The City of Guardian Stones

by Jacob Sager Weinstein

  It didn’t. It kept coming.

  There was a burst of light and, moments later, a crash of thunder.

  “We’re in a storm,” I said.

  “An underground storm!” Little Ben said. “That’s amazing.”

  Every once in a while, when there was another flash of lightning, I would get a faint glimpse of carved stone walls. But with the rain pounding down on the window, I couldn’t really make out our surroundings, and the Mail Rail didn’t seem to have windscreen wipers.

  Since we weren’t seeing much, I took us back below the surface, where at least the waves weren’t quite as strong. After a few minutes, we came to a bend. I steered us around it, and as soon as we had turned the corner, the waters calmed. Shafts of coloured light broke through from above.

  “Let’s go and see where that light is coming from,” Little Ben said.

  I took us back up, and all three of us gasped.

  We were in a flooded cathedral, stained-glass windows glowing all around us. The windows at our level were angry, chaotic jumbles of colour, but as they rose up towards the vaulted ceiling, they arranged themselves, step by step, into orderly patterns.

  I knew where we were. “Every one of the secret rivers has its own sacred place. I was in the sacred place of the Tyburn with Lady Roslyn. This must be the one for the Fleet.”

  The waters were now perfectly calm, and the storm was nowhere in sight. I lowered the sub’s windows for a better view.

  Little Ben pointed to the high, vaulted ceiling of the cathedral. “There are statues up there, between the stained glass. Nine of them. Are those the same women?”

  I squinted towards them. “I think so. They’re so far away, I can’t be sure. And wait – now that I think about it, there were statues like that in the sacred place of the Tyburn, too. I don’t know if they were the same ones – I was too busy trying not to get smooshed by them to focus on the detail. What do you think, Mom? Do those statues look like you and your sisters? Mom?”

  Mom spoke, although it didn’t seem to be in response to me. “I’ve been here before,” she whispered. Her face was still screwed up in that strange way, and suddenly I recognized the expression. I had seen it often, on normal, non-Mom people. It was the face of somebody making an effort to remember something.

  “We were all here,” Mom said. “My mother and all my sisters. We were arguing. I think we were deciding whether to leave London.”

  “Are you sure, Mom? You would have been so young. Grandma never struck me as the kind of parent who lets her kids vote on something.”

  “It’s so hazy. Why can’t I remember? Why am I so useless?” Her expression changed to one of anguish – which was another thing I wasn’t used to seeing on her face.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “Mom, it’s OK —”

  Little Ben cleared his throat. “Um. I’m really sorry to interrupt. But…” He pointed up again, and this time the ceiling had disappeared. Blocking it was an angry black cloud.

  Lightning crackled from it, striking the water frighteningly close to us. A massive thunderclap assaulted our ears. As though a switch had been flipped, water poured out of the cloud.

  I touched the controls, and the window once again rose up, sealing us in just in time, as a heavy wave crashed into the Mail Rail, pushing us below the surface.

  “It’s probably time to get out of here,” I said. “Everyone, hang on to something. No, Mom, not my arm.”

  I plunged us deeper, rotating as I looked for exits. The door we had come in by had disappeared; where it had been, there was now only glowing stained glass.

  But at the far end of the cathedral were three stone archways, all well below the waterline. As we got closer, I could see that each one had a single word carved above it: Nu, Whan, and I.

  “Which one do we choose?” Little Ben asked.

  “Let’s take the one I recognize,” I said.

  We cruised through I and found ourselves in front of three more arches, each with its own word: put, met, and hear.

  “How about put?” Little Ben said. “It sounds more active.”

  “That’s as good a reason as any.”

  We passed through to three more arches and three more choices: my, America, and a.

  “So the sacred place of the Fleet is basically a giant underwater multiple-choice test?” I asked. “Let’s choose America. It reminds me of home.”

  I sailed us through that archway – and somehow, we found ourselves back in the vast cathedral.

  “We must have chosen wrong,” Little Ben said.

  “That’s OK,” I said. “We can keep doing it until we get it right.”

  “I’m not sure we have the time.” He pointed to a light that had suddenly begun flashing on the control panel: Oxygen reserves at 20%.

  “No problem,” I said as I steered us up towards the surface. But as we rose higher and higher, it became clear that there was, in fact, a problem.

  “Where did the surface go?” Mom asked.

  The sub scraped against the ceiling.

  “The whole cathedral has flooded,” I said.

  The dashboard began to beep at me, and the light flashed faster. Oxygen reserves at 15%.

  I looked at the glowing stained glass windows all around us. Up at this level, they were astonishingly beautiful, the coloured patterns as rhythmic as a song.

  I picked one and steered straight at it. It looked like I was going to find out if the sub could withstand a collision.

  The Mail Rail crashed into the stained glass window –

  – and bounced off. The glass was unbreakable.

  Beep! Beep! Beep!

  Oxygen reserves at 10%.

  I spun the Mail Rail around frantically, looking for another way out.

  There was none. We were trapped.

  CHAPTER 16

  The headlights came to rest on a huge carved head. This close, it was unmistakably one of the nine women from the painting. And while she wasn’t my aunt Callie, there was something about her that called Aunt Callie to mind. It was her expression – as the sub’s light played over it, lengthening or shortening shadows, the face seemed to shift between intense emotion and calm reflection. Both were states I had frequently seen Aunt Callie in.

  Mom seemed to feel it, too. She stared at the statue, eye to eye, although the statue’s eyes were half as tall as Mom’s whole body. “Callie…” Mom murmured. “I can almost remember… I met a traveller.”

  “A traveller? There was someone here besides you and your family?”

  “No,” Mom said, growing more definite as she spoke. “It’s what Callie said. It’s what convinced us all. I met a traveller from an antique land …”

  “… Who said, ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert.’ It’s a poem called ‘Ozymandias’, by Percy Bysshe Shelley,” I said. “Aunt Callie made me memorize it years ago. She convinced the whole family to move to a new continent with a poem?”

  “You know Aunt Callie, dear. She can be very persuasive when she wants to be.”

  “But why would —”

  The beeping became a full-on ringing. Oxygen reserves at 5%.

  “If you know the poem, you can get us out of here,” Little Ben said. “Don’t you see? The arches. You have to select the right words. And three of those words were the first three words of the poem. But we chose the wrong one and we ended back here.”

  Oxygen reserves at 4%.

  It made sense, in a way. A family song had got me into magical places before. Maybe a family poem would get me out.

  We dove back down, and through the I arch, and then met and a, and sure enough, instead of being dumped back into the cathedral, we ended up at three more arches: traveller, singing, and hat.

  Oxygen reserves at 3%.

  I chose traveller, and we were on our way, weaving from archway to archway. I recited the poem as we went – partly to help me remember it, and partly because, in my experience with magic, saying the right words
out loud could reshape reality. “… Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert.”

  As we went on, the arches looked more and more ancient and weathered. Were we just moving into an older part of the cathedral, or was the poem acting like a magic spell?

  As we passed through the final arches, I spoke the last lines of the poem: “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.” As I did, the very last arch crumbled, and we found ourselves cruising along a sandy bottom.

  OXYGEN RESERVES EMPTY.

  “You don’t need to tell me that. I’m already having trouble breathing,” I told the dashboard, and then immediately regretted wasting the air. Each breath was a tremendous effort. My vision was fading, too. I felt like I was in a narrow tunnel, with only a tiny dot of light ahead.

  Wait – that wasn’t my vision. The murky waters around us were actually coalescing into tunnel walls as we pressed forwards. The sand shaped itself into two rails. The tiny dot got bigger and bigger.

  Now no matter how hard I breathed, nothing useful was coming into my lungs. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stay conscious. I could see Mom and Little Ben struggling to keep their eyes open, and I wanted to say something encouraging, but I didn’t have enough air for words.

  The dot was now a circle. We glided through it into a station, and immediately all the water drained away.

  With my last bit of strength, I slammed my fist into the Transportation Mode Shift button.

  CHAPTER 17

  The glass slid down, and fresh air flooded in. Well, relatively fresh – we were in an underground station, after all – but it felt as sweet as a breeze in the park on a summer’s day.

  And nearly as welcome as the air was the giant pig waiting for us on the platform.

  “Oaroboarus!” I said as soon as my lungs were capable of producing an enthusiastic exclamation.

  He bowed his head courteously. He was dressed as I had seen him last, with nothing but a bathing suit and a box tied around his neck. As he always did when he had something to say, he stuck his snout into the box, fished around for the right cards, and pulled out a handful of them. Or, I guess I should say, a mouthful of them. He placed them gently in my hands, giving my fingers a friendly snuffle of greeting as he did so.

  In the past, there had been a few moments of intense emotion when it had seemed appropriate to hug him, but under the present calm circumstances, I decided a curtsy was the least awkward way of greeting him. He nodded, looking pleased with the formality.

  When Little Ben had filled him in on everything that had happened, Oaroboarus reached into his box of cards and pulled one out. Then he hesitated for a moment and put it back in. I had never seen him do that before. In fact, I had never seen him change his mind about anything.

  “If you can think of anything that might be helpful,” I told him, “now is not the time to censor yourself.”

  He sighed and nodded.

  “Is he evil?” Little Ben asked.

  I personally would not have considered unreliable worse than evil, but I understood why Oaroboarus did. The giant pig was the most mule-headed creature I had ever met, and I could see him appreciating a stubbornly consistent villain over an inconsistent hero.

  “Reliable or not,” I said, “we need all the help we can get.”

  “Can you help us get home first? I could use some clothes that haven’t had dirt exploded all over them.”

  Oaroboarus turned to Little Ben.

  “Shh!” Little Ben interrupted him. “I want it to be a surprise. Anyway, no, it was in my carpetbag.”

  I wondered what they were talking about, and I wondered even more about the dash that cut off Oaroboarus’s card in mid-message. When he selected it from his box, how did he know he was going to be interrupted? I had never been able to get him to explain how he always had exactly the right cards.

  “Sure,” I said. “It’ll be like old times.”

  CHAPTER 18

  I stuck my head up carefully through the manhole cover, startling a woman who was pushing a baby carriage along the pavement. “Sorry,” I said, but she didn’t seem eager to accept the apology of a scraggly, stinky, dirt-covered apparition. She ran off, the wheels of her baby carriage squeaking frantically.

  I had emerged across the street and down the block from the building where we lived, and as I took in the scene, I was glad we hadn’t come up closer to it. A muscular man sat on our front stoop. Another stood nearby, pretending rather unconvincingly to look at a map. Two others sat on a bench, reading newspapers without ever turning the pages. I could even see one looking out of our window, up on the second floor.

  If their bulky physiques hadn’t tipped me off, their rough orange complexions would have made it clear who they were.

  “Corkers,” I whispered, lowering my head partly into the manhole so that only my eyes poked about above ground. “If we try to go home, we’re going right back to jail. There’s only one thing to do.”

  Mom nodded resolutely. “Buy a new flat.”

  “What? No. We’re going to have to find out who really stole those stones. If we can’t prove we’re innocent, we’re going to be on the run for the rest of our lives.”

  “You could live in the sewer with us,” Little Ben said.

  “I appreciate that, but you’re wanted, too. Eventually, they’d catch all of us.”

  Dasra came down the front stoop of our building. The Corkers let him pass. Didn’t they know he was Lady Roslyn’s grandson? Well, I did. And our investigation was going to start with him.

  “The Corkers haven’t spotted me yet,” I said, “but even at this distance, if I pop out of the ground, they’re going to notice. We need a distraction.”

  Oaroboarus vanished down a twist of the sewer. A few moments later, the manhole cover nearest the Corkers shot upwards in a burst of sewage. They rushed over to investigate. Even the one at the window looked towards it.

  “Come on!” I said, clambering out. I reached down and helped Mom and Little Ben up. We ducked around the corner, out of sight of the Corkers, and hid behind a bench.

  Dasra rounded the corner. We waited for him to pass by and followed him all the way to Swiss Cottage Tube, where we got on the tube carriage behind him.

  “So why exactly are we following Dasra?” Little Ben asked as the train started.

  I couldn’t believe he even needed to ask that. “Because he’s Lady Roslyn’s spy. Why else would he live beneath us?”

  “Because he and his mom moved to London to be closer to his grandma, and she’s letting them stay in her flat? Remember how surprised he was to see you in jail. If he was spying on you, wouldn’t he already know you were there?”

  That was annoyingly rational, but I decided I didn’t believe it. “He never said he was surprised to see me. He just used a surprised tone of voice and let us draw our own conclusions. I bet he learned that trick from his grandmother.”

  Little Ben didn’t look convinced. “When you met him the first time, was he friendly and chatty? That’s how I’d be if I was trying to find out what you were up to.”

  “No,” I admitted. “But maybe he knew I’d find out who his grandmother was, and then I’d be suspicious, and being unfriendly would be the perfect cover!”

  Little Ben frowned, but the train slowed down, and he changed the subject. “How are we going to know when he gets off?”

  “You’ll have to peek out discreetly,” I told him. “He’s seen less of you. Fingers crossed he won’t spot you in the crowd.”

  I was pretty sure crossing fingers wasn’t a real magical activity, but just to be safe, I crossed them. Maybe it helped, because Little Ben managed to keep an eye out at every stop without getting caught, and when Dasra got out at Green Park, he didn’t notice us trailing behind.

  We kept a safe distance as he walked down the street and went into a grey stone building.

  The main part of the building was tall and impressiv
e, with high windows and bright red flags advertising the Royal Academy of Arts. The part that Dasra had entered was shorter and more modest; it looked added on as an afterthought. Instead of bright flags, there were simple brass letters next to the wooden door: SOCIETY OF GEOLOGICAL HISTORIANS.

  “It’s a building full of rock experts,” Little Ben said. “That is a little suspicious.”

  “Lady Roslyn said if she was the thief, her next act would be to eliminate anybody with enough knowledge to catch her.”

  “She also said she wasn’t the thief.”

  “She never said it wasn’t her grandson.”

  We looked at each other.

  Then we ran inside, as fast as we could.

  Then I ran back outside again and yelled, “Mom! Stop gawking at the building and come inside!”

  Then I ran back in again.

  CHAPTER 19

  As we burst in through the door, the receptionist looked up at us in surprise. Geological historians probably didn’t get many emergency visits. I tried to look as calm as I could. “Is there anybody here who studies the link between rocks and magic?”

  I was worried she’d think I was crazy, but she looked amused. “Is this for some kind of school assignment? There was a young man asking about the same thing.”

  “Oh, that’s Dasra,” Mom said. “He’s—”

  “We’re working on the same project,” I glasshoused.

  “Like I told him, you want the society historian. Up the steps, first door on the left.”

  Little Ben and I sprinted up the steps, past busts of eminent geologists and giant geological maps of England, our feet silent on the thick carpet. At the top, we pushed open the wooden doors and hurried through.

  We looked around wildly. The historian’s office was narrower than a normal room but twice as tall, and ringed with a double layer of bookshelves, like a library stacked on a library. Halfway up, a wooden balcony ran around the wall, giving access to the highest stacks.