Bk 2: chapter four (3)

"Ah, I see," Little Nse said with a nod, making Walter wonder what a little boy could possibly understand. On second thought, could this person be still called a boy? He looked the same age as his sister.

The two kept silent all through the journey. In a few hours, they had arrived at their destination. The sudden lack of motion made many slightly dizzy.

Walter himself, who after spending time in the emperor's shed considered himself quite strong of mind, felt himself get slightly disoriented for a while.

"Are you sure you don't want that map? It could be of help," Walter heard the boy say at this moment and blinked to clear his vision as he looked his way. This did not work; instead, he was met with the boy's smiling face. For a moment, that young face looked quite old in his eyes.

"Sure," Walter said. He did not mind having a map to guide his way. He saw the boy stretched his hand to him with a folded parchment in it. And tried to reach for it, but the hands became two. The boy chuckled and put the parchment in his hand outstretched the wrong way.

The Carrier opened and one or two people made their way out, finding it hard to walk straight.

"Let us meet again, Walter," The boy said and walked out of the carrier under Walter's distorted vision.

By the time Walter and his crew got out of the carrier, the boy was nowhere to be found. Walter and the rest found themselves in a great noisy city. The sound of the busy city hit them suddenly, the moment their feet stepped off the carrier. At this, they looked back at the carrier with wonder. This kind of wondrous machine, they wondered how it was made.

Walter did not ponder too much about this situation. His eyes were trained on the parchment in his hand. Without opening it, he knew it would be a map. But now, receiving this map, he suddenly felt odd. Something was not right with that boy. He wanted to request for a specific map, but the boy had given him a random one. He glanced at the words on the heading of the map. It was in a language he did not understand. Still, this language was familiar. He had seen his mother teach characters like this to his sister before; a lost language.

Not thinking too much into the words, he looked round again at the bustling city, hoping to find the boy. They were standing in an intersection with several people crossing from different directions. The crossroad divided four completely different sceneries. On one side, the stone buildings in the city were tall into the sky. They held odd inscriptions on their shining metal frame that glowed once in a while. On another, the buildings were made of exotic wood and tiled roofs shaped as though looking to the heavens yet never rose high enough to touch the birds in the sky. On another, rusty metals edged off buildings, scraps and dirt lined the floors of its streets and the last looked like an old town, with cobblestone paths that were oddly, floating on water.

Walter could not find the boy's silhouette in this crowd, but on one side of the city, Little Nse had walked towards a tea house, where a man was awaiting him by the door.

"Master, You even took a portal and a carrier too at that, for such a short distance?" the man hunched old man in grey asked.

"I had to meet him just once, this little general," Little Nse glanced back at where he came from for a second and looked away with a smile.

"Let's have tea," He said and entered the tea house with the old man on his heels.