The City of Guardian Stones

by Jacob Sager Weinstein

  And the house of worship in which stand-on-the-righters met was the London Underground. If you weren’t in a rush, you stood on the right-hand side of the escalator. That way, the left-hand side stayed free for anybody who had to get to a job interview, or meet a date, or beat a tattooed girl with a suitcase full of stolen magical stones to the ground floor.

  And if you’re feeling impatient because you want to know if we did beat the lift, and all these words of explanation are getting in your way – well, then, you know exactly how Little Ben and I felt when we got to the escalator and found a group of tourists standing on the right and left. Heretics!

  “Excuse me,” I said to the nearest sinner. She nodded and smiled at me, but she didn’t move. If we had been on level ground, I would have just shoved my way through, but I couldn’t risk sending someone toppling down the escalator. I turned to Little Ben. “Try every language you know,” I told him. “Get them to move.”

  He cleared his throat. “Excusez-moi? Enschuldigung? An-cay ee-way et-gay ast-pay? Con permiso? Me excusa? ? ? . Um, I think that’s it. Wait, was one of those Chinese? !”

  None of the languages worked, but by now, we were at the bottom of the escalator, and as the tourists piled off, we ran past them into a long white tunnel with yellow arches leading off on both sides.

  “You go left, I’ll go right,” I said.

  The platform through the right-hand arch was mobbed. If Minnie was there, I couldn’t see her through all the people.

  I could see a bench, though. I stood on it, giving me a view over everybody’s heads – and there she was, all the way at the other end, about to board a train.

  There was no way I was going to make it over to her before the doors closed, so I clambered off the bench and dashed into the nearest carriage.

  The doors closed, and we took off. As we rattled through the tunnel, I came up with a plan. At the next stop, I’d get off and push my way along the platform as far forwards as I could. If possible, I’d make it to her carriage. If not, I’d hop back on before the train left.

  So when the train stopped, I got off as soon as the door opened. This station was much less crowded, which would have meant I could get all the way up to Minnie’s carriage – if Minnie hadn’t got off herself. As she stepped off, she glanced around and spotted me, and I noticed she wasn’t holding the suitcase. Had she forgotten it, or had she handed it off to somebody else?

  I didn’t have long to contemplate the question, because she took off at a sprint. I ran after her, and as I did, I remembered another rule that’s almost as sacred as “Stand on the right”: no running on Underground platforms. I’ll be careful, I thought. I won’t run into anybody.

  I ran into somebody.

  Fortunately, instead of toppling into the gap between the train and the platform, he grabbed hold of something. Specifically, he grabbed hold of my arm, and just to be safe, I grabbed his.

  “Sorry!” I said.

  “Watch out —” he said, and then stared at me in amazement.

  I stared back at him.

  It was Dasra.

  CHAPTER 30

  “You,” we said simultaneously. Then we both said, “Let go of me.”

  I glanced down the platform. Minnie had already vanished. Without her heavy suitcase, she was probably already out of my reach. Better to hang on to the one bad guy I knew I had.

  “I’ll let go of you when you tell me what you’re doing here,” I said.

  “I don’t owe you anything, least of all an explanation.”

  “I don’t need one. I know why you’re here: you stopped me from following Minnie.”

  He arched an eyebrow at me. “If you don’t need an explanation, then why don’t you let me go? And by the way, you stopped me from following that girl.”

  “Carefully phrased,” I said. “Were you following her to catch her … or to help her?”

  He glared at me angrily. “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”

  “Then you aren’t as good at going around the glasshouse as your grandma.”

  “Don’t talk about my grandmother,” he snarled, and with a sudden burst of strength, he yanked himself out of my grasp.

  He hurried down the platform, and I hurried after him – although, I noticed, both of us were being careful not to run. We had learned our lesson.

  “Give me one good reason not to call the police on you,” I said.

  “Be my guest, Miss Fugitive-from-a-high-security- magical-prison.”

  “That’s so – you’re so – RRRR!” I said. Apparently the ability to reduce me to speechlessness was a family trait.

  “Now leave me alone,” he said, “or I’m going to call the police on you.”

  I stopped and let him vanish into the crowd. What else could I do?

  I was accused of enchanted theft larceny. My mom and I had a bouncy but persistent magical army after us. I knew we were innocent, and I was pretty sure I knew who was guilty – but I had no way of proving it. And until I could, I was going to be a fugitive.

  CHAPTER 31

  “Maybe the reason you can’t prove Dasra is her accomplice is, it’s not true,” Little Ben said.

  I stared at him in disbelief. We were seated next to my mom, in front of Mr Champney’s desk of stacked stones, and we had just finished telling the historian everything that had happened.

  “You think it’s a coincidence that Lady Roslyn’s grandson keeps popping up?” I asked.

  “No, but there are lots of other explanations. Maybe he’s trying to stop her, too.”

  “If he’s not on her side, how does he always know where she’s going to be?”

  “How did we know where she was going to be? We looked at the evidence and made a deduction.”

  “Except for the time when we followed Dasra right to her.”

  “Ahem.” Mr Champney cleared his throat. “Your friend is right, Hyacinth. You don’t have enough evidence to know what the young man is up to. But you have more than enough evidence to know that you have thrust yourself into a dangerous situation. Whether this young woman is wielding magic fingers or a laser beam, she has something sharp enough to cut stone. And the government takes the threat seriously enough to send military forces after her.” He focused his watery eyes on Mom. “Madam, when we spoke before, you refused to stop your daughter from embarking on this madness. Have you seen enough to change your mind?”

  “I’ve seen my daughter face far worse,” Mom said. “Um, I have, haven’t I, honey?”

  “You sure have,” I told her.

  Mr Champney picked up a framed photograph from his desk and looked at it thoughtfully. “This is not a happy photo, but I keep it on my desk as a reminder. When you study history, it can seem bloodless. But it’s made up of the joys and tragedies of real people.” He turned it around to show it to us: a hospital bed with a child, an oxygen mask on her face. “I once had a wife and a child. There was a fire. My wife and daughter…” He stopped, his face contorted, as if he was trying to hold back tears. “They both survived … initially. But they had inhaled so much smoke…”

  He couldn’t go on. He lowered his head, tears finally streaming down his face. We all sat there in silence. Finally, he looked up at us with sudden intensity. “Mrs Herkanopoulos, if you had been through what I have been through, you would not take this so lightly.”

  “I am so, so sorry for your loss,” Mom said. She put her hand on top of his. “If I could keep my daughter home safe with me for all eternity, I would. But I can’t. There are secrets in my family that I don’t understand, but I do know they almost killed her once. I would do anything to keep my daughter safe. Anything. In this case, that means letting her go out in the world and find out what those secrets are.”

  Mr Champney sighed. “If you feel you must do this for your daughter’s sake, then I cannot dissuade you. I, too, would do anything —” For a moment, his voice choked with tears again. Then he corrected himself. “Would have done anything for my fami
ly. Well. I have given you my warning. You must make your own choices and face your own consequences. All I can do is keep these children as far away from trouble as I am able. So, because you have been focused on the presence of this young man Dasra, you have failed to notice someone else who showed up repeatedly.”

  It was Little Ben who figured it out first. “Ooooh, Brigadier Beale!”

  “Hold on,” I said. “If you don’t think Dasra is suspicious, you definitely can’t think Brigadier Beale is. It’s his job to chase Minnie Tickle. It would be suspicious if he didn’t turn up.”

  “Precisely,” Mr Champney said. “The moments he wasn’t there are the ones that seem most suspicious.”

  Little Ben nodded eagerly. “We never saw him at the same time as the Precious Man,” he said. “I mean, assuming it was the Precious Man driving the van.”

  I didn’t buy it. “But why would he side with Minnie?”

  “Remember what Inspector Sands said?” Little Ben asked. “Brigadier Beale was given ‘full authority to quash magical disturbances. And as if on cue, a disturbance has arisen.’”

  “You think he’s faking these thefts to make it look like he’s doing his job? That’s a lot of work to get out of doing work.”

  “No, it’s the other way around. The thefts are real. It’s his investigation that’s fake. And it’s a brilliant plan!” Little Ben said, bouncing up and down on his chair in excitement. “If you were going to steal London’s magical heritage, wouldn’t you love to be the person who’s supposed to protect it? You could always stay one step ahead of yourself.”

  “If he’s the Precious Man, wouldn’t that make Minnie Tickle his daughter? I don’t think you’ll find many dads who are willing to fire machine guns at their children.”

  Mr Champney shook his head. “The Precious Man was Minnie Tickle’s father in a legend recorded more than a century ago. I’m certain Beale isn’t our young woman’s actual father. That doesn’t mean you can trust him.”

  “If it is him, although I still don’t think it is, what are we supposed to do about it? Call the authorities? He is the authorities.”

  “If he is behind this, he must have been planning it for many years, as he steadily rose up through the ranks,” Mr Champney said. “You must be equally cautious. Find a safe place to hide. Stay there as long as you need to while figuring out your next move. Then you can return here, and we shall discuss it.”

  That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but I didn’t know what else to say. We said our goodbyes and headed out.

  As we stepped out onto Piccadilly, Mom started patting her pockets with a panicked look. “I’ve lost my Oyster card!”

  I sighed. I had this conversation with her pretty much every day. “Mom, remember, I always hang on to it for you? Anyway, if you did lose it, it wouldn’t be a big deal. We could —”

  I stopped. Suddenly, I knew our next move. “To get past the safeguards that protected the underground rivers, Lady Roslyn had me use a magically charged umbrella,” I told Little Ben. “And the way she charged it was by leaving it behind on the Tube. As she explained to me, the Baker Street Tube is the most dangerous magical nexus in London – and the Lost Property Office sits directly above it. That means that when an item passes through there, it gains an additional magical charge. And if you lose the item at another powerful spot on the Underground, you can double the effect.”

  “Ohhhh!” Little Ben said. “So Minnie Tickle didn’t hand that suitcase full of stones to a confederate. She left it behind. She lost it on purpose!”

  “That’s my guess,” I said. “But there’s only one way to be sure.”

  CHAPTER 32

  “I’m here to collect a suitcase full of ancient stones,” I told the clerk behind the counter.

  When I’d gone to the Lost Property Office of the London Underground with Lady Roslyn to collect a lost umbrella, it had clearly been a routine operation for them, and it had raised no eyebrows. This time, my request raised two. When the clerk finally lowered them, all he said was “Let me get my supervisor.”

  His supervisor also had raised eyebrows, although when they didn’t go down, I realized it was a permanent condition: instead of running parallel to his eyes, his eyebrows ran at a forty-five-degree angle. It was kind of a striking effect, although it made his face hard to read.

  “You’re looking for missing stones?” he asked, staring at me with stunned surprise, or possibly complete neutrality.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “And they belong to you?”

  I hesitated. I had already demonstrated the explosive consequences of telling a lie around magic. Telling a lie in the most powerful magical nexus in London could be positively nuclear. On the other hand, surely people told lies near the Baker Street Tube all the time, and central London was still standing, so there must have been safeguards in place. I erred on the side of caution. “I’m very eager to have those stones returned,” I glasshoused.

  “Hmm,” he said, looking sceptical, or possibly convinced. Then he shrugged and held out his hand. “I’m Roger Lock, by the way.”

  I shook Roger Lock’s hand – and got a sudden electric shock, as if he were holding a little buzzer. I jumped back. He turned his hand palm up to show me a tiny chip of stone, which looked as though it might have fallen off the Roman wall.

  “The stones know,” he said, with a look of satisfaction and/or disappointment. “I think we’ll hold on to them for their rightful owner.”

  “That’s good, right?” Little Ben said as we left. “If they won’t give it to us, they won’t give it to Minnie Tickle, either.”

  “But she must know that,” I said. “She wouldn’t have left them if she didn’t have a plan for getting them back.”

  “How, though?” Little Ben asked.

  As we stood there talking, a truck pulled into a nearby driveway, in front of a large metal grille. The driver climbed out and lifted up the grille, revealing the top of a large slide. He grabbed a large canvas sack from the truck and threw it down the slide. As it went down, I caught a glimpse of the label on the sack: LOST PROPERTY OFFICE.

  “I wonder…” I said. “Mom, distract that driver for me.”

  “How should I do that, sweetie? I’m not very good at distracting people. I believe people should be allowed to focus.”

  The driver was halfway done unloading, and we didn’t have much time. Meanwhile, Mom bulldozed onwards. “There’s nothing more annoying than when there’s something important you need to do, and somebody keeps talking and talking and meanwhile your opportunity is slipping away and —”

  “MOM! That’s such a great point, I bet that man would love to hear all about it.”

  “Really?” Mom strode up to the driver. “Hello there, truck driver,” she said. “My daughter thought you might like to learn about how frustrating it is when somebody interrupts what you’re doing —”

  He turned towards her, baffled and (more importantly) distracted. As Mom rattled on, I crept around the truck, took a running leap, and jumped for the slide –

  – but before I landed on it, there was a loud crack, and I went flying backwards.

  The driver spun around. “HEY!” he yelled. “What are you after?”

  By way of answer, I ran. Mom and Little Ben followed me. Apparently, the driver didn’t want to leave his cargo, because he let us go.

  Once we were out of his sight, we stopped and caught our breath.

  “There must be some kind of filter on that slide,” Little Ben said. “Nothing but actual lost property can get through.”

  I looked at Little Ben.

  He looked at me.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.

  He grinned. “This is going to be sooooo cool.”

  CHAPTER 33

  That evening, Mom got into a taxi with a big suitcase. She had the taxi take her one block away. Then she got out, leaving the suitcase behind.

  At least, I’m pretty sure tha
t’s what she did. Even though I was close to the action, I didn’t exactly have the best view of it because I was inside the suitcase. Or, I should say, we were in the suitcase – Little Ben was crammed in there with me.

  We had decided on a taxi instead of the Tube because we wouldn’t have to wait too long before the taxi driver discovered us, and even with the air holes we had cut in the suitcase, we didn’t want to spend any longer stuck in a suitcase than we had to.

  Oh, and also, unattended luggage on the Tube sometimes gets blown up by the bomb squad.

  “Miss! Miss! You forgot your— Oh, for heaven’s sake. She’s disappeared already,” the cabbie said.

  “Lost Property Office, here we come,” Little Ben whispered to me.

  CHAPTER 34

  I thought maybe the cabbie would hand us over to somebody first, but he must have driven straight to the Lost Property Office, because after a few minutes of rumbling, the cab stopped and I heard the rattling of a metal grate being lifted. Then he opened the back door and yanked our suitcase out, and I could feel in my stomach that we were flying through the air. I had a moment of nerves: Were we going to run into that barrier again?

  We didn’t. The magical safeguards must have judged us sufficiently lost. We slid down at a sharp angle, and then we spun around, because it turns out that the baggage slide into the Lost Property Office goes in a spiral, which added dizziness to my list of complaints. Finally, we came to a sudden stop. Unfortunately, thanks to my old enemy Newton’s laws, the suitcase came to a stop first, and then Little Ben’s head stopped when it hit the nearest bit of suitcase, and then mine stopped when it hit Little Ben’s head. But the important thing was, we had arrived.

  We waited until we heard the truck start up and drive away, and a few minutes more for good measure.

  “Think it’s safe?” I whispered to Little Ben.

  “As safe as it’s going to get,” he whispered back.