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21

Shivering all alone in a room made of ice.

As if my first day as a Locksmith weren’t weird enough.

Checking portals, checking wards, that had all seemed natural. Part of the job.

Interviewing a potential victim? Brikatika, the dorach who’d been attacked by that riskatan? Made sense to me.

Been the right move, too. I’d gotten information the first interviewing Locksmiths had missed — Brikatika was hiding something. Something worth throwing his whole community into disarray — not to mention trying to kill three Locksmiths (I’m including Magellan) — and fleeing the scene, before I could find out what.

But now fighting and killing an ice serpent? Torturing myself to heal the damage from its frozen bite?

Those were the kind of experiences they’d left off the Locksmith brochure for a reason.

Still, I’d dallied long enough in recovering.

I stood up. My leg took my weight just fine. A little shaky, maybe, but that was just the aftermath. It would fade soon. The same way the chill of my gelled sweat faded.

Wait. I wasn’t really chilly at all now, in this room made of ice. Why was…

As soon as the question occurred to me, the answer came hot on its heels.

Locksmiths tolerate temperature changes beyond anything a normal person could handle. This ability aids Locksmiths in traveling wherever they need to, to tend their duties.

Explained why I hadn’t frozen to death yet.

I still needed to figure out where to go next. I had to find Brikatika.

For that matter, I had to find Vasco and Magellan. Make sure they were all right. They were supposed to follow me in here.

Maybe I should go back out the entrance? See if something had prevented them from following?

I did know right where the door was…

No. That felt like the wrong move.

Back would hold no answers for me. No, if Magellan had been right, and I had no reason to doubt the amazing beagle’s nose, then Brikatika had come this way

And if the dorach had passed through here, then there had to be another exit to this ice room.

Yes. That made sense to me. It wasn’t that this room was a trap. It was that the ice snake was a threshold guardian, of a sort.

Besides, the chamber might only hold one at a time. Vasco and Magellan might not be able to enter until I left.

That wasn’t just a guess. A quick assessment of the energetic patterns of this constructed space indicated that the entrance might only admit one. For assessment, and to control the speed of admittance deeper inside.

So I had to skip the easy solution. What a shock.

I stood in the center of the chamber and stretched forth my awareness again. Not in all directions this time, as when I’d been fighting the ice snake, but in a single direction at a time.

I covered the pale blue walls first, but found nothing there but the door I’d already known about.

I tried the dark blue ceiling next, going over it inch by inch.

I found the hole that the ice snake had come out of.

Paranoia made me follow it. Send my awareness up into the hole and track all the way to the snake’s lair. Just in case it had a mate. Or maybe a dozen hungry siblings, all getting ready to come feast on unprepared Locksmith.

The den was another dozen or so feet into the ceiling, right up close to an energetic edge of this constructed space, deep inside the copper-veined rock, which I knew was still resting at the bottom of the Multnomah Channel.

No eggs in the den. No siblings, or mate, either. In fact, there wasn’t much there, except…

Well…

Inside the little lair, there was a smooth patch of ice some eighteen inches long and twelve inches high. It served as a television set and, well…

It was tuned to a soap opera. Dark Shadows, I think.

I yanked my awareness back. I didn’t need to think about the hobbies of the ice snake that had just tried to kill me. The snake that had made me kill it.

Yes, I was defending myself. Yes, it was the only way to stop the thing. Yes, I’d even warned it.

But I’d killed it. And I hated that.

But I didn’t have time to wallow right now.

Back to my search.

Nothing else to find on the ceiling, so I turned my attention to the white ice floor. Beginning at the entry, I swept my way across the floor inch by inch.

The places where the ice snake’s acidic ichor struck tasted like sour limes through my extended awareness. Sadly, the taste was a pleasant change from the lingering pistachio in my mouth — a taste I’d once loved, but ruined for me forever by the awful experience of the Bruisebane.

Locksmith field healing sucked.

Anyway, tucked away in the far right-hand corner of the room, I found the exit. A trap door, only just wide enough to admit my shoulders.

Checking it for secondary traps burned time I wasn’t sure I had, but the last thing I wanted was to get past the guardian, and then get killed by a poison needle or something.

Nothing there. Apparently whoever built this figured the guardian would be enough.

I ripped open the trap door. Dropped feet first down a long, spiraling ice chute.

I’m not proud of what I did then. But I just couldn’t help it.

“WHEE!”

What can I say? It was a better ride than any theme park I could name.

A dampener at the exit killed my nearly lethal speed, and dropped me onto a wooden floor…

…in the middle of a very bad situation.

The room was maybe thirty by thirty, all made from dark woods, and lit by torches that put out a yellowish light and smelled like day-old fireworks.

One door in the center of each wall. Three chutes across the ceiling above me.

Vasco to my left. Maybe a dozen paces. Standing under a different chute than I was. He’d lost the leather thong tying back his gray hair, but it looked more matted down with sweat than wild right now.

Vasco bled from wounds on his chest and arms. He held a fighter’s crouch, glaring at the bad guys.

Six bad guys. Each of them stood a head taller than me, and easily twice as broad.

They were also covered entirely in long red fur. Hid all the features of their faces, except their yellow eyes and fangs. Did nothing to hide their dirty yellow claws, either. And both their hands and feet had claws.

Information leapt to mind as I saw them.

They were known as gossaks. Not much in the way of brains, but a reputation for viciousness that made them popular as henchmen, in certain circles.

Or hench-somethings anyway. They had no gender, and no one knew how they reproduced.

Anyway, they weren’t supposed to be in this world at all, because they weren’t part of any treaty. The problem in keeping them out was that they could travel across worlds at the sites of messy murders.

With the information came differentiation. I could now see smaller strains of darker fur that created patterns. Allowed me to tell one gossak from the other, and remember them later. Every bit as distinctive as facial features, eye and hair color. Which also meant they could be disguised, but few things in life were perfect.

Like this situation.

Vasco already bleeding.

Three of the gossaks holding captives. One gripped Magellan with both hands. But it looked as though the little beagle had done some damage of his own first. That gossak was bleeding at the leg. Thick, yellowish blood. I might have mistaken it for pus, if I hadn’t known better.

Another gossak held Brikatika, and the grip looked every bit as threatening as the grip on Magellan. Holding by the scruff and the throat, which would have been bad enough if Brikatika had been the size of a normal otter. Big as he was, he had to be in agony.

That gossak looked uninjured.

A third gossak held Vasco’s duffel bag in one hand. It was shaking the other hand as though stung. And I’m not surprised. That hand was swelling up to at least two or three times its normal size.

The three other gossaks looked uninjured — at a glance, anyway — and had formed a half-circle about a dozen feet from Vasco.

The moment I landed, one of the gossaks spun to face me, while the other two stayed watching Vasco.

“Whoa,” I said, hands coming up and a smile forced across my lips. “Everybody just slow down here.”

“They want to kill me!” Brikatika yelled in his native tongue, his voice strained. “Save me, Locksmith!”

“Everybody calm down,” I said, holding that smile for dear life. “Seems to me there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“Simple choice,” the gossak facing me said. “Leave or die. We give your boss here same choice.”

“Well, you’re also holding his best friend, and his duffel bag. So he might be a bit put out—”

“He attacked us.”

“Now, just let me guess,” I said. “He said you weren’t allowed on earth without a treaty, and when you objected he forced the issue?”

No answer but narrowed eyes. Probably not how it played out, but I wanted the try to get the gossaks listening to me. And painting the situation in terms that favored them would help. If they bought it.

“So you were just defending yourself then.”

Magellan barked an objection, but I waved my hand to still him.

“Look,” I said. “It’s an easy mistake to make. Vasco and I, we entered this artificial space inside a rock in the Multnomah Channel. Which is on earth. So finding you here, it feels a lot like finding you on earth.”

The big one facing me — might not have been bigger than his partners, but facing me made him look bigger — opened his mouth to speak, so I pushed ahead before he could.

“The mistake there,” I said, “is that you aren’t on earth. You’re in a rock. Now, for all I know, officially, you guys entered this rock on some other world, and then someone dragged it to earth. Not your fault you ended up here.”

“That’s right,” the one facing me said, and the others nodded quickly.

Too quickly. They were all lying. But that didn’t matter right now.

“So you’re not in violation of anything, so long as you stay in the rock. And I have no reason to think you’ll leave. Right?”

They nodded.

Magellan growled, and I had to wave him to silence again.

“Now. You hurt a Lockmaster, but you were defending yourselves. So I think we can let that go. If—” I held up my pointing finger — “you release Magellan, the beagle, and give Vasco back his duffel bag.”

“It stung me!” the one holding it cried out.

“Well, you shouldn’t have tried to search a Lockmaster’s bag. Bad policy. Be glad that’s all that happened.”

That got me some grumbling I didn’t like, followed by a whuffed conversation too quick for me to follow.

“We release dog and duffel bag and you leave?”

I really wanted to lie right then, but I knew that would be a mistake.

“You release dog and duffel bag, and you won’t get in trouble for hurting Vasco or Magellan. Then if you give us the dorach, we’ll leave in peace.”

“Dorach stays,” the gossak facing me said. “Owes us.”

“I’m afraid I have to insist. Brikatika is a material witness in a case I’m investigating.”

“Dorach stays.”

“Then we have a problem,” Vasco said, as though he were worried about what I’d say next.

“Look,” I said, smiling again. “It’s hard to come to terms when a couple of you are hurting. I get that.”

I dug around in my pocket, giving Vasco a wink at an angle so the gossaks couldn’t see my eye.

I pulled out my double-sided jar of Bruisebane and Serpent’s Kiss.

“How about I heal that bite wound?”

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