“No I didn’t,” said the Gate Thief. “I never touched a gatemage until he tried to make a Great Gate. All they had to do to stay safe from me was to confine their gatemaking to their own world. Why wasn’t that enough? Why couldn’t they be content to gate from place to place, to heal anyone who passed through their gates? Why wasn’t such a wonderful power enough for them?”

Ced thought of his own experience with power. “Because if it’s there, you have to reach for it.”

“Monkeys in the trees,” said the Gate Thief. “Always hungry for the fruit that’s out of reach.”

“What’s your name?” asked Ced. “I think of you as the Gate Thief, but that’s only your job title.”

“They call me Wad, in the place I lived most recently.”

“And what did your mother call you?” asked Ced.

“She called me Loki—but that was a job title, too. It’s the name given to the most powerful gatemage of the North family. It was under the name of Wad that I last tasted hope. It’s the name that my friends call me.”

“Tell me about this monster worse than the mages of the Families,” said Ced. “Tell me about the Eater of Souls, so I can decide whether I’m qualified to call you Wad.”

“I don’t know if it’s one being, or one of many. It could be the same one, coming back again and again, because if I understand correctly what it is, then it never dies and is very hard to kill.”

“But what is it?”

“A manmage,” said Wad. “But not the kind we’re warned against. Not like the manmages of Dapnu Dap, who once ruled the world of Mitherkame by seducing and flattering and eventually riding men and women as their heartbeasts.”

“They sound bad enough.”

“You can still find their bodies, when a manmage’s outself is riding a heartbeast. You can kill them. But from what I learned before I closed the gates, the god Bel doesn’t do this. He takes over the man’s body, and it isn’t his outself that comes to control it, it’s his inself.”

Ced tried to understand it. “So he has nothing left in his own body?”

“I don’t know if the Belmages ever had bodies. I don’t know what life is like in the world they come from. But they passed through gates into our world, never in large numbers—and as I said, it’s possible that it only happened once, and there’s only one. Because when one body dies, it doesn’t kill his inself. He simply jumps into someone else, displacing their inself, becoming that person.”

Ced understood now what the threat was. “If he takes over the body of a great mage…”