Switch! (2 page)

“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 point 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.
 

Peeping through slit eyes, Gogo Maya watched the little creatures settle down on a small mound in front of where she lay. They chewed on globs of the glutinous substance, and it seemed, the more they chewed, the more transparent they became, until she was able to look right through some of their little faces. It was quite unnerving the way she could watch the toffee shift from cheek to cheek. She wondered what sort of powerful new magic was in the innocent looking treat. It was definitely not forest magic.

“Morathi,” drawled the stranger’s cool voice.

“Yeeees,” Morathi breathed nervously.
 

Gogo Maya knew that name. That bloody lunatic, Morathi, from Kapichi village. They
were
Tokoloshe, she realised, even if they did not look much like it at the moment. What sort of trouble had he got his clan into now?

“Morathi,” the voice said. “You will find out how much the witch knows, and you will find out if she can hear my thoughts. Then you will get rid of her.”
 

Gogo Maya’s eyes flew open in astonishment. What did he mean, “
get rid of her
”? Did he mean for them to kill her?
 

Bristling with indignation, Gogo Maya tried to sit up and protest, but she might as well have saved her breath. No one could understand a word of what she was saying around the mango pip, and the air of relief emanating from the Tokoloshe told her the owner of the voice had disappeared back into the forest.
 

Morathi rounded on his men. Some looked keen to carry out the voice’s orders but most shuffled about, looking embarrassed.

“You, you and you, drag the old crone over here, and you, go and fetch my bow,” he ordered.

“I don’t want to,” whined an almost visible Tokoloshe.

“Yeah, fetch your own bow,” another said, folding his arms across his bare chest and frowning.

“Look, you fools!” Morathi was now puffing himself up to his full height. “We made a deal. He gives us the
nzuri thana
and we do what he says.”
 

“You mean like slaves?” an invisible Tokoloshe said, from beside Gogo Maya’s ear.

“No, more like someone who has accepted something from someone, and now owes that someone something in return,” Morathi said to a spot somewhere to the left of where the invisible Tokoloshe stood.
 

The rest of the Tokoloshe whispered anxiously amongst themselves.

“Please,” a stumpy old Tokoloshe took the toffee out of his mouth and went to hand the sticky mess back to Morathi. “We thought we were just stealing it.”

“Um,” a small voice beside Gogo Maya said. “It seems altogether less risky if we just sort of... go home.” Already, quite a few of them were edging their way in the direction of the woods.

Well, that served him right, Gogo Maya snorted to herself in approval. Usually the Tokoloshe did not have the sense they were born with, but one or two at least were showing an instinct for self-preservation.
 

However sinister their
nzuri thana
supplier was, Gogo Maya had not survived in this jungle for over fifty years without a trick or two up her own sleeve. She tightened her fist around her amulet. If push came to shove, she could use the power of the opal to make herself disappear and reappear someplace else, and the Tokoloshe would be left holding some small forest creature. Although she shuddered to think of the terrible ramifications if that particular trick went wrong again. Last time... Oh she did not even want to think about last time.
 

A loud snarl reverberated around the clearing and Gogo Maya watched as her leopard, Salih, backed jerkily into the clearing. Invisible Tokoloshe were apparently dragging him by the tail. This was going to get interesting. Salih could kill a Tokoloshe with a swipe of his paw, and if he did not think that would do, he had a plethora of mind tricks he could apply if he wanted to.
 

“What are they?” Salih said between gritted teeth while unseen little fingers tied him up against Gogo Maya. “I channelled a mildly repellant flow through them, but it had no effect. I couldn’t quite get a fix on what they were. I didn’t want to harm anyone unnecessarily if it turned out to be a game, because I think they are related to the Tokoloshe.”
 

“They
are
Tokoloshe.” Gagged by the mango in her mouth, Gogo Maya projected the words directly into Salih’s mind. “Someone has given them something to enhance their powers, but as invincible as it’s made them, they are as stupid as ever.”
 

Salih snorted. “It
was
a bit stupid to tie us up together.”
 

Ooh,
thought Gogo Maya. If Salih was glad they were tied together, perhaps this was going to be one of those rare occasions when he was going to use his own magic. Better yet, if he was going to channel his magic through her, he would leave residues of his own powerful magic in her, vastly magnifying her own resources.

Salih gave her a stern look.

“No, then?” she said.

“You know I only do that as a last resort,” he said. “Do you have the opal?”

“But what about the last time we used the opal?” she tried, but Gogo Maya was not that surprised; Salih was notoriously stingy with his magic.
 

“Are you sure we want to take the risk?” It was not just that she had hoped to use Salih’s magic, but the opal was a bit hit and miss. If they did a switch using it, there was no telling where they might end up. Worse, they had no idea what or who might replace them.
 

“If we switch with another witch from the village,” she said, “there is that small matter of who we ‘borrowed’ the magic from in the first place to make the amulet. There will be some awkward explaining to do. Besides, that would put someone else in danger with these Tokoloshe.”
 

“I don’t want to hurt them.” The leopard sounded apologetic.
 

“The trouble with you, Salih, is that you are too much of a softy,” Gogo Maya projected at him. “True, there are certain to be casualties among the Tokoloshe if you use your magic, especially in their present condition, but it would serve them right. They
had
been planning to kill me.”

“It’s not really their fault,” Salih said. “You know how gullible they are. Also, we need them to have their wits about them so that we can sneak back afterwards and find out who’s been manipulating them.”

“Well, if you insist.” Gogo Maya shrugged.“Hold on tight then.” Keeping a firm grip on the opal of the amulet, she shut her eyes, and mentally and physically jumped into the abyss.

The heat did not let up in Harare, Zimbabwe, even with both bedroom windows open. Ethan Flynn pushed his hair out of his eyes and snapped his laptop shut with a sigh – the battery had run out. It was just about impossible to get anything done on it in this backwoods place because electricity supply was so erratic. The power was down now, and he’d heard it might be days before it was restored. He flung himself down the passage in the direction of the verandah where his dad and stepmother were having their evening cocktails. He supposed he would have to speak to them eventually; it might as well be now.

Sophie shot him a belligerent look from her deck chair as he came out onto the verandah. He guessed she couldn’t help herself. She was dressed in a pair of short shorts, and a halter-top without a bra. The bitter lines of her face were smoothed by pulling her wispy blond hair up tightly behind her head in a high ponytail. Daintily extracting a slice of lemon from her gin and tonic with long, blood-red fingernails, she popped it into her mouth, then grimaced; possibly from the sourness of the lemon, but more likely at the sight of Ethan. With deliberate effort, she adjusted her features into some semblance of a welcoming smile.

“Ah, here he is now,” she said. “Ethan, I was just telling your father that Uncle Alan is popping into town tomorrow to collect the kids from boarding school and has offered to take you on safari with him.”
 

“But I only just got here,” Ethan said, a bit taken aback. He poured himself a glass of orange squash from the drinks trolley. He hoped the water had been filtered properly. Sophie glared at him with that exaggeratedly expectant expression that she used to remind him of his manners.

“Oh, I forgot,” he added. “Sophie, please may I have a drink.”
 

Ethan glanced at his dad, who gave no indication whether or not he thought it was unreasonable for a fifteen-year-old to have to ask for a soft drink in what was technically his own home. Regarding Ethan placidly from behind steepled fingers, he said, “Something has come up. I have to fly to Malawi for a couple of weeks.”