. When Loki gave his lost gates to Danny, they had become, if not an actual part of himself, the most intimate of friends. They were on his side. Their suggestions were designed to help him do better.