The Trophy of Champions (23 page)

Whisker felt like he was back in the rainforest on the Island of Kings. But this time he wasn't hunting for a key, he was hunting for a clue.

‘We need to find a pie,' he whispered to Ruby as they barged through the thick vegetation. ‘It represents our team perfectly. You search the northern wall and I'll take the south. Hoot like an owl if you see anything.'

‘Who elected you captain?' Ruby snapped, stepping in Whisker's way. ‘I'll go south and you can head north.' She turned her back on him and disappeared into the dense foliage.

Left with no other option, Whisker took off through the tropical plants along the northern wall. He spotted a porcelain banana hanging from a paw paw tree and glimpsed a sardine tin in a bed of orchids before he reached the end of the wall. With no pies in sight, he began working his way along the eastern side of the greenhouse.

High above him, a glimmer of sunlight caught his eye.

He tipped his head back for a closer look. A long, rectangular shape was suspended from the very top of the glass roof. It wasn't a pie, but it was undoubtedly the object he was searching for: a spring-loaded rat trap. The trap was baited with a folded piece of paper, ready to spring shut the moment he touched it. It sent a shiver down his tail.

Just my luck
, Whisker thought as he grabbed hold of the closest vine.
Even Gustave wants me dead.

With a
HOOT, HOOT,
he began scaling the side of the greenhouse, using creepers and branches to aid his ascent. Hanging on for dear life, he reached the top of the wall and began climbing upside-down across the snaking vines of the roof. As he approached the rat trap, he realised the vines in front of him stopped short several metres from the suspended object. With nothing but glass to hold, he knew he would have to climb back down and approach from a different wall.

In frustration, he looked below to see two penguins waddling out a small rear door carrying an ice-cream cone and a scrunched up ball of paper.

No time for climbing,
Whisker told himself, grabbing hold of a loose vine.
I'll have to do this jungle style.

As Ruby appeared beneath him, Whisker drew his sword and slashed at a section of the vine, separating it from its lower stem. Holding onto the vine with his free paw, he launched himself off the roof with a hard kick. His body swung downwards in an arc, gathering speed, and then rose upwards towards the rat trap. Angling his scissor sword forward like a lance, he skewered the note, flicking it free before the trap slammed shut with a mighty
SNAP!

The impact threw Whisker backwards. Losing his grip, he plummeted down, crashing through leaves and branches and landing with a cushioned
thud
in a moist garden bed. The note fluttered down after him.

Ruby plucked it gracefully out of the air.

‘What does it say?' Whisker groaned, pulling himself out of the soil.

Ruby unfolded the note and read in a whisper:

Her brow contorted into a frown. ‘What in Ratbeard's name is that mumbo jumbo supposed to mean?'

Whisker's mind flashed back to his conversation with Rat Bait on the
Golden Anchor.
The Lover's Labyrinth,
he recalled.
Where scarlet roses grow …

He turned to Ruby, trying to contain his excitement.

‘The Rose Maze,' he whispered. ‘It has to be our next destination. Come on. There's a back entrance this way.'

Whisker and Ruby burst into the sunlight at the rear of the greenhouse to the sound of breaking ceramics.

The porcelain banana,
Whisker thought.

As they rounded the deserted campsite and made their way down the rocky slope, the two rats heard a mighty
SMASH tinkle, tinkle
and turned to see Prowler leaping though a large hole in a shattered pane of glass clutching a sardine tin in his paws. Cleopatra and the marmosets bounded after him.

‘Here they come!' Whisker exclaimed.

‘Are you sure we're heading in the right direction?' Ruby panted, pointing ahead to the maze. ‘The roses are white, not scarlet.'

‘I'm positive, Whisker puffed. ‘There's a bush of scarlet-red roses in the centre of the maze.'

‘Do you know how to reach it?' Ruby asked.

‘Err … not exactly,' Whisker replied, pulling Gustave's map out of his drawstring bag.

He quickly scanned the drawing of the maze as he ran, hoping to locate a hidden word or symbol. He saw nothing.

‘What about the note?' he said, turning to Ruby. Take another look.'

Ruby held the note up in front of her. Her emerald-green eye lit up with realisation.

‘Look!' she cried, almost tripping over a tuft of grass. ‘The first letter of each word is written in italics:
L R L S R.
Does that mean anything to you?'

‘No,' Whisker said, staring up at the thorny wall of roses ahead of him, ‘but we need to pick a direction – and fast. It's either right or it's …
'

‘LEFT!'
Ruby shouted. ‘It has to be left. The letters must stand for directions:
left, right, left, straight, right.'
She grabbed Whisker's paw and pulled him into the dense maze. ‘Hurry!'

As Whisker darted through the maze, clutching Ruby's paw tightly, his mind flashed to a different race – a race once won by a scandalous rogue and his young sweetheart.

‘Right,'
Ruby snapped, roughly dragging Whisker around the next corner. ‘Keep up or I'll leave you behind.'

‘So much for a lover's labyrinth,' Whisker muttered, copping a thorny branch in his face.

The thick, tangled walls of rose-bushes grew taller and denser as the rats turned
left
and then followed the passage
straight.
The sunlight transformed the uppermost roses into majestic golden blooms. On ground level, deathly-pale rosebuds and icy-blue shadows filled the maze.

The rats reached the final turn
right,
almost colliding with two penguins hurrying in the opposite direction. One of the penguins held a single red rose in his flipper. Tiny white words were scrawled over its outer petals. He quickly stuffed the rose out of sight before Whisker could decipher its message.

The penguins disappeared around a bend and the rats sprinted down a long, straight passage. Reaching the far end, they saw a small alcove to one side containing a solitary bush with blood-red roses.

‘Find a rose with writing,' Ruby instructed.

As Ruby scoured the top of the bush, Whisker dropped to his knees and began searching the lower flowers. He had barely examined a dozen roses when he heard a scuffing sound behind him and spun around expecting to see one of the other teams. All he saw was a flash of blue-grey fur through a small hole at the bottom of the rose wall. Looking closer, he realised the hole led to an outer passage and was only visible from ground level.

‘I think I've just found a shortcut out of here,' Whisker whispered.

‘Good,' Ruby hissed back, ‘because I've just found our clue.' Using the end of her fingernail as a knife, she severed the rose from its stem and threw it to Whisker. ‘Decipher this, detective.'

Whisker took one look at the message and stuck the rose between his teeth like a tango dancer. Following Ruby's lead, he threw himself headfirst into the hole, wiggling under branches and thorns. It wasn't long before he emerged from the opposite side of the wall with a shirt-full of thorn holes for his troubles.

‘Well?' Ruby asked as he scrambled to his feet, ‘Have you figured out the message yet?'

Whisker removed the rose from his mouth and grabbed Ruby's arm.

‘I'll tell you on the way,' he cried, taking off down the passage. ‘Right now we have two penguins to beat.'

Paw-in-paw, Ruby and Whisker overtook the penguins a few metres from the entrance. There was no triumphant cheer or round of applause as they burst from the Lover's Labyrinth, but Whisker was silently celebrating. They were winning the race and they were winning together.

The rats sprinted a short distance up the ridge, leaving the penguins waddling in their wake. Without warning, Whisker suddenly changed direction and pulled Ruby into the Apple Grove.

‘This way,' he said, weaving past a thick trunk.

‘Hey!' Ruby protested. ‘There's no tower in here. The closest thing is the forge chimney, but that's hardly
falling down.'

‘You're right,' Whisker agreed, dodging a pile of Granny Smith apples. ‘We're not headed for a tower. We're headed for a well. It fits the description perfectly:
A windowless tower, tall and round. Not rising up but falling down.
A well isn't literally falling down but it is falling into the earth.'

‘I hope you're right,' Ruby said, glancing over her shoulder. ‘The marmosets have just left the maze and they're not headed in our direction.'

Beginning to doubt himself, Whisker took another look at the map. Scanning its inked surface, it only took him a moment to spot a fallen tree crossing the creek.

‘Round, tall and windowless,' he thought aloud. ‘It ticks all the boxes – except the
falling down
bit. The tree has already fallen down.'

‘Fingers crossed,' Ruby muttered. ‘One of our teams is right. The other is out of the competition.'

Hoping desperately they had the right ‘tower' Whisker continued his scramble through the grove in the direction of the well. He was soon surrounded on all sides by gnarled trees and thousands upon thousands of apples. The ripe fruit dangled from branches and lay in rotting heaps at the bases of trunks – every colour under the sun: red, green, pink, golden and brown.

We should be baking
Trojan Apple Strudel,
he thought, as the forge came into view.

Through the gaps in the trees he could see thick, grey smoke drifting upwards from the top of the chimney. The heavenly songs of Mama Kolina and her daughters filled the forest. Ruby pulled a sour face.

‘The well's just ahead,' she said, pointing past the forge. ‘Unless you'd prefer to visit the house of the
three little pageant queens
for breakfast …'

Whisker shook his head and kept on running, annoyed that it wasn't Fred's out-of-tune singing they had heard.

The stone well lay in the centre of a small clearing at the eastern end of the Apple Grove. Sunlight streamed through a hole it its brick-tiled roof to reveal four ropes descending into the watery darkness.

One rope for each team,
Whisker thought in relief.
We must be in the right location.
He rushed over to the well and took hold of the closest rope.

In moments, a wet coil of rope lay on the ground and a water-filled bucket was making its way to the surface. Ruby reached her paw inside the bucket and removed a round river stone. She brushed the water off its smooth surface to reveal several lines of chiselled text: