“Then he has all that mage’s power. That’s what the Belmages did, before we understood and began to fight them. A great mage of our kind would suddenly change, become more powerful and yet more ruthless. Systematically evil, that’s how it looked. But when we fought against a mage who had become so terrible, we simply … won. Killed him sometimes. But sometimes we were able to imprison him, talk to him—and he wouldn’t remember a thing. Not a thing. He didn’t remember the way heartbeasts remember their jaunts together with their mage inside. He never felt controlled. He was simply—absent. Cut off from his own body. Asleep in some deep sense. One of them said that he was wandering, but he couldn’t say where, or anything that happened to him.”

“So the mage you had imprisoned—he really hadn’t done the terrible things that made you go to war with him.”

“There was a thing that took over his body, but when we got control of him, made him powerless, the thing was no longer interested in staying inside him. It left. The Egyptians discovered the danger first. That’s why they cut the organs out of the bodies of great mages and put them in separate jars. So there’d be no way for the Belmage to use their body for evil after their own inself was gone.”

“But how do you even fight something like that?” asked Ced.

“Another Loki faced him once, and won. He gated the body containing the Belmage into the Sun of Mittlegard. We always assumed that the Belmage died there, along with the body, because there was no other human close enough to jump into. But now I wonder if the Belmage didn’t simply wander for a long time, lost. If that’s the case, then there’s only the one. But he came back, and in my time he was too clever to be fooled again. I couldn’t use the trick that other Loki used. So I took all the Great Gates from the world, so that no matter what body he took, it would be a weaker one, and he could never get from there to here.”

“So if I went back…”

“Everyone that Danny North brought here to Mitherwee—to this world, to Westil—is now more powerful than any other mage in Mittlegard. The Belmage will know. It will crave that power. They’re all in terrible danger, and none so much as Danny North himself. Because if the Belmage takes him, he can make all the Great Gates he wants. And if there are many of them, and not just one, they’ll all be able to come here, to the heart of magery, and make their bid to rule the universe.”

Ced nodded. “Displacing all the gods. Becoming the permanent, immortal, unkillable gods.”

“If they really are unkillable. If we don’t stop them.”