“Can you make his gates?” asked Hermia.
“After what happened with the Wild Gate, I wouldn’t dare to try. But please, please let me tell you what I learned while I can still remember it.”
“Learned?” asked Veevee.
“I was there to act out the kinetic memory of the time when Loki learned some great secret from a Christian hermit in Egypt. A Coptic-speaker, but a scholar all the same. A collector of ancient Egyptian lore. Secret stuff that isn’t in the inscriptions, it isn’t in the books of the dead, it isn’t anywhere. It’s just known, and he told it to Loki, and the gates can’t give it to me in language, they can only help me recover Loki’s mental state when he learned it. Do you understand?”
“I don’t think you understand, sweetie,” said Veevee.
“I don’t,” said Danny. “But let me talk it through. Because it was working. There at the end when you shook me, I was finally getting it. After starting over again and again.”
“Sorry I saved your life,” said Hermia.
“Please, please let me tell it.” He almost cried with desperation.
“He’s asking you to shut up, dear,” said Veevee.
“I know what he’s asking.”
“If you don’t want to listen,” said Veevee sweetly, “then will you please leave and let him tell me?”
Hermia buried her face in her hands.
“It’s going to be a jumble,” said Danny. “I feel it slipping away like a dream. It’s about the ka and the ba. The ka is the inself, the ba is the outself.”
“Everybody knows that,” said Hermia.
“I didn’t!” said Danny.
“Shut up, please, Hermia,” said Veevee. Her voice sounded so sweet that it was clear she was murderously angry.
“And it’s not the same. That was what was so hard,” said Danny. “We think of the ka as being tied to the body, part of the body. So we send out the ba into our heartbeasts, into our clants, into our gates. But neither ka nor ba is part of our body. Neither one.”
“That’s absurd,” said Hermia. Then she clapped her own hand over her mouth.
“This is what Loki heard that made him so excited and frightened,” said Danny. “I remember how he felt about it. I remember him understanding this. The ka and the ba are bound to each other. Together, they’re both the thing we actually are. The body is just-a dwelling place. A tool set. It has a life of its own, a mind of its own, but it isn’t us. Any of us. Mages and drowthers alike. We are ka, we are ba, we are not these animals that we wear.”
“We’re listening,” said Veevee.
“Sounds very gnostic,” said Hermia.
“No it doesn’t,” said Danny. “It doesn’t sound gnostic at all. Or Coptic. It sounds like the thing that made Loki close all the gates.”
“If the ka and ba aren’t part of our human body,” said Veevee, “then where do they come from?”
“From the world of the Belmages,” said Danny.
“In other words,” said Hermia, “from ‘heaven.’”
Danny clamped his hands over his ears. “Please, please don’t pollute this. Let me say it first. Let me say it before you start trying to bend it to fit whatever shit you Greeks think you already know. Did any of you go closing gates? No? Loki did. So shut up and let me try to remember why.”
“Sorry again,” said Hermia.
“From the world of the Belmages,” said Danny. “It was a gate from their world that first turned these hairless apes into humans. But it was also these bodies that gave them the powers we turn into magery.”
“No,” said Veevee. “I mean, I thought the powers came from the ka and ba.”
“That’s the thing. Everybody has a ka and ba. It comes into the body when we’re born or … whenever. It comes in. But in the process, the body has a … a … an interface with the ka and the ba. When mine came into me, when Loki’s came into him, that’s what I mean, that’s what I remember, when Loki’s ka and ba entered his body, it fragmented his ba into all his gates. That’s when he became a gatemage. Body plus ka and ba. You see? There’s no magery without the body.”
“So far this is so exciting I can see why you nearly died to learn it,” said Hermia.
“I haven’t gotten to the exciting part yet,” said Danny. “It’s in the book of Revelation. ‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceives the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’”
“I thought you said this was ancient Egyptian lore,” said Hermia.
“Sounds like the King James version to me,” said Veevee.
“The devil. Satan. That’s the Belmage. He was cast down-that means he was sent through a gate to Mittlegard. But he wasn’t put into a human body. He and his angels were sent here as naked ka and ba.”
They pondered this. So did Danny. “I feel so much of what Loki understood slipping away from me. Now I don’t even know how much of this is what he concluded and how much of it I’m making up right now, trying to make sense of it.”
“Just go ahead,” said Veevee. “I’m finally beginning to see why this matters.”
“I’m not,” said Hermia.
“Belmage is not a manmage. There are manmages, and what he does is very similar to manmagery, but he isn’t in a human body. He’s bodiless. But think what the devil keeps doing all the way through the New Testament. He possesses people’s bodies. He and the other devils. His angels, you see? Jesus was always casting them out.”
“I thought that was just schizophrenia,” said Hermia.
“Or multiple personality disorder,” said Veevee.
“That’s the only thing today that looks like what the Bible describes. But there are all these bodiless kas and bas around. The Belmage is their boss. The big guy. The main enemy. That’s all ‘satan’ means-”
“Don’t bother telling gatemages what words mean,” said Hermia.
“So the Belmage hates us all, because our ka is joined to a body and it changed us. Gave us these powers. If we learn how to use them. The ability to use magery is hereditary. Tied to the body. But that’s why he wants to take possession of the bodies. Take over, get the power.”
“But they aren’t joined to our body the way we are, are they?” asked Veevee.
“No, they aren’t. They don’t get magery of their own. They get inside us and boss us around and get the use of our magery. That’s the danger of the Belmage. He’s not a guy who sends his ba into other people the way a manmage does. Persuading you, changing your perceptions. No, his whole ka and ba climb into you. He wears you like a puppet. He makes you use your powers to do his will. But when you die, he doesn’t die. In fact, he loves it when your ka gets separated from your body, because then he’s in sole control.”
“So why doesn’t he just kill you and take over?” asked Veevee.
“That’s the thing. The ancient Egyptians believed the Semitic gods could animate dead bodies. That’s why they emptied out the brains and internal organs of the people of great power, and put them in the canopic jars. So that the body wouldn’t work. So that the Belmage or his minions couldn’t animate your corpse and continue ruling in your place. Embalming wasn’t about living forever. It was about making damn sure you stayed dead.”
“But can they?” asked Veevee. “That would be-zombies.”
“No, no,” said Danny. “The hermit called that superstition. The Belmage can’t control a dead body unless he’s already in control when the ka leaves. People believe what they believe, right? But the Belmage needs to take control of a living body, and he wants powerful ones. He wants mages. Then he uses their magery.”