The Talismans of Time (Academy of the Lost Labyrinth Book 1)

by Stephen H. Provost

  “The Guardian of the Forest,” Django answered, taking hold of the boy’s wrist and trying to pull him along on the path. “Likho is a trickster. He will deceive and misdirect you, especially if you hunt or even scorn the creatures of his forest. But if you enter there, you must hunt if you are to survive, for Likho has charged the trees and bushes there not to produce any fruit that can be eaten. There is no winning with Likho. You will become hopelessly lost in there if you go that way. He will make sure of it.

  Alex broke free of his grip. First the kobold, and now Django: Everyone seemed to think they could force him to go where they wanted him to go. He had his own ideas, and the more others tried to dissuade him from pursuing them, the more fiercely he tended to cling to them. He was already lost, and he had been told the compass could be trusted. To use it properly, he needed that map, and if the compass said the map lay in that direction...

  “I’m going,” he announced.

  He didn’t wait for Django to respond to him, but instead took off running in the direction the needle pointed.

  The tall young man had no choice but to run after him, following the boy’s flickering lantern light.

  “Wait!” he called, but almost before the word was out of his mouth, Alex had disappeared into the trees ahead of him. He was fitter and had longer legs, but by the time those legs had caught up to the boy, they were far enough into the forest that it was hard to tell which was the proper way out. Their lantern light flickered against trees that had already shed their autumn leaves, rising up with jagged, forking branches in a dense tangle that all but blocked out the dark night sky.

  The only clear sense of direction was provided by the compass, and it was still pointing, insistent, toward the same destination.

  The two stood side by side, both out of breath from the chase.

  “I told you, we can’t go that way!” Django said.

  “The compass says we have to,” the boy responded.

  Django sighed. “Very well. But if we starve to death in here, I’m going to strangle you.” He seemed extremely serious about this, despite the absurdity of strangling someone who was already dead.

  “If the river gets in our way, we can just follow it until we find another way across.”

  “Mama says that river is magical, and I told you, there’s no way to cross for miles! I might be able to make it that far, but you’ll get tired, and I’ll have to carry you. Then I’ll get tired and we’ll both just end up dying here, if Likho doesn’t find us first.”

  “Likho, Likho, Likho!” Alex mocked. “I’m not scared of your silly stories.”

  Django shook his head. “You’ll see,” he said, resigned. Then, more to himself in a whisper: “You’ll be sorry.”

  Nevertheless, they followed the compass forward, except where it pointed them directly at some obstacle like a large tree or a rock that they had to go around. They spoke little as they traveled, the normally talkative Django having settled into a glum resignation at having been overruled by a young boy. As skeptical as he’d been about this Likho character, Alex had to admit that Django had been right about one thing: Not much fruit grew here, and that which he saw was either barbed or shriveled or an unappetizing gray. In fact, almost everything was gray or black here in the woodland, and it wasn’t just the night that made it appear so. The Black Forest, Alamina had called it, and the name was certainly apt.

  Now and then, an owl hooted mournfully in the distance, or a squirrel scuttled across their path. Once, a buck appeared almost directly in front of them, antlers majestic and dark eyes flashing in their lantern light. It looked at them directly for a few seconds, then bounded away into the trees. Moss grew on those trees, and mushrooms sprang up from the forest floor. Beetles crawled up and down tree trunks, and earthworms burrowed their way into the ground beneath their feet.

  They occasionally heard a low, lumbering-grumbling sound, like someone or something very heavy traipsing through the woods, accompanied by something that seemed halfway like a groan and halfway like a growl.

  “Likho,” Django said simply whenever they heard it, and when it sounded closer, Alex could see him tense his muscles.

  Whatever it was, the sound was disconcerting. The boy thought it might be a bear, which was far more worrisome than some imaginary forest guardian. But then, they came upon some tracks that didn’t look at all like they’d been made by a bear. The footprints looked human, but were perhaps three times as large, with impressions around the edges that seemed to have been made by leaves.

  “Likho,” Django said again. And the next time the sound came, closer still, he ducked quickly behind a tree, pulling Alex along with him.

  A moment later, the sound stopped, and the two of them stepped tentatively out from behind the tree. Django looked this way and that, and the boy followed his eyes, but neither of them could see far in the dim lantern light. After a moment, when the strange sounds appeared to have gone silent, Alex glanced again at the compass, and they set out again in the direction the arrow was pointing.

  Before they had gone a dozen steps, though, an owl swooped down from some unseen branch, flying almost directly in front of them. Almost without thinking, the pair instinctively leaped to one side in tandem. But instead of landing on solid ground, they found themselves in an abrupt and unexpected descent, through a blanket of leaves that had masked a thin layer of loosely bound rope-netting.

  It tangled them up in it as they fell, slowing their journey downward and, eventually, catching them before they could hit anything hard in the darkness below. It was a good thing, too, because they had fallen for some distance. The netting had caught their lanterns, too—which had somehow, fortuitously, remained lit during their tumble—but their glow was not enough to illuminate whatever lay beneath them, save for a single rock outcropping just a few feet down.

  Before they could take any further account of their surroundings, they heard the sound of sawing, a jagged-toothed blade scraping back and forth against... the rope that was holding them up!

  A moment later, the rope gave way.

  “Ooof!” Django landed on the outcropping below them with a thud, the impact knocking the air from his lungs.

  “Ouch!” said Alex, landing beside them.

  Django leapt to his feet and grabbed his lantern, which was teetering at the edge of the outcropping, before he lost it over the precipice. Alex’s lantern was nowhere to be seen. A few pebbles fell toward them from above, bounced off the rock ledge, then disappeared into the chasm below. If they made a sound where they landed, it was too far down for the pair to hear it.

  Alex looked upward, but it was too dark outside to tell the difference between the blackness of the pit and the night beyond. And he knew they’d fallen too far to climb back out, even if they were sure they could find handholds. Someone might as well have sealed them in.

  “Nice work, magic compass,” Django spat. And he really did spit, off over the edge, in disgust. “I wish Mama had never given you that thing.”

  The compass needle, as if in answer, spun three times around and pointed directly at Django, accusingly.

  “You better watch what you say,” Alex said. “You said your mother would be watching us.” He had intended it as sarcasm, but Django seemed to take it so seriously he put his hand over his mouth and gazed upward apologetically. He actually appeared convinced his mother was watching them.

  His head snapped forward again, however, at the sound of something scuttling toward them. It wasn’t the sound of footsteps, exactly, but a shuffling and skittering in the darkness that grew gradually louder until the thing that had been making the sound appeared at the edge of the lantern light.

  The creature before them was very small: less than a foot long, Alex was sure. Almost half its size seemed contained in a pair of giant hands equipped with very long nails. It had a long nose, too, and the whiskers at the end of it twitched in keen interest as it sniffed the air. Its eyes were so small that the boy couldn’t even b
e sure it had any, hidden as they were behind the layer of soft brown fur that covered it.

  “A mole,” said Django, clearly unimpressed.

  The mole turned toward the sound of his voice.

  “Not just any mole,” it quipped. “Xander Molander the Third, at your service.”

  Moles talked too? The boy had spent his entire life thinking that only people knew how to speak. Well, there were a couple of exceptions. Parrots, for example. And he had heard that crows like Mr. Rrawk could mimic human speech, but not that they could actually form words based on original thought.

  “The third, eh?” said Django. “What happened to the first two?”

  Xander Molander the Third shrugged. “Not sure. We’re not a close family. But I can tell you one thing: They didn’t get caught in one of Likho’s traps. Haha!”

  Likho again. Who was this Likho?

  “It’s his fault,” Django objected, pointing at the boy. “He insisted on entering Likho’s realm. I told him it was a bad idea.”

  “It doesn’t look like he listened to you,” the mole said. “What did he do? Tie you up? Intimidate you? Threaten your mama if you didn’t go with him?”

  Django’s face contorted into the kind of expression someone makes when he snarls, although he didn’t make any sound. Alex was sure he was biting his tongue. He remembered the young man had said it wasn’t a good idea to scorn the creatures of Likho’s forest, and he guessed Django was trying his best to avoid doing just that.

  “Can you take us to this Likho?” the boy suggested.

  “Very good! Very good, my young friend,” the mole responded. “That is precisely what I am here to do.”

  ...

  Chapter Eleven

  Tree-Man

  Xander led Alex and Django through a twisting, turning series of passageways that seemed even more daunting than the corn maze itself. Django’s lantern provided precious light, but the mole didn’t seem to need it. He appeared to know exactly where he was going, and never once hesitated where the passageway split in two or more directions, always plunging ahead into the darkness without a second thought.

  The mole may have been small, but fortunately for the two human visitors, the passages were not. The ceilings were easily high enough for them both to stand at their full height, and all signs suggested that they’d been here for a very long time: The stone path beneath their feet wasn’t dusty, but had been worn smooth by time and perhaps hundreds of feet. The path seemed to be rising gradually as they moved forward, an impression confirmed by the appearance of tree roots pushing down through the ceiling.

  Then, however, it leveled off and opened out a few moments later into a large cavern. Water fell in drips and drops, splashing rhythmically into pools on the smooth rock floor. But Alex and Django barely noticed this, transfixed as they were by something else that was happening directly in front of them: The roots were moving, burrowing deeper into the cavern and pushing outward against the earth of the ceiling, causing bits of dirt and rock to cascade down like solid rain. Alex dropped to one knee instinctively, bending forward and putting his arms up over his head. For a moment, it seemed the entire ceiling might collapse. But then, he realized that the roots were creating a hole in the ceiling, which turned out to be the opening to a tunnel from overhead.

  Through that tunnel could be heard the same lumbering-grumbling sound Alex remembered from the forest above.

  It was getting louder.

  “Likho,” Django breathed.

  “Yeah, I know,” Alex wanted to say. He wished Django would stop saying that, in part because it was annoying, but even more so because the way he said it was spooky, as though he was trying to creep him out. Whatever his purpose, it was getting old—but Alex was too young to be sarcastic about it. Whatever was making that sound was scary, regardless of what Django might choose to call it. He was far more worried about what it looked like and, more to the point, what it might do. He didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  The rumbling grew louder still, and a moment later, more earth fell from the opening in the ceiling. Then, something emerged. It was large and bulky, and it looked like a giant man, but also like a tree. His mouth was almost entirely obscured behind a long, scraggly beard, which tumbled down across his chin and down his chest, the strands appearing more like thin and twisted roots than human hair. So thick was it, that it was difficult to see whether he wore anything underneath it. His eyebrows looked like cones from a pine tree that had yet to open, and his head was crowned by what looked like branches in the form of antlers, surmounting a forehead and glazed gray eyes.

  Those eyes stared at the two young humans, without moving. They didn’t appear to be looking for anything, so much as they seemed to be staring at something they knew was already there. What that something was, the mouth beneath that scraggly beard wasn’t saying. At least not yet.

  Alex looked sidelong at Django, who had dropped to one knee and bowed his head before the strange figure, which stood perhaps four times the height of a man, its head touching the ceiling of the voluminous cavern. Django reached up with one hand, placed it on Alex’s shoulder, and pulled him forcefully down until he, too, was kneeling.

  Alex brushed the hand aside, stood and dusted the dirt off his knees. He had faced the Grim Reaper, he reminded himself, and this figure, no matter how imposing, couldn’t be as fearsome as all that.

  Xander was shaking his mole-head vigorously back and forth. The boy ignored him.

  “My name is Alexander, sir,” he said, noticing that his voice shaking more than he wanted to allow. “What do you want us for?”

  There was a rumbling low in the stomach of the creature—do trees have stomachs? Alex asked himself—and the boy noticed for the first time that the noise sounded faintly like the name Django had been uttering: “Lurheeeko.” The middle syllable sounded like wind being pushed out of a bellows. Then it repeated what the boy himself had said: “What do you want us for?”

  “I don’t want you,” the boy said plainly. “I just want to get home.”

  “I see,” Likho said, then fell silent.

  “We humbly seek passage through your lands,” said Django, still kneeling. “We have harmed nothing living here. You have our word.”

  “Of course, you have not,” Likho replied. “You know the consequence for doing so. But tell me: What is your destination?”

  Alex reached into his pack and produced the Compass of the Seventh Kingdom. “We are following the needle.”

  Impossibly fast, a gnarled tree-hand flashed forward and snatched at the compass. Before the boy’s young reflexes could close his fingers around the object, it was no longer in his hand.

  Likho lifted it up to examine it closely.

  “Ah, yes. I know of this artifact,” he said. “The Compass of the Seventh Kingdom. Are you aware that artificial mechanisms are forbidden in my realm?”

  The boy heard Django inhale nervously.

  “I will be keeping this,” said Likho, his voice flat. “And you will leave my realm immediately.”

  “But we can’t find our way out!” Alex protested, his voice rising. “I need that!”

  “That is not my problem,” Likho answered. Then, almost as an afterthought: “The compass will do you no good, in any case, without the map.”

  “Yes!” Alex blurted out. “The Map of Gildersleeve. That’s what we’re looking for!”

  The glazed look on Likho’s face lifted for a moment, and the light of mischief danced briefly in his eyes, then was gone. “I have it,” he said almost offhandedly, then reached into his beard and pulled it out! “And I might have given it to you if you hadn’t broken the rules and brought that mechanical instrument into my realm.”

  Alex shook his head. Without the compass, the map would do him no good. And without the map, the compass would only get him so far. The compass had directed him this way. If he’d had the map before, maybe it would have shown him a way around Likho’s realm, but that was impossible if
Likho himself had the map!

  This was hopeless.

  Django stood up and addressed the tree-man: “If I may...”

  “Silence!” Likho thundered in a loud and echoing rumble. “I was not speaking to you.”

  Django fell back to one knee and bowed his head again. Alex took two steps backward. The mole, he noticed, was nowhere to be seen.

  Likho lowered his voice, bending down over Alex so that his root-beard brushed against boy’s face.

  It tickled.

  “What if I told you that there was, in another place and time, a girl who is hopelessly lost, just as you are?”

  Alex blinked and raised his eyebrows.

  “Now,” the tree-man continued, “what if I told you that she needed the map and compass just as you do, and that she could never find her way home without it?”

  Alex’s eyes widened.

  “Who...?”

  “That is not important,” Likho said flatly.

  Django raised his head, although he did not stand this time, and spoke again: “If this girl is in another place and time, as you say, how do you know of her if you never venture forth from your realm?”

  Alex expected the tree-man to respond with another thunderous objection, but instead, he turned to face the young Romani, that mischievous twinkle dancing in his eyes once again—if only ever so briefly. “I said, ‘what if,’” he pointed out. “Nevertheless, it is a good question, so I will indulge it. You must remember that I am part tree, and trees are very long-lived, so if that ‘different time’ were a century behind us, I would have witnessed it already. As to how I might see these such things without leaving my own realm, I will pose a question of my own: How can your own mother see you here, though she has never left your caravan?”

  “A crystal ball?” Django breathed. He seemed surprised, but also, strangely, worried.

  “Nothing so mundane,” Likho rumbled. It sounded vaguely like a laugh. “There are many ways of seeing, most of which you know nothing of. I merely cited your mother’s way as an example. Suffice to say that time and space are not so constant as you humans seem to think, and that on this, All Hallows’ Eve, the veil between the worlds of past and present, here and there, is uncommonly thin. It is a simple matter to see across miles and across decades, if you know how.