Wasn’t that what they were making this Great Gate to find out? With no Gate Thief left to threaten him, and with Marion and Leslie primed to keep all danger at bay, Danny could experiment a little. He could stay a minute or two on Westil. Not very long—not long enough to be in danger. But long enough to see the place where Marion and Leslie had lingered for only a fraction of a second. “We blinked and then came back,” Marion explained at the time. “It was daylight and there were rocks and grass, that’s all I know.”

“And he only knows about the grass because I told him,” Leslie had said. “Stonemages don’t care about grass, but Cowsisters have a real eye for it.”

Danny put a little weight on the rope that Marion had suspended. He was so hungry to make a Great Gate that he almost couldn’t wait until the others arrived.

No, that wasn’t true. Danny wasn’t hungry for it. What he was feeling as a powerful yearning was coming from many of the outselves trapped inside him. The Gate Thief’s old prisoners, not the Gate Thief himself—his gates were all about blocking Great Gates, stealing them, not using them, and certainly not building them.

Could Danny use some of the captive outselves in making a Great Gate, as if they were his own? Hermia had told him that in the old days, mere Pathbrothers would sometimes contribute to a Gatefather their three or four or dozen gates to help reach the critical mass to make a Great Gate. Could he use these captive gates the same way?

Danny tried to use one on an ordinary gate. That is, he did the inward thing that felt like gatemaking, only tried to access one of the captives to do it. The result was almost a physical pain, the rebuff was so sharp and strong.

No!

It felt like a shout from somewhere deep inside him. Not the word no, but the meaning of it, the idea of utter rejection.

It made sense. Danny could not force another mage’s gate. In Hermia’s account, the Pathbrothers would donate their gates willingly. These gates had all been stolen, from gatemages who most assuredly would not want their captor using their long-lost outselves to make his gates.

It would have been interesting to see the result of a Great Gate made out of so many different mages’ gates at once. But if they wouldn’t let him, the question was moot.

It made sense. If Gatefathers could make use of stolen gates, then they’d have done it all the time. The Gate Thief wasn’t taking gates in order to use them, he was taking them in order to prevent their being used.

And again he wondered why. Something about the Semitic gods. Something about Bel, the ancient Carthaginian deity.