They stood around it, for the moment hesitant. “I don’t know what treasure can help us now,” Dor said, and whipped off the cloth.
The pirate’s treasure was revealed: a pile of Mundane gold coins-they had to be Mundane, since Xanth did not use coinage-a keg of diamonds, and a tiny sealed jar.
“Too bad,” Irene said. “Nothing useful. And this is the end of the tunnel; the pirate must have filled it in as he went, up to this point, so there would be only the one way in. I’ll have to plant a big tuber and hope it runs a strong tube to the surface, and that there is no water above us here. The tuber isn’t watertight. If that fails, Smash can try to bash a hole in the ceiling, and Chet can shrink the boulders as they fall. We just may get out alive.”
Dor was relieved. At least Irene wasn’t collapsing in hysterics. She did have some backbone when it was needed.
Grundy was on the table, struggling with the cap of the jar. “If gold is precious, and gems are precious, maybe this is the most precious of all.”
But when the cap came off, the content of the jar was revealed as simple salve.
“This is your treasure?” Dor asked the bone.
“Oh, yes, it’s the preciousest treasure of all,” the bone assured him.
“In what way?”
“Well, I don’t know. But the fellow I pirated it from fought literally to the death to retain it. He bribed me with the gold, hid the diamonds, and refused to part with the salve at all. He died without telling me what it was for. I tried it on wounds and bums, but it did nothing. Maybe If I’d known its nature, I could have used it to destroy the loins.”
Dor found he had little sympathy for the pirate, who had died as he had lived, ignominiously. But the salve intrigued him increasingly, and not merely because he was now standing knee-deep in water.
“Salve, what is your property?” he asked.
“I am a magic condiment that enables people to walk on smoke and vapor,” it replied proudly. “Merely smear me on the bottoms of your feet or boots, and you can tread any trail in the sky you can see. Of course, the effect only lasts a day at a time; I get scuffed off, you know. But repeated applications-“
“Thank you,” Dor cut in. “That is very fine magic indeed. But can you help us get out of this tunnel?”
“No. I make mist seem solid, not rock seem misty. You need another salve for that.”
“If I had known your property,” the bone said wistfully, “I could have escaped the loins. If only I had-“
“Serves you right, you infernal pirate,” the salve said. “You got exactly what you deserved. I hope you loined your lesson.”
“Listen, greasepot-“ the bone retorted.
“Enough,” Dor said. “If neither of you have any suggestions to get us out of here, keep quiet.”
“I am suspicious of this,” Chet said. “The pirate took this treasure, but never lived to enjoy it. Ask it if there is a curse associated.”
“Is there, salve?” Dor asked, surprised by the notion.
“Oh, sure,” the salve said. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“You did not,” Dor said. How much mischief had Chet’s alertness saved them? “What is it?”
“Whoever uses me will perform some dastardly deed before the next full moon,” the salve said proudly. “The pirate did.”
“But I never used you!” the bone protested. “I never knew your power!”
“You put me on your wounds. That was a misuse-but it counted. Those wounds could have walked on clouds. Then you killed your partner and took all the treasure for yourself.”
“That was a dastardly deed indeed!” Irene agreed. “You certainly deserved your fate.”
“Yeah, he was purloined,” Grundy said.
The bone did not argue.
“Oops,” Chet said. He reached down and ripped something from his foreleg, just under the rising waterline. It was a tentacle from the kraken.
“I was afraid of that,” Irene said. “That weed is way beyond my control. It won’t stop growing if I tell it to.”
Dor drew his sword. “I’ll cut off any more tentacles,” he said. “They can’t come at me too thickly here at the end of the tunnel. Go ahead and start your tuber, Irene.”
She dipped into her seedbag. “Oh-oh. That seed must’ve fallen out somewhere along the way. It’s not here.”
They had had a violent trip on the raft; the seed could have worked loose anywhere. “Chet and Smash,” Dor said without pause, “go ahead and make us a way out of here, If you can. Irene, if you have another stabilization plant-“
She checked. “That I have.”
They got busy. Dor faced back down the dark tunnel as the water rose to thigh level, spearing at the dark liquid with his sword, shining the sunstone here and there. The sounds of the ogre’s work grew loud. “Water, tell me when a tentacle’s coming,” he directed. But there was so much crashing behind him as Smash pulverized the rock of the ceiling that he could not hear the warnings of the water. A tentacle caught his ankle and jerked him off his feet. He choked on water as another tentacle caught his sword arm. The kraken had him -and he couldn’t call for help!
“What’s going on here?” Grundy demanded. “Are you going swimming while the rest of us work?” Then the golem realized that Dor was in trouble. “Hey, why didn’t you say something? Don’t you know the kraken’s got you?”
The kraken seaweed certainly had him! The tentacles were dragging him back down the tunnel, half drowning.
“Well, somebody’s got to do something!” Grundy said, as though bothered by an annoying detail. “Here, kraken-want a cookie?” He held out a gold coin, which seemed to weigh almost as much as he did.
A tentacle snatched the coin away, but in a moment discovered it to be enedible and dropped it.
Grundy grabbed a handful of diamonds. “Try this rock candy,” he suggested. The tentacle wrapped around the gems-and got sliced by their sharp edges. Ichor welled into the water as the tentacle thrashed m pain.
“Now there’s a notion,” Grundy said. He swam to where Dor was still being dragged along, and sliced with another diamond, cutting into the tentacles. They let go, stung, though the golem was only able to scratch them, and Dor finally gasped his way back to his feet, waist-deep in coloring water.
“I have to go help the others,” Grundy said. “Yell if you get in more trouble.”
Dor fished in the water and recovered his magic sword and the shining sunstone. He was more than disheveled and disgruntled. He had had to be bailed out by a creature no taller than the span of his hand. Some hero he was!
But the others had had better success. A hole now opened upward, and daylight glinted down. “Come on, Dor!” Grundy called. “We’re getting out of here at last!”
Dor crammed coins and diamonds into one pocket with the sunstone, and the jar of salve into another. Smash and Chet were already scrambling out the top, having had to mount the new passage as they extended it. The centaur was actually pretty good at this sort of climbing because he had six extremities; four or five were firmly braced in crevices while one or two were searching for new holds.
Grundy had no trouble; his small weight allowed him to scramble freely.
Only Dor and Irene remained below.
“Hurry up, slowpoke!” she called. “I can’t wait forever!”
“Start up first,” he called. “I’m stashing the treasure.”
“Oh, no!” she retorted. “You just want to see up my skirt!”
“If I do, that’s my profit,” he said. “I don’t want this hole collapsing on you.” For, indeed, gravel and rocks were falling down as Chet’s efforts dislodged them. The whole situation seemed precarious, despite the effort of the plant Irene had grown to help stabilize the wall.