The City of Guardian Stones

by Jacob Sager Weinstein

  I had to admit: that was a problem.

  On the other hand, dozens of Saltpetre Men were shambling down the corridor towards our cells. That was a problem, too.

  Maybe I could solve both problems at once.

  “Rip the note off your wall and get over here!” I yelled.

  Mom looked like she was about to argue. Then she saw my expression. She grabbed the note and crawled into my cell.

  As she did so, the note began to fizz and shake, but it didn’t explode. “It’s not a full escape until we jump in the hole!” Little Ben shouted, and I nodded.

  “Give me the note, and don’t jump until I count to three,” I told them.

  Mom handed me the angrily vibrating note. As I crumpled it into a ball, I looked up. The ceiling had been badly damaged by the explosion; it was sagging, and it looked like it wouldn’t take much to make it collapse.

  Perfect.

  “One … two … THREE!”

  As I called the last number and leapt into the air, I threw the wadded-up paper into the air, too, so that it hit the ceiling as Mom fell into the hole.

  We dropped into blackness.

  The note exploded.

  The ceiling collapsed, sending a thousand pounds of dirt and plaster chasing after us.

  CHAPTER 11

  We bounced and rolled and slid down the steep sides of the newly blasted hole, the avalanche I had set in motion roaring behind us. It was pitch black at first, but as we tumbled through a twisty bit, a pinprick of light appeared in front of us, and moments later we crashed through into a Tube platform. Or maybe a Tube platform that had shrunk in the dryer: everything was smaller, from the narrow tracks, to the toylike train that sat on them, to the low ceiling from which a massive roar was thundering.

  Wait, massive roar? “ROLL!” I yelled, and we spun out of the way as dirt and rocks and timber came crashing down after us. Within seconds, the largest pieces of debris had blocked the hole we had come through, leaving only a thick trickle of dirt tumbling down.

  I didn’t fool myself that a hole full of dirt would stop the Saltpetre Men, any more than a pool full of water would stop a penguin. But I did hope that the chaos and confusion of the explosion would buy us a few extra minutes.

  Little Ben, meanwhile, was gazing in awe at the train. “The Mail Rail,” he whispered. “Even in the 1920s, traffic on the roads was slow, so they built this to move the mail more quickly. They shut it down in 2003 because of budget cuts. At least, that’s what the newspapers in my dad’s files all said. But I wondered: if it was an ordinary transport network, why did my dad have so much information on it? What was it really for? And what went wrong that they’ve left it sealed for more than a decade?”

  “Let’s find out,” I said.

  On the ceiling above us, the dirt was beginning to seethe and bubble, and that meant one thing: the Saltpetre Men were on their way. We squeezed quickly into the narrow train, facing the dusty, rusted control panel.

  “Can you operate a train?” I asked Little Ben.

  “I have no idea!” he said. He reached out and began flipping switches and pushing buttons. The train rumbled for a moment, as if the engine was starting. There was a series of pops as the engine died. An acrid smell filled the air. “I guess not,” Little Ben said.

  “My turn,” I said. I was never as good with complicated machines as Aunt Polly was, but she had let me help her restore a 1927 Duesenberg race car once. Now that I thought about it, she had seemed awfully insistent that I understand how it worked – and the dashboard of the train looked a lot like the one on the car. There were a few weird bits (What the heck was a bilge counter? And why would a train have a steering wheel?). But for the most part, I knew what I was dealing with. “I bet this is the clutch. And that’s the ignition…”

  “No esscapess,” hissed a voice from above as a Saltpetre Man poked his head out of the bubbling ceiling.

  “No esscapess,” chorused a dozen other guards, emerging at the same time.

  I started the engine, and the train puttered off, a dozen guards lurching after us.

  CHAPTER 12

  In movies, whenever anybody has to make a getaway by rail, they pretty much win the moment the train starts up, and the only thing their pursuer can do is run along the platform for a few seconds and then stop, panting and shaking their fist. So that’s sort of what I thought would happen once we took off.

  But in the movies, the train is never a miniature one meant to transport letters slightly faster than a horse stuck in traffic. And the pursuers always have lungs. As we chugged along at roughly the same speed as the shambling dirt monsters behind us, I remembered that Saltpetre Men never run out of breath. They could keep going as long as the train could.

  The walls of the tunnel started off looking a lot like the ones on the London Underground – concrete and metal, with wires leading up to glowing work lights. But as we rounded a corner, they changed abruptly to smooth plaster, yellowed like the walls of an ancient Roman villa in a book Mom had shown me once.

  Little Ben noticed the same thing. “This doesn’t feel like something built in the 1920s.”

  “Maybe they built the Mail Rail to intersect with tunnels that were already under the city. But where does it lead?”

  “No esscapess,” chanted the Saltpetre Men.

  Painted on the wall up ahead of us was a fresco, the bright colours standing out against the yellowed background. A green garland with orange flowers surrounded nine women, a single star shining above them. The women wore dresses of different styles and colours, and the closer we got to them, the more familiar the women and their clothes looked.

  Especially the woman in a white dress with long, fancy ruffles.

  “Mom,” I said, barely able to speak through my shock. “Why is there a painting of you in your wedding dress on the wall?”

  “That’s a very good question, sweetie,” Mom said. “Honestly, I don’t remember much about my wedding. Maybe we hired a painter instead of a photographer?”

  As we reached the painting, I stopped the train. The Saltpetre Men weren’t more than two minutes behind us – but I might as well use those two minutes to figure out how my family fit into the mysteries of London.

  “No esscapess,” hissed the Saltpetre Men.

  “Um…” Little Ben said, pointing at them.

  “Yes. Figure out how to deal with them,” I told him, then turned to Mom. “I know you and Dad had a photographer, because I’ve looked at the photo album. And that’s your dress. And the other women – those are the same dresses your sisters were wearing. Aren’t they?”

  Now that we were right next to the painting, I wasn’t quite as confident that it showed my family. The clothes matched, but the faces and hair colours weren’t exactly right. In any case, the figures were a little too abstract and cartoony to match to any specific person with certainty.

  And yet … there was something about the essence of each figure that reminded me of one of my aunts. Aunt Mel’s determined expression, Aunt Uta’s elegant poise, Aunt Rainey’s arched eyebrow – they all looked out at me from faces that were almost but not quite the faces I had grown up looking into.

  Mom seemed to connect with them much less ambiguously. “Look at that,” she said, sighing. “Polly’s hair is so pretty when she grows it out. She hasn’t done it that way for years, though.”

  “But that doesn’t look like Polly’s nose.”

  “Yes, Polly hasn’t worn her nose like that for ages, either.”

  Before I could figure out whether that was a significant clue to my family’s past or just Mom being Mom, Little Ben interrupted. “I know how to escape the Saltpetre Men.” He pointed, and for the first time I realized there was a crack in the wall running around the edge of the painting. Little drops of water dribbled out of it.

  “The Mount Pleasant Mail Facility is built on top of the river Fleet, remember?” Little Ben said. “I bet that’s it on the other side. But how do we get there?” />
  “No esscapess,” said the Saltpetre Men. I would have liked to stand there and examine the painting, but they had almost caught up with us.

  I remembered how I had got through a solid-looking object before, when I was with Lady Roslyn. I took my mother’s hand. “Sing with me,” I said. As soon as I started, she joined in:

  Ann browsed bridger luna doona,

  Eggs feather thorn, a la kenner.

  “No esscapess,” chorused the Saltpetre Men. “No esscapess.” They were about ten seconds away.

  I thought I saw the crack beginning to glow. Was it just my imagination? No: it grew brighter and brighter. It was unmistakable now.

  The Saltpetre Men reached the back of the train and climbed on board.

  The glow was almost blinding now, and it seemed to be coming from the women in the painting as well. Was the painting changing? Did one of the women wink at me?

  A Saltpetre Man reached out a hand to grab my shoulder –

  – and the wall swung open.

  Water gushed out, engulfing us all.

  CHAPTER 13

  Little Ben and I grabbed the sides of the train, and Mom was already holding my hand, so we managed to stay inside the carriage as the torrent rushed past. The Saltpetre Men were swept away, still gargling “No esscapess.”

  We were safe – except that the water was still coming. The tunnel began to fill up.

  “Should we swim for it?” Little Ben asked.

  I shook my head. “The current is too strong.”

  “But if we stay here, we’ll drown.” He was right. Already, the waters were halfway up the walls, flowing into the train and sloshing over our feet.

  We couldn’t leave the train, and we couldn’t stay where we were. The only solution was to move the train. But with the next station nowhere in sight, it seemed likely the water would be over our heads before we ever got there.

  What we needed was a boat. And then it hit me.

  “Bilge counter!” I yelled.

  “Suffering scalawags!” Little Ben yelled back. “Are we using pirate curses? Ooh, are we summoning pirate ghosts?”

  “No, that dial on the dashboard – it says ‘bilge counter’. I think a bilge engine is something you find on a boat.”

  When I had started the engines, I had ignored the dials and levers I didn’t recognize, but now I scrutinized them. One in particular seemed significant: a big button labelled TRANSPORTATION MODE SHIFT.

  I pushed it.

  The train car vibrated and rumbled.

  The bilge-counter dial spun.

  The water that had flooded the train drained out from around our feet.

  And from either side of the train, windows rose up, curving to meet above our heads, forming an airtight seal. And just in time, too: the waters had risen up above us, and we were now fully submerged.

  The train floated up from the tracks, and it wasn’t a train any more. It was a submarine.

  I put my hands on the steering wheel, whose existence finally made sense. The only question was, which way should I go? Ahead of us, illuminated by the still-glowing work lights, the tunnel curved off into the distance. If we took it, we’d be guaranteed to reach the next station, and from there we could make our way back to the surface.

  To the left, the open door led into blackness. No guarantees lay in that direction – but maybe, just maybe, there might be answers about my family.

  I steered the Mail Rail sub left, into darkness.

  CHAPTER 14

  I turned on the sub’s headlights. Slender rectangular fish wriggled through the cone of light, gazing at us with square eyes.

  I pointed at them. “Their eyes… Are those…”

  “Ooooh, yes!” Little Ben exclaimed. “They are! Those are postage stamps!”

  One of the braver fish swam right up to our windscreen, giving me a closer look at the markings on his side. They looked like a few lines of ink that had smudged in water. “And that’s an address. Those fish used to be letters.”

  A big red bag – the kind a postman would carry –swam past us, undulating like a jellyfish.

  “I’m pretty sure we’re in one of the magical rivers right now,” I said.

  Little Ben nodded. “The Fleet. The most unpredictable of them all. Oooh, I think I figured something out! Can we go down?”

  I tilted the steering wheel forwards, and the boat angled down towards the ground. Except we could soon see that it wasn’t the ground. Instead of silt, it was a peeling linoleum floor.

  “I thought so!” Little Ben said. “This must have been a sorting office at one point. But the Fleet has always been wild and surging. It must have broken out and flooded the— Look out!”

  Ahead of us loomed a squat sea monster with a hundred square mouths snapping. Long arms that looked like hundreds of rubber bands melted together grabbed at us. I wrenched the wheel, and we swerved away from it.

  It lurched after us.

  I swerved in the other direction, and it lurched again, its rubber-band arms waving and its many mouths snapping right behind us.

  It was faster than I’d have expected – but it looked heavy. I pulled up on the steering wheel. The monster tried to jump after us but fell down to the floor with a thud that we could feel through the water.

  “What was that?” Mom asked.

  “I think it used to be a postal sorting machine,” Little Ben said.

  A wall came into view ahead of us, crusted with barnacles that had once been rubber stamps. “If this used to be an office,” I said, “there ought to be a doorway somewhere on the floor level.” I tilted down, and the headlights picked out not just one door but two.

  The first was an ordinary door that you might find in any building, except that this one was hanging loose on broken hinges, swinging back and forth in the current. Beyond it, I could see what looked like a staircase leading upwards.

  Next to it was a wide iron door, with a dozen locks and a heavy chain stretched across it. Rust had encroached on the sign bolted to it, but its large letters were still legible:

  DANGER. ACCESS STRICTLY LIMITED TO

  PERSONNEL WITH TOP SECRET CLEARANCE

  AND ADVANCED DEGREES IN LITERATURE.

  Little Ben grinned. “I know which door I want to go in.”

  “We can’t go in that door,” Mom said. “I forgot my keys.”

  “We don’t need keys,” I said. “See how rusty the hinges are?”

  “Oooh, are we going to smash into it?” Little Ben asked.

  “Not us,” I said. “I don’t know if the sub could withstand the impact. But I think I know someone who can.”

  I turned the sub around and brought us back down to ground level. The sorting machine leapt out of the gloom, and Mom shrieked.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, yanking back on the wheel. “Now that we’ve got its attention, I’m going to get out of its reach and —”

  Rubber-band arms shot out, and this time they slammed against the glass, gripping it with little suckers.

  “Oops,” I said. “Its reach is a little longer than I thought.”

  The sub strained against the sorting machine’s weight, stretching out the monster’s arms as more and more of them slammed against the glass. “Fine,” I said. “We can’t go up. There are other directions.”

  I swung back down and headed straight for the iron door. As we got closer, the monster’s arms stretched even further. By the time we were nearly at the door, they were shaking with the tension, making the sub shake, too.

  The sub slowed and then stopped. We had reached a stalemate.

  I kept the throttle on full.

  We didn’t move.

  The sorting machine didn’t move.

  And then it did. It leapt towards us –

  – but now that it wasn’t gripping the floor, the tension in its arms jerked it towards us like a giant slingshot.

  I yanked the throttle, pointing us up, and we moved just enough to pass over the sorting machine as it
slammed into the iron door, knocking it off its hinges.

  The only thing is, I had forgotten about Newton’s third law: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And so as we were pulling the sorting machine in one direction, it was pulling us in the other. Which meant that while the engine was moving us a little bit upwards, the rubber arms were yanking us a lot backwards.

  The sub shot off, throwing us against the front window (Newton’s law again!).

  The rubber arms snapped, leaving us free to move – but also free to spin in circles.

  Finally, the sub came to a stop. Dizzy, I grabbed the nearest thing to steady myself. Fortunately, this happened to be the steering wheel.

  I guided us forwards. As we passed over its head, the sorting machine roared and snapped its teeth, but its newly shortened arms couldn’t reach us. I dodged it easily and drove the sub through the broken door.

  “I don’t suppose either of you has an advanced degree in literature, do you?”

  “I’m pretty sure I’m too young to have one,” Little Ben said.

  “If I do, I don’t remember it,” Mom said.

  “I guess we’ll have to make do with whatever education we’ve got.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The moment we passed through the door, the water outside began sloshing furiously back and forth. Combine that with the spinning we had already gone through, and I was glad my stomach was mostly empty. Little Ben looked OK, but Mom had an expression on her face I had never seen before – her eyes shut tight and her face compressed with concentration.

  Mom’s signing the contract to get gruel had already resulted in one explosion. I hoped eating the gruel wasn’t going to result in another one.

  The Mail Rail’s headlights now showed nothing but bubbles bouncing in the turbulence. Unlike us, the letter fish must have known not to enter these dangerous waters.

  “Let’s see where we are,” I said. We broke the surface, and I waited for the water to finish running off the windows.