Five seconds…
Think, Timmy, Think!
Then a voice spoke inside me. If you do not take this decision now you would forever become incapable of making your own decisions.
I gritted my teeth.
Two seconds…
I looked at the map. I had never even heard the names of the places mentioned in the map before. I was sure these places existed outside of Abhaya. I randomly selected one of the locations and said out its name.
“Drannia.”
I went into the portal.
The moment I did so the chamber disappeared. I found myself in complete darkness. Above me, below me and around me only darkness existed. A strange music played, that felt like the musical instrument used to create it was just next to my ears. I had used portals before, but this was nothing like the ones that I had used before. Maybe this portal belonged to a different breed of portals?
I saw a circular doorway down below me that opened to some kind of a light outside. I was falling fast towards it. Before, long I had fallen through it.
Chapter 7
The blackness disappeared. The music stopped, and was replaced by a different sound, that heard like the snorting of some animal.
For a few moments I struggled to take in the surroundings.
I was next to a big tree. A few metres away there was what I thought was a stream initially, but on second thought I realised that it was actually some kind of a pond that had been dug around the tree.
Beyond the circular pond there was a road, paved with ancient stones. I recalled the snorting sound and jumped to my feet, when upon turning my head I saw the ferocious head of an animal just metres away from me. One with rather large front teeth that stuck out of its ugly mouth. The animal also had giant whiskers.
Cold fear struck me as I realised that the animal was a giant rat.
One that was not very happy on seeing me.
And then I heard a moaning sound. From the corner of my eye I saw something on the ground, just near the legs of the rat.
A cat.
A girl cat.
She was more or less unconscious.
The rat opened its mouth, ready to attack me. Its foul breath struck my nose such that I could have died from the smell.
The rat pounced at me. I leapt sideways, and nearly fell into the pond.
I saw that the water of the pond was rather yellow and it stank.
Wait a minute, was the water of the pond water in the first place?
Or was it what I thought it was?
Urine?
Shit.
The rat wasn’t going to let me go easily, and once again it came for me. I wished so much that I had taken my father’s sword before entering the portal. What had I expected embarking on a quest to be like? I should have at least brought a weapon along to stand a fighting chance.
As the rat approached me, my eyes fell on the tree. The rat was so big that if it tried to climb the tree, its weight would pull it down. But I could climb the tree easily. I sprinted for the tree. The girl was spread on the ground just next to it, and before I climbed the tree, I had a second thought and decided to play the hero who rescues the damsel.
I hauled the semi-conscious girl onto my shoulder. At once I was hit by the smell of rum. So the girl was drunk? I didn’t have much time and I climbed up the tree as fast as I could, my claws penetrating into the bark and giving me a good hold.
But just then I felt a sharp pain about my tail and I realised that I could not move up any more. With a wince I looked down and saw to my horror the rat’s mouth enclosed around the end of my tail.
Shit.
The rat pulled, and despite my best efforts to cling onto the tree, I fell together with the girl. We felt right atop the head of the rat. The rat hadn’t expected this at all. We hit the rat’s head with so much force that the rat let go of my tail due to the pain. I was aching all over from the fall, but so intent I was to escape that I wasted no time. Once again I hauled the semi-conscious girl onto my shoulder and I raced up the tree. This time the rat didn’t manage to catch me by the tail.
I reached a branch high up the tree, and there I laid down the semi-conscious girl in such a position that she wouldn’t fall off.
The girl opened her eyes a chink.
“Who are you?” she asked me and she seemed like she was having a hard time actually forming words with her tongue.
“Uh, I am Timmy,” I said. “And you?”
“Gnaria,” the girl replied. And then she closed her eyes and she was again lost in her world of bliss.
“Gnaria,” I repeated staring at the girl’s face. She was actually beautiful, I thought. A beautiful girl filled with rum.
I looked down at the rat. The rat was scratching its claws on the tree as though trying to climb. But the rat was just not made for climbing, what with its body that weighed a ton.
If I was the rat, I would rather focus my energy on breaking the tree entirely, instead of trying in vain to climb it.
Wait a minute, what if the rat actually tried to pull down the tree? It sure had the strength to do so. If the rat did so then Gnaria and I would fall straight into the pond of urine, which undoubtedly belonged to the rat. Sheer panic rose inside of me.
But after a few moments, the rat gave up on us. The rat rested its head on the ground and closed its eyes, seemingly gone to sleep.
Okay, now how do we get away from this place?
I tapped Gnaria’s cheek.
“Hey,” I said. And then I suddenly withdrew my hand.
The only way Gnaria could have come to the rat’s tiny kingdom was by crossing the great pond of urine. Had she swam across it? I cringed at the thought. I bent close to her face and I sniffed her, trying to make sure if she was actually drunk with rum… or if the disgusting liquid of the rat had gone into her stomach and somehow made her drunk.
Gnaria suddenly opened her eyes, which were just an inch or two away from my own, even as I tried to sniff her and make sure whether she smelled of rum or the other liquid.
“Hey, what are you doing?” she asked. This time her voice was quite sober. I withdrew immediately, feeling my face flush.
“Uh,” I said uneasily.
She sat up and let out a cry.
“Who brought me here?” she said, looking down at the sleeping rat with much horror.
“I... I brought you to this branch so that the rat wouldn’t eat you,” I said.
Gnaria frowned hard at me.
“And who are you?” she asked. Apparently she had forgotten entirely that I had told her my name only a few seconds back.
“Timmy,” I told her. She kept looking at me, as though she was unsure whether to trust me or not. Then she shook her head, apparently deciding to think about that later. She stared at the pool of urine below.
“Um, did you fall into the pond?” I asked her with much hesitation.
Gnaria grabbed her head, as though trying to recall.
“I don’t think so,” she said, “all I remember is taking a glass of rum last night.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. The girl smelled of rum, not the other liquid. Also, apparently the first glass of rum that been followed by dozens more.
“Then how did you get here?” I asked.
The girl’s eyes twinkled as though she had remembered.
“I used a bamboo pole to jump to this place,” she said. “The pole fell into the pond.”
So this girl could pole jump while drunk? Great.
“Where do you live?” I asked Gnaria.
Gnaria looked at the road in the distance.
“The road is my home,” she said. What? She was homeless? I was rather surprised. “And you?” she asked me.
I cringed. Should I tell her who I truly was or where I came from? I decided that it would be best to ignore her question. Instead I pretended as though I hadn’t heard and I asked.
“I wonder if I am already out of Abhaya,” I said.
“Abhaya
is a great distance to the south,” Gnaria said, eyeing me with a small frown, “so you are a traveller?”
“Yes, kind of,” I said. I realised Gnaria could give me better information about my whereabouts if I showed her the piece of the map and I promptly took it out of my pocket.
“You know where these places are?” I asked. Gnaria tried to take the map from me to have a closer look, instead I myself took the map closer to her eyes. Gnaria seemed like a good girl who might be a bit too inclined for drinks and for coming to places where giant rats lived. Still, it was best not to put too much trust on anyone.
“I think this one can be reached by ship from the northern port,” Gnaria said, putting her paw over the place “Hostania” on the map. “I do not know about the other places, never heard of them either.” I noticed that there was a smaller name scribbled beside Drannia.
“Ultur,” I muttered the name. Suddenly Gnaria’s eyes went wide.
“Ultur?” she said with much astonishment. But at that very moment, the branch we were sitting on creaked, as though it was not going to be able to take our weight for long. My attention suddenly changed and I quickly pocketed the map. I thought it would be best to discuss the locations of the map without sitting on a weak branch atop a tree, below which a giant rat waited to eat us.
And then I remembered. How could I have forgotten?
The Long Hands spell!
At that moment I realised that it was pointless to have many spells if you didn’t remember to actually put them to use when they were required.
First I activated the Human Hands spell, and then I looked around. The closest tree was at a distance of thirty metres from where we were. If I could grab a strong branch with my fingers then it would be possible for me to pull Gnaria and myself to the tree and then we could easily climb down from it. We wouldn’t also need to deal with the great circular pond of urine.
I had sufficient mana, and I extended the fingers of my hand, even as Gnaria watched me in great amazement. My fingers curved downward the more I extended them. After a point I could no longer keep them in the air. However, my fingers had already crossed over the rat urine pond. I made my fingers move over to the nearest tree and then I grabbed what I thought was the strongest branch of that particular tree.
The whole process felt weird to be honest. My fingers felt odd.
“Grab me,” I said to Gnaria. She probably understood what I was going to do next and she embraced me as tightly as possible. It was the first time in my life that I was this close to a girl and I couldn’t help but feel aroused. I let out a cough, even as blood rushed to my face and I felt my ears turn hot. The smell of rum coming from Gnaria was the only minus point though.
“Okay,” I said, “Let’s get the hell away from here.”
I shrank the length of my hand very fast, such that Gnaria and I flew over the urine pond safely, the wind against my face, and the next moment the two of us found ourselves hanging from the branch of the other tree. I let out a laugh in disbelief that the trick had worked. Gnaria who was still clutching onto me leapt to the trunk of the tree and made her way down to the ground. I followed suit.
Chapter 8
In the distance the rat that had been sleeping stirred. It opened its eyes and looked up at the tree and was shocked to see that we were not there. It turned its head this way and that and finally saw us. I waved at the rat.
“Missed a good meal, eh?” I shouted to the rat. The rat sure looked pissed off.
“I didn’t know you could use a Long Hands spell,” Gnaria said, “Long Hands spell are being newly rewarded and are very rare.”
I wondered if she was indirectly telling me that I should have used the spell earlier.
“Are they?” I said and as I thought about it I had myself seen only a couple of people use the particular spell, and that too not a long time ago. “I forgot that I actually had it, or I could have used it before.”
Gnaria frowned at me.
“How did you actually get to the rat’s dwelling?” she asked.
“I was just passing when I noticed the rat and I saw you about to be eaten by it, so…” I was stuck after this. If I said that I had used my Long Hands spell to go to the rat’s dwelling, then it would be in stark disagreement with what I had said just moments before about forgetting the spell. Luckily, at this very moment the sound of horses came.
Gnaria and I turned and saw a bunch of cats come towards us riding horses. They wore colourful clothes very much like Gnaria. Gnaria waved at them.
“Hey!” she cried. “Where did you all go?”
There were more females than males in the group. They came and stopped near us.
“I am sorry, Gnaria,” one of the male cats said as he leapt down from his horse. He had a rather long face for a cat. “I should have not told you that giant rats have the best rum in the world. I am very sorry.”
“We have been searching for you since yesterday night,” one of the females said, “you disappeared from the inn. It was only some time ago that Zolem told us that he had joked to you that one gets the best rum with giant rats and he suggested you might have come in this direction as we saw the giant rat here while passing a few days ago.”
Zolem, the cat with the long face, hung his head. He looked really sorry. I looked uneasily at Gnaria and I didn’t think at all that Zolem was faulty in any way. After all how could he think that someone would believe such a ridiculous joke to be true? But then I remembered that Gnaria had told me that she had drunk rum yesterday night. Perhaps the rum had affected her brain a bit too much.
“I- I,” Gnaria said and she seemed to be at a loss of words. Suddenly her eyes swelled with tears. “I am being a burden to you, aren’t I?” She asked the group. “I get drunk like shit all the time and then I do something stupid.” And Gnaria began to sob. Two of the females climbed down from their horses and came to console Gnaria.
One of them looked at me.
“And who is this good gentleman?” she asked me.
“I am Timmy,” I said.
Gnaria glanced at me with tearful eyes.
“He saved me from the rat, otherwise I was done for,” she said.
The female smiled brightly at me.
“You are a handsome cat,” she said to me and then she extended a paw. “I am Zuli, by the way.”
I shook her hand. I felt a bit odd because no girl had ever spoken to me like that before. The other girls and the male cats too introduced themselves to me. There were seven of them in total besides Gnaria. Zolem, Kark and Filip were the male cats while Zuli, Paru, Nori and Betty were the ladies.
“So what are you guys, exactly?” I asked the group. “Travellers?”
“Kind of,” Zolem answered. “We are all from the same village. There were way too many restrictions in our village and we were getting frustrated. So one day we just decided to leave it.”
“We just travel from one place to another,” Zuli said and the way she looked at me I wondered if she was trying to charm me or something, “we enjoy the different cultures and people that we come across. We are at peace with our lives now. We also don’t stay at any place for long so that we do not contract the vices of the place.”
“Interesting,” I found myself saying, trying to not look too much in Zuli’s direction. I didn’t want to give her any wrong signals for sure. I was after a quest at the end of the day and it was utmost necessary that I stayed focussed. I turned to Gnaria instead.
“So you know about this place Ultur, right?’ I asked her. The moment I said the name of Ultur that almost everyone present gasped.
“What?” I asked uneasily. “Something wrong with the name?”
“We have been in Drannia for less than a month,” Gnaria said, exchanging glances with her friends, “but even this short time has been enough for us to know that the name Ultur is highly feared in this region.”
“What for?” I asked. Though inwardly I thought that it wasn’t that surprising a thing. The nam
e Ultur was written in a map that led to the mythical goat king treasure. Obviously the quest had countless obstacles and dangers that were needed to be overcome.
“It’s a strange patch of woods, almost at the centre of the town of Drannia,” Zolem said. “Anybody who enters it never comes back. The authorities have created a big wall around the small patch of woods. But sometimes adventurers would go into it anyway and they would never be seen or heard of again.”
A chill ran down my spine hearing this.
“If you are an adventurer I would say that you should not go there,” Zuli said. “It would be a waste of a handsome cat like you. Why don’t you join us instead if adventure and thrills are all that you seek? We have plenty of those.” Zuli winked at me. I wondered if she had taken some kind of a liking for me. For apparently no reason that too.
“Come on Zuli, stop hitting on every male cat you meet,” Gnaria snapped at Zuli, but not too aggressively either. Zuli rolled her eyes and looked at the sky playfully.
“Who said I am hitting on anybody?” she asked.
“Um, thanks for the offer to join you,” I said, “but it’s important that I go to Ultur.”
“Come on, you don’t have to do that,” Gnaria said. I would have understood had the others said that, but Gnaria? She herself was crazy enough to go to the dwelling of a monster rat because someone joked to her that the monster rat had the best rum in town!
I sighed.
“I must,” I told her. “If you guys could take me to this Ultur place, I would be really grateful to you all.”
Catheroes Page 31
