The City of Guardian Stones

by Jacob Sager Weinstein

  Using the string we had tied to the inside of the zipper, I unzipped the bag.

  We toppled out, dizzy and achy. When we finished rubbing our foreheads and falling over, we clambered across the pile of suitcases and canvas bags that surrounded us and took in the scene.

  We were in an industrial-looking room, with exposed air ducts on the low ceiling, and concrete bricks visible through the thin white paint of the wall. Long grey counters stretched from the blue spiral slide at our backs to the other end of the room, where tall rolling cages held hundreds of backpacks and suitcases.

  The room was big enough for a dozen workers, but we had done well to get lost after business hours – there was nobody there but us.

  “I bet these counters are for people to empty the bags out, to see if they can figure out who they belong to,” Little Ben said.

  “I guess not all bags come with chips of magically charged stones to identify the owners,” I said.

  We chose a metal cage and started pulling bags out. There were small backpacks with cartoon characters on them and massive ones suitable for camping. There were suitcases of all sizes, but none of them was the one we had seen Minnie Tickle lugging. None of them were even heavy enough to have stones inside.

  “If this is the room where they do their first sorting, there must be another room for the next step,” I told Little Ben.

  We passed the sorting tables into a long hallway lined with shelves and more cages. We didn’t find Minnie’s suitcase, but when we went down a flight of stairs, we found a treasure trove.

  It was another long corridor, once again lined with metal cages, but these were overflowing with umbrellas: small pocket umbrellas, giant golf umbrellas, sombre black umbrellas, colourful children’s umbrellas…

  “Wow!” Little Ben said. “It’s like something from the Arabian nights!”

  “Sure, if the forty thieves were reeeeeally worried about their robes getting wet.”

  “Oooh, that one has a sword handle!” He tried to yank it out. “It must be jammed in.”

  “It’s cool, but if it’s not made of stone, it’s not what we’re looking for.”

  Ignoring me, Little Ben tried a bunch of other umbrellas in the same cage. They all slid out smoothly. Then he tried the sword-handled one. It didn’t budge.

  “It’s an umbrella shaped like a sword, and I can’t remove it,” he said. “Does that seem like it’s part of the weird ten per cent? It seems very ten-per centy to me.”

  I walked over, grasped the sword-shaped handle, and pulled the umbrella out easily. “See? You must have been pulling at a funny angle or someth —”

  I stopped mid-word, interrupted by a sensation that was definitely not a typical umbrella-related one. It was like a brief electric shock shooting up my arm, followed by the feeling that the umbrella was almost a part of my hand. It was exactly what I had felt when I had picked up Bazalgette’s Trowel, the very first magical item I ever encountered.

  “I think this is a tosheroon,” I told Little Ben. When Lady Roslyn and I had explored the sewers, we had encountered a group of toshers – scavengers of the enchanted items that washed up in London’s magical underground rivers. Of all the things they searched for, the most valuable were called tosheroons – multiple magical items fused together into a new, more powerful one. This certainly looked like one, given that it started off like a sword and ended up like an umbrella. (Of course, I couldn’t claim to completely understand the concept of tosheroons, given that the toshers somehow thought I was one. I never got a straight answer on why they thought that, or even how it was possible.)

  I looked closely at the umbrella. It was encrusted with gleaming stones and as heavy as steel. In the middle of the handle, where the button would be on a normal umbrella, was a thick diamond. “I wonder…” I said, and pushed the diamond. It clicked, and the umbrella whooshed open. I could now see that it wasn’t an umbrella with a sword-shaped handle. It was both a sword and an umbrella at the same time – a sharp and shiny blade extended from the handle, gradually tapering until it became an ordinary umbrella shaft about halfway through.

  “Cool!” Little Ben said.

  “Except the umbrella part blocks me from using it as a sword.”

  “In modern-day London, an umbrella is probably more useful.”

  “Good point,” I said, folding it closed. Since I didn’t have a scabbard handy, I tucked it into my belt, and we moved deeper into the Lost Property Office.

  We passed a room overflowing with scooters and baby carriages, then turned left into a chamber lined with long steel shelves. Each one was labelled with its contents, although the labels hardly did them justice. Sure, the CHILDREN’S TOYS shelf held children’s toys, but I had never in my life seen such a jumble of stuffed animals, yo-yos, action figures, dolls, and wind-up helicopters. And then there was the LARGE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS shelf, and the SMALL MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS shelf, and thousands of keys sealed in individual labelled envelopes, and, sitting in a corner all by itself, an urn labelled GRANDPA.

  Past the last shelf, another slide led into darkness, through a hole in the floor.

  “After you,” Little Ben said.

  I jumped in.

  CHAPTER 35

  The slide spiralled through the darkness and then it flattened out, and just as I was thinking I wonder if I should brace myself, I ran out of slide and smacked my bottom on the ground.

  At least I had the presence of mind to roll out of the way before Little Ben came sliding down, so he didn’t crash into me. “You don’t have a torch in that bag of yours, do you?” I asked.

  There was a rustling, and a click, and a narrow beam switched on.

  A large sphinx leapt out of the darkness at us.

  Little Ben and I screamed and jumped back, but the stone creature sat placidly on its massive haunches.

  “I don’t think it’s actually moving,” I said.

  “N-no,” Little Ben said. “It was a t-trick of the light. K-kind of an interesting effect, actually.”

  He cast his light around the room, revealing stone after stone – benches, crumbling walls, tiny fragments, starbursts and rectangles and statues and squares.

  “I think we’re in the right place,” I said.

  “I feel sorry for the workers who had to move all this stuff down here, without magic fingers.”

  I tapped the nearest statue. “Hello? Can you hear me?” It didn’t budge.

  “I think only the statues made from Coade stone are alive,” Little Ben said. “These are regular stone. You can tell because they’ve been worn down by the elements – Coade stone lasts pretty much for ever.”

  “I guess it’s just us, then.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” a voice said.

  The lights switched on.

  CHAPTER 36

  By the door stood Roger Lock, the Lost Property Office employee who had buzzed me with the bit of Roman stone. I couldn’t be sure, but his eyebrows seemed even more raised than usual.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “We were … um…” My glasshousing powers failed me, so I told him the truth. “Everything in this room was stolen.”

  “Of course it was,” he said.

  Now it was my turn for raised eyebrows. “You knew that?”

  “I read the newspapers. And I know Roman walls and medieval priories when I see them.”

  Little Ben couldn’t believe what he was hearing, any more than I could. “And you’re leaving it here?” he exclaimed.

  “All lost items must remain at the Lost Property Office for ninety days, waiting for their owners,” Roger Lock said. “At the end of that period, if they haven’t been claimed, we can dispose of them at our discretion. Usually that means donating them to a charity shop. In this case, we’ll make sure everything goes back where it belongs.”

  “It’s not that simple,” I told him. “You used that stone chip on me, so I know you know magic is real, and – wait, you did know that, d
idn’t you? I can’t tell if you’re surprised.”

  He laughed. “I work at the Lost Property Office. I see more enchanted items by nine AM than most people see in their lifetime.”

  “Then you must know that someone very powerful has gone through a lot of trouble to make sure all this stuff ended up right here. They wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t think they could get it back.”

  “There are elaborate safeguards in place,” Roger Lock said. “No one can take something from here if it doesn’t belong to them.”

  Little Ben piped up. “Then how can you get rid of things after ninety days?”

  “That’s when the law says a lost item stops belonging to its owner.”

  “So the law can change who owns something? And the magic will respect that?”

  Lock nodded. “Law is a series of words that alters the nature of reality. It’s a form of magic in and of itself.”

  “We’ve got a big problem,” Little Ben said. “Minnie Tickle owns everything in here.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “We saw her steal stuff, right in front of us.”

  “Have you ever heard of the principle of market overt?” he asked.

  “Market what?”

  “It’s an ancient law. If you buy something during daylight hours, in a market that has existed since time immemorial, it belongs to you – even if the person who sold it didn’t own it in the first place.”

  I saw where he was going. “How long has Borough Market been around?”

  “Nobody knows. A thousand years, at least, in that very spot. Parliament actually repealed the law of market overt decades ago – but the new law didn’t say anything about magic items. I think they didn’t want to publicly admit that magic exists. But that means magic items are still covered by the old law.”

  I turned to Roger Lock. “We saw Minnie Tickle give money to a merchant in Borough Market. We wondered why he didn’t give her anything in exchange. I bet you she was buying the things she had already stolen.”

  “That’s dismaying,” Lock said. Maybe when your facial expressions were as unreadable as his, you got in the habit of explicitly stating your emotions. “But if she’s truly the rightful owner of all this lost property, we’ll have to give it to her as soon as she shows up to claim it.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “ARE YOU CRAZY????” I inquired politely.

  “I won’t enjoy doing it,” Lock said. “I’ve spent my life making sure things go back to their owners. Handing sixty tons of London’s heritage over to a thief will break my heart. But… Look, imagine it’s World War Two, and you’re a doctor with the Red Cross. You’re allowed behind enemy lines to treat British POWs in an enemy camp. While you’re there, you have the chance to shoot a couple of Nazi soldiers. Do you?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  I had answered instinctively, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became. “Because shooting a few random Nazis won’t end the war any sooner. All it would do is stop anybody from ever trusting the Red Cross again. There’d be thousands of deaths on my hands. Maybe more.”

  “Mr Lock,” Little Ben said, “I think it’s great what you do. So many umbrellas! But you’re not the Red Cross. If you break the rules, people just get wet. No offence!”

  Lock didn’t seem offended, although I’m not sure I’d know if he was. “The stakes are higher than you might think. Any item here might have been crucial to the destiny of its owner. That’s why they built the Lost Property Office above a magical nexus: when an item passes through here, it returns to its owner with a magical charge, in case they need it to restore their life to its rightful path.”

  “But all these —” I gestured to the stones around us. “By your logic, every one of them is crucial, too. Millions of people passed them every day. Who knows how their absence will change those people’s fates?”

  “All the more reason to stick to the rules,” Lock answered. “You’re going to have to leave.”

  Little Ben headed for the door, but I wasn’t giving up that easily. “No,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” Roger Lock said.

  “This is the best lead we’ve got. We’ve been shot at and arrested and nearly drowned to get here, and we’re not going to walk away.”

  Lock sighed. “I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve tried reason. Now, I’m afraid, I’m going to have to use force.” He reached up over his shoulder, and for the first time, I noticed that he was wearing a scabbard on his back, crocheted out of red and green yarn. He reached into it and unsheathed his weapon.

  It was a cricket bat.

  “This was the second item ever left in the Lost Property Office,” he said. “It’s been down here for eight decades, gathering power.”

  He raised it. Bright light shot up its handle, coalescing at the tip and shaping itself into a ball of energy, hovering just above the bat.

  He pulled the ball out of the air, then dropped it on the ground, letting it bounce.

  As it came back up, he smashed it with the bat, sending it right at us.

  CHAPTER 37

  If I had had more experience being assaulted by magical glowing cricket balls, I might have had a rational plan in place. Instead, I acted instinctively and did something moderately crazy:

  I pulled the umbrella out from my belt, opened it swiftly, and shielded myself and Little Ben.

  The cricket ball smashed into the umbrella with enough force to send me staggering backwards –

  – and then the ball exploded into a dozen flaming shards, which shattered into hundreds of flaming snowflakes, which hung in the air, twinkling, before fading away.

  I lowered the umbrella.

  Roger Lock was staring at me. He was speechless. His jaw had dropped. His eyes had grown wide. His eyebrows had stayed exactly the same.

  “Excalibrolly,” he whispered, in an awestruck tone. “That umbrella was the very first item to end up here, decades ago. Nobody knew who turned it in – it just showed up, moments after our doors opened. The ninety days’ period passed, and no one claimed it, so my predecessors tried to remove it, but it wouldn’t budge. It became a rite of passage for all new employees to try to pull it out. A legend grew that it could only be removed by one who was worthy to wield it. Who are you?”

  “I guess I’m Excalibrolly’s rightful owner,” I said. “Does that mean we’re on the same team?”

  “I can’t be on anybody’s team. I took a vow of neutrality. But I do know somebody who might help: my husband Chapel is a Brother.”

  “What’s a husband chapel?” Little Ben asked, at the same time I said, “You married your brother?”

  “Not my brother,” Lock said. “He’s a Brother of the —”

  He was interrupted by a loud explosion from somewhere above us. The lights flickered off and on.

  The ancient segments of Roman wall, the giant stone sphinx, the tiny scattered pebbles, and all the rest began to vibrate. At first, I thought it was the aftershock of the explosion, but they kept on shaking. Then, like metal shavings moving towards a magnet, they slid towards the door.

  “Minnie is here,” I said.

  “You must have been right about her buying them,” Lock said. “They know their rightful owner.”

  “They know their legal owner,” Little Ben said, shoving away a stone bench that pressed up against his leg like an overfriendly cat. “That’s not the same thing.”

  “I can’t make that distinction,” Lock said.

  Maybe I was just distracted by the stone elephant that was trying to run me over, but I could kind of see where Lock was coming from. Anyway, I was only going to convince him by arguing on his terms. So I said, “I understand. You have to play by Red Cross rules. But Excalibrolly has chosen me as its owner, and Minnie takes things away from their owners, and it’s your sworn duty to help people keep things they own. So don’t you have to help me, at least a little?”

  He poin
ted to a stone sarcophagus, quivering eagerly in the far corner. “Let’s get the lid off that. You can hide in there while…” He gritted his teeth and looked almost dismayed. “While I help this thief collect her ill-gotten gains. Good luck.”

  CHAPTER 38

  The good thing about hiding in a stone sarcophagus is, you’re in a lightproof, soundproof container, and when the lid slams down, nobody can see you.

  The bad thing about hiding in a stone sarcophagus is, you’re in a lightproof, soundproof container, and when the lid slams down, you have no idea what’s going on outside it.

  The worst thing about hiding in a stone sarcophagus is, it’s a sarcophagus. As in, a big box for what’s left of a dead person.

  “Did you happen to read the name on the outside of this thing?” I asked Little Ben as I tried to arrange the bones so that I wasn’t actually lying on top of them.

  “I wish I had,” Little Ben said. “It seems rude to be this close to someone without being introduced.”

  The sarcophagus tilted, sending us and the bones sliding around. Then it straightened out, and a few minutes later, the faint rumble of an engine came through the thick stone.

  “The Precious Man’s van?” Little Ben asked.

  “That would be my guess,” I said.

  Little Ben and the dead guy and I rumbled along for a good twenty or thirty minutes. At one point, I tried to call Mom, just to check in with her, but I didn’t have any reception – the sarcophagus hadn’t been built with the mobile phone needs of its inhabitants in mind.

  Then the rumbling stopped, and Little Ben and Anonymous Bones and I got to enjoy a bonus few minutes of being tilted into each other, presumably as Minnie Tickle levitated us somewhere.

  Finally, we thumped back down onto the ground. We waited a few more minutes, and then I pushed up on the lid of the sarcophagus.

  It didn’t budge. Add “Easy to open from the inside” to that list of things that the sarcophagus industry really needs to pay more attention to.