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17

Dorachs, of course, lived in water.

My initial thought was that their resemblance to river otters meant they could travel pretty freely along the Willamette, and its shore.

Now that I had a deeper understanding of things, though, I knew that wasn’t quite true.

Dorachs looked enough like river otters that everyday people didn’t mind seeing them. In fact, since most humans seemed to like otters, there was a better than average chance that humans would want to look at them.

Which was where the problem came in.

Dorachs were too big for river otters. That meant that dorachs risked getting their pictures in tabloids, uploaded onto the internet, or even showing up on the news. If they weren’t careful.

That could lead to scientists coming to investigate the deviation. It could lead to poachers. Could lead to all sorts of problems.

So dorachs had adapted. They’d let themselves play along the water line now and then, but mostly they stuck to diving deeper, and finding or making air pockets for themselves.

Which meant that the local dorach community was based in a dug out cavern system under the Willamette.

Which meant that, for the second time in two days, I had to dunk down into the cold, cold waters of the Willamette.

Joy.

No need to change my clothes, though. Oh, no. As soon as Vasco brought us out through the Ross Island Portal and onto that little spike of rocky, dirty shore in the middle of the Willamette River, a spell occurred to me.

Oh, the Locksmiths didn’t call them spells. They didn’t really talk about Locksmithing as magical at all. They just referred to skills and energies.

I always liked the idea of magic though, so until someone taught me a difference between “magic” and “what Locksmiths do” I was more than content to just consider my new job “magic.”

And the spell that occurred to me?

It was a way to stay dry and breathe while underwater.

“Unbelievable,” I said, shaking my head.

I was standing at the very tip of the banana stem, there on Toe Island. Vasco was on my right, and Magellan on my left. The sun was still low in the east, over Mount Hood, from this angle, and Portland was just really waking up to its Sunday morning.

“What’s unbelievable?” Vasco asked as soon as he’d finished preparing himself and Magellan for our coming dip.

“All morning I’ve been getting this poor silk shirt soaked by river spray. But that wasn’t enough to bring back the memory of this spell.”

“Skill,” Vasco corrected. “And you’re really remembering it now because you’ll need to be able to breathe.”

He clapped me on the shoulder. “Cheer up. Now that you recall it, it’s part of your more active arsenal. Won’t happen again.”

I gestured to my silk shirt.

Vasco winked. “At least you’ll only have to dry-clean it the once.”

“There’s not a spell for that, is there?”

“Specifically dry cleaning clothing?” Vasco said. “Not a formal Locksmith skill. Now come on.”

And we dove into the river.

Didn’t feel so shockingly cold this time, but that was likely the effect of the spell. It seemed to be preserving my body heat, even as it allowed me to breathe and…

Wait. I wasn’t breathing air from a bubble, the way I expected. Rather, instead, I seemed to have temporary gills on my neck.

And yet, my clothes, so far as I could tell in the water, seemed to stay dry.

Neat effect. I hoped it worked in snowy weather as well.

But now I had to pick up speed to catch up with Vasco and Magellan. They were both jetting along like Olympic athletes.

Even the beagle, which seemed a little unfair. I mean, he was still doing a dogpaddle kind of stroke, but he was keeping pace with Vasco as though he had fins.

Still, I didn’t have any trouble catching up to them. So that was some consolation. Might have been that Vasco was so much older than I was.

More likely, he was slowed down by his duffel bag.

I wanted to ask about that, about how Magellan could swim so well, and whether it was something he’d trained at, or an effect created by Vasco.

The problem was that my vocal cords weren’t working right. I couldn’t produce any sound.

Vasco must have noticed my attempt, though, because he grinned at me.

I’d expected to lose light, as we got deeper under the surface of the Willamette, but the ability to see clearly underwater must have been part of the effect.

Irritating. I could remember the spell I’d just used. The word of power was xiros, and the gesture was a quick movement of fins on the side of my head.

But now that I’d already created the effect, the details of how it worked seemed to have become need-to-know. And since it was working, apparently I didn’t need to know.

One of these days, I was going to figure out how to trigger these memories at my option, not someone else’s.

Anyway, fewer fish through this part of the Willamette. Fewer swimming lizardfolk or spirits as well. Might have been the hour. Might have been that this part of the river was more heavily used, and thus more avoided.

Either way, I didn’t run across anything that drew my attention before we reached the dug out cave system used by the dorachs.

The caves started in the west bank of the Willamette, a hole down where the curve of the bank flatted out into the river bottom.

The sides of the opening cave were a dark gray rock, and I could feel that energies had been applied to keep mud away, as well as to control what came and went through that cavern opening.

It was a ward of some kind. Not Locksmith work, but an innate ability of the dorachs. Or perhaps merely something they developed themselves over of the course of their history.

Either way, as we approached, I suddenly knew the gesture needed to open the ward to us.

I didn’t hesitate. I went right for it.

Vasco grabbed me by the shoulder. Shook his head.

And let me just say, I thought Vasco’s gray hair was long and wild out in the air?

That was nothing to seeing it underwater. His hair went out all directions, like he had a crop of gray seaweed on his head.

I missed his first attempt to tell me, by gesture, why he’d stopped me, because I took one look at his hair and started laughing.

That got me a sour frown that sobered me right up.

Vasco showed me a quick twirl of his fingers that triggered another memory. It was a way of knocking on a ward. Not so much for permission, as to announce through the ward that a Locksmith was about to enter.

Once he’d sent out the right pulse of energy through the right gesture, he nodded his head to me.

I opened the ward to us.

It didn’t part or anything. It just went from being a ward that would keep us out to a ward that kept out things and people that weren’t us.

Just as well. If the ward had come down, the Willamette would have come in with us. Didn’t want to make a mess like that on my first day.

Anyway, I opened the ward to us, and then we were inside a gray stone … airlock, after a fashion. It was just a little entry chamber, with a single tunnel leading out of it. A tunnel that curved immediately to the north, and looked even tighter than the confines currently surrounding us.

The airlock ceiling was low enough that even Vasco had to duck down. I practically had to crouch. The sides were close enough that with three of us there — even though Magellan was a beagle and thus, pretty small —the entryway felt pretty darn cramped.

The rocky floor was slick and slimy, and smelled like lichen. A strong enough smell to overwhelm even Vasco’s animal musk scent. The odor of lichen clung to my tongue.

But though the chamber was wet, I noted that I was dry again.

I do mean dry, too. Head to toe, I was dry as bone. Even my silk shirt had lost its water spots.

Magellan barked and wagged at that sight.

“Thought that might tidy things up for you.” Vasco clapped me on the shoulder. Both he and Magellan were as dry as I was. “Neat side effect, if you remember it.”

I mumbled to myself what the spell was and what it did, while we stood there. After three repetitions, I turned to Vasco.

“You’re the one who’s been here before. You lead the way.”

“Oh, no,” he said, and even Magellan barked a refusal. “Entering this opening is one thing. Barging into the heart of their community is another. Only ever do that if you’re pursuing someone who’s broken the treaty.”

I could remember the dorach treaty now. Not a long one. Mostly proscriptions against activities that no decent society wanted to encourage: assault, robbery and the like. It was the kind of treaty that I mentally shorthanded into don’t be a dick and you’re welcome here.

We weren’t waiting long. And to my surprise, Brikatika himself came sort of galumphing into the chamber.

Well, not quite into the chamber. He stopped in the tunnel, just outside the entry chamber, when he noticed how crowded it was.

I had no trouble recognizing Brikatika, which surprised me a little bit. I mean, before yesterday, all otters looked pretty much alike to me.

Had to have been something in my training. Something that taught me to look for the subtle distinctions in the appearances of nonhumans, to ensure that I didn’t mistake one people for another, much less one person for another.

In Brikatika’s case, his dorsal coat was dark brown and his ventral coat was closer to cinnamon in shade. But both dorsal and ventral, he had small bands of gray shooting through the main color.

“It’s you!” Brikatika said as soon as he saw me. He stood on his back legs and extended his forepaws for me to shake.

That wasn’t a dorach gesture, which meant he was trying to offer me extra respect by offering me a human gesture of thanks.

I shook his forepaws — both of them, so maybe he didn’t understand the gesture as well as he thought, not that I’d point it out to him — and he chattered at me in his native tongue.

“You saved my life. You saved my wife’s mate. You saved my children’s father. You saved future generations their progenitor. If ever I or mine may perform you a service, you have only to ask.”

“No need for that,” Vasco said in dorach. “He is a Locksmith.”

“He was not when he saved me.” Brikatika squeezed my hands. “I insist. Say you will accept this offering of thanks.”

Formal words. Refusing Brikatika would have caused an incident.

“Of course I accept,” I said. “And may the fortunate timing of our meeting prove a blessing to both our houses.”

No, I was not planning on saying that. The words just came out. They were the right words, though. Brikatika squeezed my hands once more, and released them.

“This is formal Locksmith business now,” Vasco said.

“Of course. You have new questions?”

“I am told,” I said, “that you have no role in politics. That you were about no special business yesterday.”

“I was not,” Brikatika said, then recounted a morning as boring as that of any human office worker. The dorach equivalent of arising with the alarm clock and settling into an hour of traffic before trudging into work.

At least, if someone randomly tried to kill that office worker, while he poured his first cup of coffee on his way to his desk.

Vasco shrugged at me. It sounded more and more as though this poor dorach just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time.

There had to be something though. Something about this dorach. I already knew it wasn’t about that spot of the Willamette, or even about something else happening during the riskatan attack.

Locksmiths had already checked into the obvious possibilities, on the assumption that the attack had been intended as a simultaneous distraction.

Brikatika had to be the answer. But how?

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