He could only see the old hermit Kawab, sitting in the mouth of his cave on the rocky plateau west of the Nile.
Wad knew him instantly, knew that he had sought this man for a year, once he discovered that he existed. Knew that he had come to him for guidance, for the answer to his question.
What was the question?
He heard himself in memory, explaining why he was there.
“She was possessed by a Belmage, and so I passed her through a gate, to drive the Belmage away,” Wad remembered explaining. “I knew enough to take her to a place far from him, so the Belmage didn’t dive right back into her and rule her again as if she were his clant. Only it didn’t work.”
Wad remembered now the terror of that realization. When he followed the Illyrian Clawsister he had just freed from possession, she laughed at him. “Fool,” she said. “Fool! You have no power over me.”
“What is this Belmage?” Wad remembered asking Kawab. “You are the last of the Enemies of Set; you are the only one who can tell me why my gate did not drive this one away.”
Kawab said nothing, did nothing. But a single tear streaked the thick dust on his face.
“What is it?” demanded Wad. “You know what this means, and it grieves you.”
“It was no Belmage,” said Kawab. “Not one of the Sutahites, the followers who were cast out of heaven with the Dragon. It was Set himself, the Dragon, the Enemy of all souls, and your story tells me that he has gained the power to hold onto a body beyond the power of any man to drive him out.”
“How do I fight him, then? How do I free this woman from him?”
“You can free her only by killing her,” said Kawab. “And yet it will not harm Set himself. He cannot be killed. He will simply find another man or woman to possess, to control. And none can heal her, none can drive him out. He is the devil of devils.”
“Don’t tell me the dogmas of Christians,” Wad insisted in that memory. “I came to you for the lore of the Enemies of Set.”
“They are the same, the same,” murmured Kawab. “What do you think John the Revelator was talking about in the Apocalypse? War in heaven-that was the battle in the world of Duat, which Michael won, which Osiris won, it was the same war. Set was cast down to the Earth, the great Dragon, Satan, the devil, Baal, Bel, the Enemy. Only fools think that truth disappears when the boundaries of belief are crossed. Set is the enemy, the slayer of Osiris, the possessor of souls. His followers are weak, pathetic creatures. You can drive them out with your gatemagery, you can trick them, frighten them. They have no power except what people give them. But Set and a very few of his disciples, they are the most terrible manmages ever to live-or not-live-here upon the Earth.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Wad had answered him. “What is Duat? Who is Michael or Osiris or whatever you call him? What was the war? And who is this Set, this great Dragon, this Satan?”
Over and over this memory played through Wad’s mind, starting over whenever Danny North lost the thread of it back in the Egyptian desert on Mittlegard. Again and again Wad heard himself ask and ask and ask and yet for hours there was no answer. Danny North could never get him to the answer.
This much consciousness of the present moment Wad retained: He reached to his own gates, the ones he had put under Danny’s power, and he calmed them. Slowed them. Kept them tied to the memory. He tied them to his own inself, not taking back control of them, but giving them cleaner, clearer access to himself, to his memory. And through them, he was able to calm and soothe Danny North himself. Stop him from losing the thread of the memory. Help him hold to it, follow it, allow it to reach fruition.
Finally the voice of Kawab went on, the soft voice, the urgent voice. “We are all creatures from another world.”
Yes, from Westil, thought Wad-who-was, his old self there in the desert.
“Not from the world you call Westil or Mitherholm, and not from the world you call Mittlegard or Middle Earth. Where do you think that name comes from? Terra stands in the middle, between two worlds. The world of the mages who call themselves gods, and the world of all souls, Duat, where every human comes from.”
“How can I come from there, if I don’t remember it?” said Wad-who-was.
“Because we are tied to the body. Ka and ba, both parts of the soul, what you call inself and outself-they are tied to the body, to this hairless ape, this featherless biped, this tribe-dwelling louse-picker, and in that moment all access to the ancient memory is lost. Yet you remain yourself, for all the decisions of the body are made in the ka, the bonded mind, the inself, and the body has no choice but to obey. New memories are made, by ape and ka and ba together, a new self, a whole soul. It is why we were sent to Mittlegard, to get this body, to learn to control it.”
Then Wad-who-was asked the question that immediately occurred to Wad-that-is, lying unconscious in the meadow on Westiclass="underline" “In what part does the magery lie? Is it of the body or the inself-and-outself?”
“Both,” answered Kawab. “It is the body that gives shape to the powers inherent in the ka and ba. Because the ka is rooted in the body, the ba is free to roam and act out the will of the self. Because of the abilities inherited from your parents’ bodies, your ka and ba expressed their powers as gatemagery; your ba is divided into ten thousand parts, more than the ba of any other man I have seen, a ba like grains of sand. Because of this, you can make ten thousand gates, or a thousand Great Gates. Because of this, you have the power to eat the gates of any other living mage, for you can take their gates into yourself and overwhelm them. But without this body, you are a ka and ba like any other.”
“And without my ka and ba?” asked Wad-who-was.
“Then the body is only a tool-making monkey,” said Kawab. “The natural man. A beast with lips that make words, but no mind to understand the deep meaning of anything.”
It was clear to Wad-who-was, and so it became clear again to Wad-that-is.
Now Kawab could explain who it was that Wad-who-was had failed to drive from the body of the beastmage he had tried to save.
“In the world where every ka-and-ba was born, there was a war. Set was the evil one, and he persuaded many to follow him. But they lost the war and were cast out of Duat, down to Earth, through a gate that only worked in one direction.”
“But you say we are all cast down to Earth from Duat,” said Wad-who-was.
“We are not cast anywhere,” said Kawab. “We are born, one by one, created as body-and-ka, with a ba to do their bidding. The ka joined deeply to the ape. We are born. This did not happen to Set and his followers, the Sutahites, the ones you call Belmages. They cannot become part of the ape, as we have.”
“And yet they take possession anyway,” said Wad-who-was. “One or ten or a hundred Belmages or Sutahites, however many it takes to do it, they force their way into the body and rule it. We gatemages drive them out, until now, until this Set.”
“They only take possession as your manmages do-they persuade the ka-and-ba to see the world the way they see it, and then to act within the world according to their will.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“It is not the same thing,” said Kawab. “They feel nothing of the body-they only watch us feel it. They do not cause a single finger to curl, a single eyelid to close or open. They cannot taste the food we eat, or make the jaws chew. They have only the power that comes from our obedience.”
“Except for Set.”
“Not even him,” said Kawab. “Not even the great Set. He rides the ape-brain like a man on horseback, but he never becomes the horse.”
“Not even the way a beastmage becomes the heartbeast?” asked Wad-who-was.
“It is the ba that goes into the beast, but it is the ba of a mage who is attached to a living body of flesh and blood. The ba knows how to become a part of the body. The ba feels what the beast feels. Yet doesn’t it also persuade rather than rule?”