As long as he remained in control of Danny’s body, and Danny’s body remained alive, then Set had a hope of persuading Danny to cooperate; and if that never happened, he could use Danny’s body to bring him close enough to another person to make the jump smoothly and easily.

He could always kill Danny later, he doubtless thought.

And so he made one of the only gates remaining under Danny North’s control—the captive gates. He made it and then moved it so that it passed over Danny’s body, healing him. Danny North would not die.

And then Danny did something Wad had not known was possible. He gave the captive gate to itself. The ka that the gate had once been attached to was long dead, gone wherever the kas of dead gatemages went. But the ba was still part of that self, wherever it was, and even though Danny could not find that ka, he figured out that the ba could find it, could always find its ka, and so he gave the ba to itself, and through itself, to its original maker, even though he was dead.

The result was that the ba was gone. Simply gone. Danny hadn’t unmade the gate—Set would have known what that felt like, would have prevented Danny from doing it. But Set did not know what Danny was even doing, when Danny performed the act of giving a gate. Because as far as Wad knew, he was the first mage ever to give a gate to another mage—if someone else had done it, Wad had never heard of it. And Danny had taken that new technique, had learned it, and then extended it to a use Wad would never have imagined.

Danny’s body was healed, and Set was in check. His total supply of gates was limited to Wad’s old captives, and now he knew that each time he made such a gate, he could use it once, but then it would be gone. Danny North would set it free, would let it die and disappear. And though there were many hundreds of gates, that number would be exhausted very soon if Set made heavy use of them.

If spacetime really had brought Danny North into the world as a giant prank, it was a good one. Because even though Danny North tried hard to be a decent man, he still had a prankster’s heart, and he had chosen his victim well. Set had thought he would be master, and he was; but Danny had taken the mastery out from under him, even though it meant that Danny would be left utterly empty when Set abandoned his body. If Set let him live, Danny would be an empty gatemage, just like all the mages Wad had emptied through the years.