Free Aquamancer (mancer series Book 2) by Don Callander

becoming bored with doing and seeing practically nothing—except blue sky, brown river, and yellow reeds all the same height on either side—he stood on the after-deck and fitted the long oar into its rest. Swinging it back and forth in the rowlock to push and pull the curved blade through the water, he found he could drive the gondola easily, breasting the slowly flowing river current. It was welcome exercise, once he got the hang of it, and something useful to be doing.
    At Summer Palace the river had been broad and the current lazily looping right and left, syrup slow. As they moved upstream, however, its course became choked with densely tangled floating mats of hyacinths, water lilies, and low-lying mud aits built up around snags of branches and sometimes full trees, swept down by past floods.
    Between the islets, the stream flowed so slowly that its direction was barely perceptible. Choosing the passages that appeared deepest and widest, Douglas rowed steadily on.
    By late afternoon, open water had all but disappeared. Douglas navigated by the lowering sun, alone. Even this failed when he ran the gondola’s sharp prow against an unusually thick and tangled snag that blocked the stream course, disturbing a nest of newly hatched alligators, who swam quickly away, squeaking furiously.
    Backing water to free the bow from the snag, he tried another channel, only to find their way impeded by a vast floating mass of sweet-smelling purple hyacinths. Even Myrn’s strong propulsion spell was unable to push them through the intertwined stems and bulbous leaves.
    After retreating and trying several other paths, he realized he was becoming confused, especially as the sun was now below the horizon.
    “Can you tell which way the current is flowing?” he called to the Otter, who was sitting on another hyacinth mat, fluffing his fur.
    “Better turn back! We’ll never get the boat through here.”
    Douglas shipped his oar and sat down to ponder the situation in Wizardly fashion. The Sea Otter jumped aboard from the hyacinths.
    “Actually there are several dozen channels,” he said. “You just keep picking the wrong one, I guess.”
    “You’re a big help,” Douglas sniffed sarcastically. “Got any better ideas?”
    “Hoy! I’m a Sea Otter, not a riverine one,” Marbleheart protested. “I don’t know anything about rivers except that they get shallower and smaller as you go away from Sea. As I said at the beginning, if we could swim ...”
    “I could change myself into a fish. No, not a fish! A certain Otter around here has too big an appetite,” mused Douglas. “Beside, shape changing is a very uncertain business. There’s always the danger of not being able to change back. If I changed into an Otter, I might have to stay an Otter forever!”
    “Not what I’d call a fate worse than death,” chuckled the Sea Otter.
    Douglas stared at the wall of reeds on all sides, each reed as thick as a man’s thumb and standing eight feet out of the water.
    “I could fly out of here, but then I couldn’t take the boat—or the Otter, for that matter, over that distance. Too tiring. No. Instead, I’ll loft myself above the reeds with Flarman’s Levitation Spell,” he decided. “Maybe I can see our way to a clear channel.”
    “Worth a try,” said Marbleheart, excited by the prospect of seeing more magic. “What should I do?”
    “Stay put! Don’t wander off and don’t let the boat get in among the reeds where I can’t see it,” Douglas ordered.
    He performed the appropriate incantation and gestured to lift himself gently into the air, slowly rising until he was looking down at the hundreds of square miles of marshland around them. From this vantage he could just see the broken towers of Summer Palace in the distance and a ragged line of mountains to the west, but little in between but the occasional glimpse of open stretches of water rapidly growing dark as the sun fell.
    “We’ve twisted and turned so often,”