Free The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) by Orson Scott Card Page B

Danny. He made a tiny gate, really just a viewport, that showed him the room where someone had shot him.
    Two men were standing there, one carrying a shotgun. “I know I hit him before he disappeared,” said one.
    Danny made a gate and pulled it over them.
    They arrived twenty feet above some spot out in the Atlantic Ocean, far from the nearest land. Danny’s new viewport was in place before they hit the water. The shotgun sank at once; the men cried out for help as they tried to swim.
    They weren’t good at it. In fact, one of them was panicking and clearly had no idea how to swim.
    Not Greeks, then. Hermia’s Family were proud of their heritage among the thalassocracy, and they were all taught to swim as babies.
    Danny needed a way to hold them in place, where they’d be helpless, unable to escape, but in no danger.
    Gravity would have to do the police work for him. Danny made a gate that scooped them out of the water, then dumped them twenty yards over it; he moved the mouth just under them to catch them. They fell a half inch into the gate’s mouth, which tossed them back up that half-inch and dropped them again. It gave them a continuous sensation of falling, but they could breathe and they could hear.
    Through the viewport, Danny spoke to them.
    “I could have put you a thousand feet down and the ocean would already have crushed you.”
    The man who had held the shotgun was weeping. But the other seemed capable of listening.
    “Where is the woman who lived in that hotel room?” asked Danny.
    “Woman?” asked the man.
    Danny moved the mouth of the gate so now they fell twenty yards before rising again. He let that go on for a minute and then returned them to a half-inch fall.
    “Try again,” said Danny.
    “She go to the beach,” said the man. “Then we go in her room. She not come back yet.”
    Now that Danny had a chance to study the men, he could start making guesses. “Persians?” he asked. “Hindi?”
    The assassin managed to look scornful in the midst of his ongoing terror.
    “Tell me what Family you’re from,” said Danny.
    “Never,” said the man.
    So it was a Family—an Orphan would have declared his non-Family status proudly. And it was a Family that regarded hiding its identity as more important than life itself. Any of the known Families might have wanted to do this assassination stealthily, but the secrecy wouldn’t be important enough to die for it. After all, killing gatemages was something they were all sworn to do.
    A Family, then, that everyone thought was extinct?
    Danny ran through a mental list. Middle Eastern, from the look of them. But all the Families were Indo-European, and in the Middle East that list wasn’t very long. “Hittites?” he asked.
    “No!” shouted the man.
    Hittites they were, then. Interesting. Exciting, even. How had the Hittite Family remained hidden all this time? They were supposed to have been wiped out before Pompey came to Syria, though some Family historians speculated that they might have adopted the Armenians and helped them surreptitiously.
    But historical interest would have to wait. “If Hermia is dead,” said Danny, “so are you.”
    “Alive!” the man cried. “We not touch her.”
    “No Great Gates!” shouted the other man, the weeping one. “Bel comes! Bel goes to Yllywee!”
    So they were allies of the Gate Thief. Or shared his fear; Yllywee was an ancient name of Westil. Danny remembered the runic inscription in the Library of Congress. “We have faced Bel and he has ruled the hearts of many.” Manmages from another world—a world not Earth and not Westil. “Loki found the dark gate of Bel through which their god poured fear into the world.” Why would it matter whether Danny made a Great Gate if Bel already knew how to make gates of his own?
    The Hittites knew something, and he had to find out what it was.
    Danny moved the tail of the gate that suspended them to the barn. They plopped in a sodden mass amid the straw