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27

Brikatika in the lead, the four of us swam at breakneck speeds down the Willamette River. We stuck to the bottom, of course, where we had to maneuver around rocks, fish, and the occasional confused lizardfolk, but we didn’t have to worry about hitting ships or human swimmers.

With the speed boost keeping us from kicking up silt and mud, there wasn’t even a cloud of muck to mark our passage. Even if an everyday citizen wanted to look down under the water, they wouldn’t have spotted anything worth ignoring.

I kept my focus solidly on swimming, taking up the rear. Following Brikatika. Keeping track of Vasco and Magellan. Yet even so, I couldn’t help but wonder if Brikatika’s experience of the speed boost was the same as mine.

Did the water feel like responsive gelatin to him too? If so, what was that like for his otter-like body?

No way I could ask though, so I tried to busy that portion of my mind with tracking our movement. I hadn’t done that the last time I’d been swimming this fast, and the result had been too disorienting for me.

So I knew when we passed out of Portland to the southeast. I knew when we passed by Milwaukie, then Oak Grove. The river bent southwest then, past West Linn, then Oregon City.

All the while we jetted through the water. We didn’t even need to surface for air, thanks to the underwater freedom spells.

It was finally southwest of Oregon City that Brikatika slowed enough to point out our target.

It was that tugboat. The little rusty one I’d seen earlier. The one I remembered as smelling like a tire fire. With two passengers in full yellow slickers, hoods up, despite the heat of the day, and the lack of rain.

I resisted the urge to smack Vasco on the shoulder.

I knew there was something suspicious about that tugboat.

No other water traffic around us right now, of course. Not with something odd about the tugboat. Chances were pretty good that other boats and such were keeping their distance, without even realizing they were doing it.

Wait.

I was getting used to the idea of normal people ignoring the, well, abnormal. Still. There shouldn’t have been enough odd about that boat for everyday people to ignore it in droves.

The passengers in slickers maybe, but they were strange enough for eyes to slip off them, not strange enough to keep the area clear like this…

I grabbed Vasco by the sleeve. He gave me a puzzled look, which looked even weirder under the water, where his wild gray hair drifted out in all directions.

I shook my head. Pointed to the shore.

Vasco frowned, but he couldn’t speak to me any more than I could to him. Not underwater.

We swam for the shore. Magellan fell right into place beside us. Poor Brikatika got dragged along by the smithcord, despite his own efforts to go straight aboard the ship.

We didn’t leave the water. None of us. Just bobbed over the surface at the shore, concealed from the tugboat by a jutting rock. This was also a spot where the river bottom was still low enough to keep our bodies submerged, along with the gills on our necks, while our heads came up enough for speech.

Quiet speech. No way of knowing what resources that tugboat and its people could bring to bear.

“Area’s clear,” I said, as soon as Vasco’s and my heads were above water.

“So?” Brikatika said quickly, before even Vasco could reply. “Why aren’t we on that boat right now?”

Vasco took my hint though. Held up a warning finger to Brikatika, whose whiskers vibrated with irritation.

Vasco and I both turned to extend awareness across the waters to the boat, while Magellan kept a fixed eye on Brikatika.

Sure enough, the energies flitting around that thing included multiple spells. The most obvious of which, to me, was the don’t look here effect.

“Right,” Vasco muttered. “Good catch, rook.”

Once we could get our minds past that effect, the wardings became apparent.

Biggest was a detector, that would tell someone in the cabin when anyone boarded the ship, and who it was.

Apart from that, there were a few simple effects. Turned out the rust wasn’t real. Just illusion. There were a couple of other illusions as well, making the tugboat look shabbier and messier than it really was.

Even that tire fire smell was an illusion, to help encourage people to spend their attention elsewhere.

“I don’t see any traps,” I said.

“Tough to be sure from here,” Vasco said. “I count the detector as the most obvious trap though. They just detect Locksmiths boarding, and take steps that might not be bound into any energies right this second. They might have someone standing by with the equivalent of a grenade.

“But we must board the boat,” Brikatika said. “I’ll go myself if you’re scared.”

“We’re not scared,” Vasco said, though I knew my nerves were jangling pretty hard. “But if we do this wrong, they might kill your family rather than risk losing them to a rescue. And none of us want that.”

Now, I can’t be sure what all had been going through poor Brikatika’s mind up to that point. Probably nothing more than just getting to his wife and children as fast as possible. That was what would make the most sense to me, but I was a human.

I could speak dorach fluently. But that didn’t make me an expert in dorach psychology.

Once Vasco pointed out the potential consequences of us pulling a rescue attempt, though, the dorach’s whiskers dipped in fear, taking his whole head down in a dunk under the water and back up, dripping.

“That is where she is,” Brikatika said, pointing with one paw toward the tugboat. “I know that as I know the waters around us, or the air I breathe. But I will stop rushing. I trust you to lead.”

“We need to take down that detector,” I said. “Know any quick ways?”

“Nope.” Vasco shook his head. “One advantage though. We have two of us. You take down the detector. I’ll watch everything else. Keep any traps keyed to it from springing, or extra alerts from going off.”

Said something about the tenseness of the situation that neither Vasco nor I chuckled at his use of “keyed.”

“Can you do that?” Brikatika asked, sounding astonished.

“Not if I have to disable it myself. But if he handles that part, I can make sure the rest is safe.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

Back under the water we went. One advantage of only having stuck our heads out of the water was that our underwater freedom spells were still in effect.

The speed boosts were down, but with the underwater freedom still in effect, we didn’t need anything more to keep up with something as slow as that tug.

We swam over as close as we dared, and I went to work on the detectors while Vasco acted as magical overwatch.

Tricky, keeping my awareness on the other side of a don’t notice me effect long enough to work with the energies. Would have been all too easy to get sloppy. Make a mistake.

So despite my own nervous urgency, I worked slow and sure.

First, I cast my awareness along the whole area around that boat, narrowing it slowly, slowly, slowly, until I was sure I hadn’t missed any threads that tied in to someplace else.

The last thing I needed to do was keep the boat from knowing what was going on, but accidentally call in their reinforcements.

Once I established the limits of the detection effect, I allowed myself to perceive it in full detail.

Its color was a pale, watery blue. Its scent was foul. Reminded me of a BART station bathroom I’d been in once, as a teen, on my way back from an A’s game.

That was one nasty bathroom. And the energies of this alarm effect, they smelled even worse.

Tactilely, the alarm felt like a low electrical pulse. One that was absent, absent, present. That was part of the reason it was tough to spot. It could be looked for three or four times in a row, but if it wasn’t pulsing, it might not get noticed.

Once I had a true sense of the detection effect, then I only needed to find its keystone.

This time the “keystone” reference made me smile.

“Key” is a joke word to a Locksmith for good reason. Not only could we lock and unlock portals — when it came to locking and unlocking things, controlling admittance, we were the best at it.

Truly. The best.

Not a boast, either. Of all the various races that ever came our way or interacted with us in any ways, none were as good as Locksmiths when it came to gaining access and controlling access.

Locks and keys were tied into the philosophies behind our skills and magics. For example, the underwater freedom effect was done through “unlocking” water, in a deeper sense.

So while a listasa elf might unweave a spell, or a sissalaxa lizardfolk might eat the heart of its power, I could disable an effect by unlocking it.

In the case of that magical alarm, the point that held it together — the lock — lay between the two absent pulses of the cycle, in the heart of a urinal odor, where the watery blue edged closer to a colorless white.

That was my target. Time to pick the lock.

Diakopi. I could only think the incantation, but that was enough to combine with a poking gesture to unravel that detection effect and open the boat to us.

Vasco made the same gesture, a fraction of a second behind mine. I wasn’t sure exactly what he’d done, but he gave me a thumb’s up.

I swam down to the riverbed, then back up as fast as I could.

I sprang up into the air, water sheeting out around me, and grabbed onto a hot, dusty tire on the side of the boat.

The underwater freedom effect broke as soon as I was out of the water, and I was bone dry again.

I scrambled up the tires, rolled over the gunwale, and crouched down on the rough wooden deck of the tugboat.

No one visible from…

Check that. No one visible on the deck. Inside the cabin, I could see the skinny, bearded man from earlier at the wheel. His gaze was fixed and distant.

I could detect a haze of foreign energies flowing around his head. I doubted he was in control of his own actions. Likely another treaty violation…

The rest of the deck looked clear.

That worried me more than a little. There was only the one cabin on this little tugboat, and it didn’t look big enough to…

Check that. Now that I was inside the illusions surrounding the boat, I could tell that the cabin had several energetic effects flowing around it.

At a glance, none of them looked dangerous or deceptive, so I finished my job.

I stuck my arm out over the water and waved.

Brikatika was out of the water, up the tires, and beside me before I even pulled my arm back.

I hushed him, and he nodded, slow and awkward as the gesture looked on his otter-like body.

Vasco came up — slower than Brikatika — a moment later. Magellan under one arm, and his duffel bag still slung over his shoulder.

Magellan was handed over the rail first. Good boy that he was, he knew to get low and stay quiet without my telling him.

The duffel bag came next, and as I grabbed it and set it down, I vowed that whatever container I chose to carry with me — once I’d had time to make it bottomless, like the duffel bag — would be smaller than a freaking duffel bag.

Vasco came last. Dry as the rest of us. His eyes raked across the boat, and I could tell he’d drawn the same conclusions I had.

Staying low, I led the way across the deck to the entrance to the cabin.

It should have looked like a red doorway.

Instead it looked like a gray, stone tunnel entrance, leading straight into blackness.

“Nychter magic,” Vasco whispered. “They make their own caves so they don’t interfere with the normal bats of worlds they travel to.”

“That’s real?” I couldn’t keep the shock out of my whispered words.

Vasco nodded. “No further wards, either.”

“Come into my parlor,” I muttered, shaking my head.

Vasco thumped me lightly on the shoulder. Gave me a wicked smile.

“Remember, Scott. We’re the spiders here.”

I nodded grimly, and turned to the tunnel.

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