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  Contents

  Title Page

  1 - A Dilemma

  2 - A Wily Witch

  3 - A Picky Boy

  4 - The Crystal Pools

  5 - A Drowning Witch

  6 - A Peculiar Forest

  7 - Begrudging Help

  8 - A Big Decision

  9 - Smoke and Mirrors

  10 - A Turbulent Beginning

  11 - A Vicious Encounter

  12 - A Dubious Power

  13 - An Uneasy Homecoming.

  14 - Stolen Gems

  15 - The Source of the Magic

  16 - A Ride on a Tiger

  17 - Some Hyperactive Help

  18 - A Hit and Miss Strategy

  19 - A Horrible Shock

  20 - Lions!

  21 - An Irresponsible Owner

  22 - A New Complication

  23 - The Jumper's Plans

  24 - A Hostage Situation

  25 - A Cunning Plan

  26 - A Favour Repaid

  27 - A Dangerous Game

  28 - A Surprising Revelation

  29 - A Perfectly Valid Reason

  30 - Tough Decisions

  31 - All Sorted Out

  32 - Well, That's That Then, or is it?

  SWITCH!

  A Young Adult Fantasy Adventure

  By Karen Prince

  Go to: karen-prince.com for downloadable map of The Lost Kingdoms of Karibu.

  This book is dedicated to Christopher, Lloyd, Michael, Robbie and Pamela. You guys are the best and I thank you for your patience and encouragement without which there would have been no book.

  Published by: Karen Prince

  ASIN: B009H28446

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1491255094

  Cover design: Karen Prince

  Copyright © 2012 Karen Prince. All rights reserved. This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters and incidents that bear any resemblance to actual people or events are entirely coincidental.

  1

  A Dilemma

  The high priest, Drogba, sat beside his meditation cave halfway up the mountain gazing disconsolately at his people as they went about their business in the valley far below. He had not jumped for a long time. Such a long time, in fact, that his body — which had not been that young when he got it — had reached an advanced stage of decrepitude. He wondered what would happen if he were still in it when it expired. Would he be reincarnated like everybody else, and not remember his past lives? Or would he finally be gone? Judging by the dreadful wheezing noise coming from his chest, he suspected that if he procrastinated... er... meditated any longer he was about to find out.

  Now he faced a terrible choice. It was not that he liked what he could do, but strong magic pulled him; he was going to have to jump somebody soon.

  The trouble was, he’d allowed himself to become too attached to his people over the last seventy-odd years. Once he’d got to know them it was hard to sacrifice a nice harmless person to provide him with a new body, even if it was for the greater good. He’d vacillated over Anuk occasionally. Now there was a man who was not exactly harmless, or particularly amicable, but Anuk had not looked after his body and it was almost as elderly as Drogba’s. Drogba was looking forward to something more robust; something that could travel a long distance. He had to weigh his options carefully before he made his choice, which was why he was up in the mountains, in this cave, carefully observing the villagers when providence provided a body.

  His eyes darted towards a furtive movement at the edge of the forest where a dark shadow glided towards him on silent feet. “Who is th–” he started to say, then stopped, his eyes widening. It was not quite the body he had in mind but he supposed he would get used to it; he always had. Clutching his robe around himself Drogba rose rather unsteadily to his feet, and stepped forwards, a dangerous chuckle escaping from his weak old throat that would have frozen the marrow in your bones if you had been close enough to hear. Ha! I haven’t quite lost my touch then, he thought, vaguely surprised. He hadn’t tried that in a long time. Then, before he could have second thoughts about the whole thing, he pounced.

  2

  A Wily Witch

  The old witch poked a finger in her ear and wiggled it up and down, then cocked her head to one side to listen properly. She hadn’t been aware of the cicadas singing till they stopped. The sudden silence in the forest raised the little grey hairs on the backs of her arms. She wasn’t afraid, exactly. Gogo Maya was never afraid of anything, and she wasn’t going to start now. Still, something felt oddly unsettling.

  Hunkering back on her haunches, she ran a sharp black eye over the ancient forest. She could have sworn she had glimpsed a movement out the corner of her eye, almost as if something was creeping up on her. Then she smiled and shook her head. It couldn’t be. Predators living in the forest had the sense to hunt in the rift valley below the escarpment, rather than eat anyone who had access to the magic in the water up here on the plateau. The more magic a creature ingested the more bitter they tasted, and if one magic creature ate another, the consequences could be most disturbing. Gogo Maya snorted. It would be pretty disturbing if anyone ate her; over the years she had ingested a lot of magic.

  It was unlikely that anyone would have ventured up from the valley either. The disgraceful Almohad saw to that by spreading spine-chilling rumours about dark happenings in the forest to keep the valley tribes away from the magic. If anyone was heroic enough to come looking for it, the Almohad promptly captured them, fulfilling some of those dark prophecies. She didn’t suppose the Almohad themselves would bother her. Everyone knew witches made terrible slaves, and they wouldn’t kill her because the Almohad had that silly superstition that witches could suck up their souls and take them with to the afterlife.

  She let her breath out softly, and bent down once more to dig, but spun around moments later to confront the sound of a soft plop. The branches on the one side of a giant red mango tree on the edge of the clearing snapped up, then gently settled into place again, leaving an enormous mango on the ground.

  In the uneasy silence that followed, she wondered if she should abandon her foraging and go back to her village, but she had come a long way, and if she hurried, she had just enough time to dig one last mbogo root out of the ground before the storm broke. Gripping her nose firmly between thumb and forefinger to block the pungent smell, Gogo Maya brushed a misshapen bloom aside and steeled herself to dig up a root from underneath. The roots were diabolically vile, but she needed them to enhance her magic. A cloud of mosquitoes took to the air, disturbed by the movement.

  “Drat!” she muttered, letting go of her nose to swat at them, then gasped as she was almost fumigated by the dirty-sock smell.

  Someone definitely sniggered.

  She whirled around to face him, shaking her trowel at him, but as fearsome as her grimace was, it did not frighten him into revealing himself. Sighing heavily, she stood up, hefted her root basket onto her hip, picked her way out of the mbogo patch, and strode down the trail with as much haughtiness as she could muster. She would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her look over her shoulder.

  After a few steps she turned suddenly, her hands on her hips, elbows poking out defiantly, and glared down the path. Still, she couldn’t see anyone. What she should have done in the first place, she supposed, was lie down under a nice safe bush and search for his mind pattern. A quick glance at the thunderheads rolling in above told her she was already too late, so she turned back and walked on.

  Gradually, a low hair-raising chant drifted towards her, turning into a war cry, and
she spun around to confront...

  Nothing.

  Only, this nothing had left a wide path of flattened undergrowth in its wake. Gogo Maya lobbed her digging trowel in its general direction, hiked up handfuls of her voluminous black skirt, and in a frightful din of jangly bangles and ankle bracelets, took flight down the path, her long grey dreadlocks streaming out behind her.

  With a grunt she heaved herself up onto the trunk of a huge tree that lay fallen across the track and sat straddling it, scrambling to untangle her skirt that had snagged amongst the branches. She thought momentarily of untying the garment and abandoning it, but the loss would be too great. Her life was in the pockets of that skirt.

  In the hope that her leopard familiar, Salih, was at least within hearing, she placed two shaky fingers into either side of her mouth, rolled her tongue back and blew, but her mouth was too dry to produce a whistle.

  “Salih!” she yelled as a last resort.

  A phosphorescent flash lit up the forest, followed almost immediately by a clap of thunder. Gogo Maya blinked and peered through the afterimage to see a scar of flattened grass snaking towards her. It came to rest before the fallen tree trunk and hesitated.

  Grabbing a handful of her skirt, she ripped it off the snags and scrambled down the far side of the tree trunk, painfully scraping her bottom. She landed with a grunt, ducked under a bough and continued her headlong charge into the forest. She flinched as a trail of little treasures scattered out of her torn pockets behind her. There was no use worrying about it now, she thought, as long as she hadn’t dropped her amulet. It would be an unmitigated disaster if that fell onto the wrong hands.

  Rummaging amongst the throwing bones, skinning knives and lucky charms in her pockets for the amulet as she ran, she tried to remember when last she had seen it. It had been so long since she’d used it. She doubled over to relieve the stitch in her side, just as large drops of rain began to patter down, and within seconds she could barely see an arm’s length in front of her face.

  “Ugh!” She tried to push her dreadlocks away from her face and wipe the water out of her eyes with her skirt, while looking around for a shelter. The undergrowth would have to do, she decided, and scrambled under a shrub, hugging her knees to her chest to make herself small. Screwing her eyes shut, she tried to empty her mind before reaching out to find the mental pattern of the beast, but for the longest moment she could only think about thinking about nothing.

  Now was not the time to panic, she told herself grimly, and taking a hold of herself, calmed her mind. Within moments Gogo Maya’s eyes flew open at the bewildering muddle of tiny, sharp thoughts, and then they were upon her.

  “Me first. Me first. Out my way!” lisped one.

  “Charge!” yelled another.

  “No biting, remember, we only got to catch her.”

  There were so many of them. They came hurtling through the air, landing all over her in a blur of sharp elbows and knees. Nothing like what she had imagined. Not a big beast at all. Silhouetted against the rain, she thought she caught glimpses of the knee-high, hairy Tokoloshe that lived in the forest. They certainly lisped like them. Only, when one of them revealed himself fully for a moment, he didn’t look entirely Tokoloshe. He was a translucent amber color. The long thick hair on his back bounced up and down as he moved, almost as if it was made of soft rubber.

  There was nothing soft about the one she managed to get a grip on. She hurled him into the undergrowth where he bounced up again and came running back to join in the attack.

  “I got her! I got her,” he shouted, even as she pulled her slippery wet arm out of his grip.

  “Get your elbows out of my face,” wailed another one.

  “Somebody bit me.”

  “Gerroff my hand.”

  A length of vine bounced up and down a foot above the ground, making its way towards Gogo Maya. She could almost make out the shapes of the shimmering wet little creatures carrying it.

  “What do you think you’re doing, chasing a nice old lady like this?” she spluttered, aiming a vicious kick along the length of the vine, hoping to strike down a few of them. It was like kicking a large warthog. Pain shot up her leg, reverberating through her body. One of them rammed a peeled mango into her mouth while it was open, stifling her shriek and nearly choking her. Before her hands could fly up to her mouth, some of the others got a firm grip on them, and tied them up behind her back with the vine. Gogo Maya struggled to sit up, fighting for breath as the heavy rain trickled up her nose. She coughed weakly, spluttered, and then glared at her attackers; her jaw, if it had not been jammed open, would have been set defiantly.

  “Okay, lady, you going to walk with us a bit, or we going to tie up your feet and drag you?” lisped the little leader. She could see him quite clearly now. He stood bristling before her, completely visible but translucent – a couple of shades darker than honey. He was surrounded by about fifty of his band in various stages of transition back to visibility.

  “Hi huk hy Heet!” Gogo Maya grumbled sarcastically around the mango pip.

  He drew himself up to his full eighteen inches and grinned in a nasty way, revealing long, sharp, pointy teeth. “Okay,” he nodded.

  “Nnng,” Gogo Maya fumed.

  He cocked his head to one side, and raised a bouncy, hairy eyebrow. “Drag then,” he said, turning on his heel and striding back into the jungle the way they had come.

  After a clumsy attempt at pulling her by her slippery, wet limbs, the gang swivelled her around, and grabbing handfuls of her hair, dragged her kicking and spluttering after him.

  ~~~

  Gogo Maya was usually prepared to put up with quite a lot of pain – provided it was not happening to her. Lying on her side, amongst the wet leaf mould on the jungle floor, in considerable pain, she pretended to be asleep. It was not that easy. Covered in bites and bruises, she felt as if she had been hauled backwards up a waterfall, and her hair felt as if it had been pulled out by the roots. It very nearly had. She had found her amulet at last; only, she was lying on it, so it dug painfully into her left buttock.

  The feather-light tickling sensation on her face turned out to be ants swarming over the mango pip still jammed in her mouth. Her jaw hurt. Gah! She thought. It was going to be almost impossible to incant a decent spell with a pip in her mouth. It took all her willpower to repress a spasm of revulsion, but it would not be wise to let her captors know she was awake till she knew what they intended to do with her.

  Keeping her body perfectly still, she reached out to touch the minds nearby. Her first impression was of a very high-pitched buzz. That would be the ants, she thought, not stopping to delve any deeper – she would not be able to understand them anyway.

  The second wave of thoughts she infiltrated came from the trees overhead and were just... well... nasty.

  They could be Tokoloshe, she thought. Apart from that rubbery disappearing nonsense and their excessive violence of the night before, their hyperactive behavior was in keeping with the little rapscallions, but she wondered why she could not smell them. Tokoloshe usually trailed a strong odor of catnip behind them. They rubbed it on their hairy bodies to lure cats in the hope of capturing them for ransom. She should know – she’d supplied them with the ghastly herb herself once or twice when it had been useful to be able to smell them coming. Still, it hardly seemed right that she should be subjected to the indignity of being captured by them. Surely they knew how dangerous she was, and who on earth did they think would pay a ransom for her?

  Deciding the game, whatever it was, had gone on long enough, Gogo Maya was about to lift her head to glower at them when she realised they had all frozen in terror.

  “Very good work,” murmured a cold, smooth voice in the clearing behind her.

  Gogo Maya resisted the urge to crane her neck to see who it was. Instead, she sent telepathic tendrils out in search of his mind, but there was absolutely nothing where his thoughts should have been. She was wondering, grumpily, what the poi
nt was in having a skill that didn’t work when she most needed it, when she realised it was working on the Tokoloshe. Sort of. A ripple of emotion passed through them. Not thoughts exactly, just a vague knowing, on the edges of her search for the mind of the voice, that he was gesturing towards something on the ground. Something he was subtly offering but they seemed afraid to take because even a Tokoloshe knows bait when he sees it.

  “Oh, don’t be a bunch of big babies,” the voice snapped. “I am not going to hurt you.”

  If he had to keep behind her instead of revealing himself, Gogo Maya fumed, would it be too much to hope that one of the Tokoloshe would have the sense to think about his face so that she could read who he was?

  But the Tokoloshe were totally focused on the thing on the ground, which looked, in their minds, something like a sticky glob of toffee. One or two of the little creatures crept tentatively out of the trees, followed by a few more, and a few more, until the forest exploded into activity as they boiled into the clearing and fell upon it.

  “Reward!” whooped one.

  “Oom noom noom noom,” murmured another.

  “Mine.”

  “No mine.”

  Gogo Maya noticed one or two of the little creatures held back, not entirely unaffected by the sinister undertones of that voice. Even she had almost felt a chill up her spine upon hearing the voice.

  “Foolish! Must fight urge,” one thought.

  Another kept clearing his throat behind her. “Dangerous!” he said eventually.

  While they were distracted, Gogo Maya tried to eject the mango pip by wiggling her tongue vigorously back and forth, but it was no use. Her eyes glinted, though, when her searching fingers fell on the icy cold surface of the small eerie opal of her amulet. Pausing only for a moment to absorb the magical shadowy darkness of it, she felt along the length of the leather thong to see if her precious amber was still attached to the other end. It was. It gave off a low vibration as she took the warm stone between her hands. The healing power of it crept slowly through her body and the numbness in her hands began to recede.