Centaur Aisle x-4 Read online

  “The tunnel, idiot,” the bone said.

  The sound of the pride of loins was looming louder. The tiger sharks were snarling as the growing kraken weed menaced them.

  “Where’s the tunnel?” Dor asked.

  “Right behind you, at the shore,” the bone said. “I sealed it off, took three steps, and fell prey to the loins.”

  “I don’t see it,” Dor said.

  “Of course not; the high tide washes sand over it. Last week someone goosed the tide and it dumped a lot more sand. I’m the only one who can locate the tunnel now.”

  Dor picked up the bone. It resembled the thighbone of a man.

  “Locate the tunnel for me.”

  “Right there, where the water laps. Scrape the sand away.” It angled slightly in his hand, pointing.

  Dor scraped, and soon uncovered a boulder. “This seals it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the bone said. “I hid my pirate treasure under the next island and tunneled here so no one would know. But the loins-:

  “Hey, Smash,” Dor called. “We have a boulder for you to move.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t,” the bone cautioned. “That’s delicately placed so the thieves can’t force it. The tunnel will collapse.”

  “Well, how do we get in, then?”

  “You have to use a sky hook to lift the boulder out without jarring the sides.”

  “We don’t have a sky hook!” Dor exclaimed angrily.

  “Of course you don’t. That was my talent, when I was alive. No one but me could safely remove that boulder. I had everything figured, except the loin.”

  As the bone spoke, the kraken weed, having driven back the tiger sharks, was questing toward the shore. Soon it would be more of a menace to them than the tiger sharks had been.

  “Any progress?” Chet asked. “I do not want to rush you, but I calculate we have thirty seconds before the loins, whatever they are, burst out of the forest.”

  “Chet!” Dor exclaimed. “Make this boulder into a pebble! But don’t jar anything.”

  The centaur touched the boulder, and immediately it shrank. Soon it was a pebble that fell into the hole beneath it. The passage was open.

  “Jump in!” Dor cried.

  Irene was startled. “Who, me?”

  “Close enough,” Grundy said. “Want to stand there and show off your legs to the loins?”

  Irene jumped in. “Say, this is neat!” she called from below, her voice echoing hollowly. “Let me just grow something to illuminate it-“

  “You next,” Dor said to Chet. “Try not to shake the tunnel; it’s not secure.” Chet jumped in with surprising delicacy, Grundy with him.

  “Okay, Smash,” Dor said.

  “No go,” the ogre said, bracing to face the land menace. “Me join the loin.” And he slammed one huge fist into a hammy palm with a sound like a crack of thunder.

  Smash wanted to guard the rear. Probably that was best. Otherwise the loins might pursue them into the tunnel. “Stand next to the opening,” Dor said. “When you’re ready, jump in and follow us. Don’t wait too long. Soon the kraken will reach here; that will stop the loins, I think. Don’t tangle with the kraken; we need it to stand guard after you rejoin us.”

  Ike ogre nodded. The bellow of the loins became loud. Dor jumped in the hole.

  He found himself in a man-sized passage, leading south, under the channel. The light from the entrance faded rapidly. But Irene had thoughtfully planted starflowers along the way, and their pinpoint lights marked the progress of the tunnel. Dor paused to unwrap his midnight sunstone; its beam helped considerably.

  As Dor walked, he heard the approach of the pride of loins out side. Smash made a grunt of surprise. Then there was the sound of contact. “What’s going on?” Dor cried, worried.

  “The ogre just threw a dandyloin to the kraken,” the pebble in the mouth of the tunnel said. “Now he’s facing up to their leader, Sir Loin Stake. He’s tough and juicy.”

  “Smash, come on!” Dor cried. “Don’t push your luck!”

  The ogre’s reply was muffled. All Dor heard was “. . . luck!”

  “Oooo, what you said!” the pebble exclaimed. “Wash out your mouth with soapstone!”

  In a moment Smash came lumbering down the tunnel, head bowed to clear the ceiling. A string of kraken weed was strewn across his hairy shoulder. Evidently he had held off the loins until the kraken took over the vicinity. “Horde explored, adored the gourd,” he announced, cracking a smile like a smoking cleft in a lightning-struck tree. Those who believed ogres had no sense of humor were obviously mistaken; Smash could laugh with the best, provided the joke was suitably fundamental.

  “What did the loins look like?” Dor asked, overcome by morbid curiosity.

  Smash paused, considering, then uttered one of his rare nonrhyming utterances. “Ho ho ho ho ho!” he bellowed-and the fragile tunnel began to crumble around them. Rocks dislodged from the ceiling and the walls oozed moisture.

  Dor and the ogre fled that section. Dor was no longer very curious about the nature of the loins; he just wanted to get out of this tunnel alive. They were below the ocean; they could be crushed inexorably if the tunnel support collapsed. A partial collapse, leading to a substantial leak, would flood the tunnel. Even an ogre could not be expected to hold up an ocean.

  They caught up to the others. There was no crash behind them; the tunnel had not collapsed. Yet.

  “This place makes me nervous,” Irene said.

  “No way out but forward,” Chet said. “Quickly.”

  The passage seemed interminable, but it did trend south. It must have been quite a job for the pirate to excavate this, even with his sky hook to help haul out the refuse. How ironic that the loin should be his downfall, after he had finished the tunnel! They hurried onward and downward, becoming more nervous as the depth deepened.

  To heighten their apprehension, the bottom of the tunnel became clammy, then slick. A thin stream of water was flowing in it-and soon it was clear that this water was increasing.

  Had the ogre’s laugh triggered a leak, after all? If so, they were doomed. Dor was afraid even to mention the possibility.

  “The tide!” Chet said. “The tide is coming in-and high tide covers the entrance. This passage is filling with water!”

  “Oh, good!” Dor said, relieved.

  Four pairs of eyes focused on him, perplexed.

  “Uh, I was afraid the tunnel was collapsing,” Dor said lamely. “The tide-that’s not so bad.”

  “In the sense that a slow demise is better than a fast one,” the centaur said.

  Dor thought about that. His apprehension became galloping dread.

  How could they escape this? “How much longer is this tunnel?” Dor asked.

  “You’re halfway through,” the tunnel said. “But you’ll have trouble getting past the cave-in ahead.”

  “Cave-in!” Irene squealed. She tended to panic in a crisis.

  “Oh, sure,” the tunnel said. “No way around.”

  In a moment, with the water ankle-deep and rising, they encountered it-a mass of rubble that sealed the passage.

  “Me bash this trash,” Smash said helpfully.

  “Urn, wait,” Dor cautioned. “We don’t want to bring the whole ocean in on us in one swoop. Maybe if Chet reduces the pieces to pebbles, while

  Smash supports the ceiling-“

  “Still won’t hold,” Chet said. “The dynamics are wrong. We need an arch.”

  “Me shape escape,” Smash offered. He started to fashion an arch from stray chunks of stone. But more chunks rolled down to splash in the deepening water as he took each one.

  “Maybe I can stabilize it,” Irene said. She found a seed and dropped it in the water. “Grow.”

  The plant tried, but there was not enough light. Dor shone his sunstone on it; then the plant prospered. That was all it needed; Jewel’s gift was proving useful!

  Soon there was a leafy kudzu taking form. Tendrils dug into the sand; vi
nes enclosed the rocks, and green leaves covered the wall of the tunnel. Now Smash could not readily dislodge the stones he needed to complete his arch without hurting the plant.

  “I believe we can make it without the arch,” Chet said. “The plant has secured the debris.” He touched a stone, reducing it to a pebble, then touched others. Soon the tunnel was restored, the passage clear to the end.

  But the delay had been costly. The water was now knee-deep. They splashed onward.

  Fortunately, they were at the nadir. As they marched up the far slope, the water’s depth diminished. But they knew this was a temporary respite; before long the entire tunnel would be filled.

  Now they came to the end of it-a chamber in which there stood a simple wooden table whose objects were covered by a cloth.

  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.

  “There is that,” she agreed nervously. She started to climb, while Dor completed his stashing.

  The kraken’s tentacles, given respite from the attacks of sword and diamond, quested forward again. The water was now chest-high on Dor, providing the weed ample play. “There’s one!” the water said, and Dor stabbed into the murky fluid. He was rewarded by a jerk on his sword that indicated he had speared something that flinched away.

  For a creature as bloodthirsty as the kraken, it certainly was finicky about pinpricks!

  “There’s another!” the water cried, enjoying this game. Dor stabbed again. But it was hard to do much damage, despite the magic skill the sword gave him, since he couldn’t slash effectively through water. Stabbing only hurt the tentacles without doing serious damage.

  Also, the weed was learning to take evasive action. It wasn’t very smart, but it did learn a certain minimum under the constant prodding of pain.

  Dor started to climb, at last. But to do this he had to put away his sword, and that gave the tentacles a better chance at him. Also, the gold was very solid for its size and weighed him down. As he drew himself out of the water, a tentacle wrapped around his right knee and dragged him down again.

  Dor’s grip slipped, and he fell back into the water. Now three more tentacles wrapped themselves around his legs and waist. That kraken had succeeded in infiltrating this tunnel far more thoroughly than Dor had thought possible! The weed must be an enormous monster now, since this must be only a fraction of its activity.

  Dor clenched his teeth, knowing that no one else could help him if he got dragged under this time, and drew his sword again. He set the edge carefully against a tentacle and sawed. The magically sharp edge sliced through the tender flesh of the kraken, cutting off the extremity. The tentacle couldn’t flinch away because it was wrapped around Dor; its own greed anchored it. Dor repeated the process with the other tentacles until he was free in a milky, viscous pool of kraken blood. Then he sheathed the sword again and climbed.