The City of Guardian Stones

by Jacob Sager Weinstein

  “There’s an old trick for you,” said the soldier crouched nearby. “Using lies to wipe away tears.”

  He flipped up the glass shield over his face, and I stared at him in disbelief. “Troy?” I said.

  CHAPTER 53

  Newfangled Troy winked at me. “In the flesh. Driving a cab was getting dull. I decided I wanted a job with a little more action. Brigadier Beale doesn’t hire too many humans, but I managed to blag my way in.”

  Troy and Dasra stared at each other, and I knew what was coming next. I was pretty sure Troy liked me as much as I liked him, and seeing me in the company of a cute boy my own age was undoubtedly going to make him jealous. I hoped it wasn’t going to be a problem – we had enough to deal with already. I mentally rehearsed the speech I’d give him: Troy, it’s true that Dasra’s really cute, and it turns out I hate him less than I thought, but you’ve got to put aside your feelings and—

  Troy interrupted my thoughts by clapping Dasra on the shoulder and beaming at him. “Dasra, old boy – funny meeting you here,” he said, in an astoundingly posh accent. (Newfangled Troy seemed to switch accents as often as he switched jobs. When I first met him, he was working as a tosher, and he had the same thick accent that the other sewer scavengers did. Then I found him driving a cab and sounding like an ordinary Londoner. One of these days, I was going to figure out which accent was his real one.)

  “You know each other?” I asked.

  “We met at my father’s club,” Dasra said, grinning back at Troy. “Great to see you again!”

  Troy winked at me over Dasra’s shoulder, and I wondered how he had got into whatever fancy club Dasra’s family belonged to. But all Troy said was “Let’s catch up later, shall we?” He pulled a key from his pocket and uncuffed us.

  “Are you helping us out of the goodness of your heart?” I asked him. “Or do you smell a profit?”

  “What makes you think they’re mutually exclusive?” he said. “If Minnie destroys the London Stone – well, let’s say there tend to be fewer jobs when all your potential employers have been flattened.”

  Now that we were all free, Troy pocketed the key and saluted us. “I’d better get back to my battalion before they get suspicious.”

  “That’s it?” I said. “A quick unlock and you’re gone?”

  “Trust me,” he said. “You want me where I can have some influence on where the bullets are going.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because Minnie just noticed you.”

  He was right. The tornado was heading right at us, with Minnie floating in the eye.

  Minnie glanced down and flicked a finger, and a stream of stones shot towards us.

  CHAPTER 54

  I’d worn Excalibrolly tucked in my belt ever since I had found it, but I hadn’t been any more conscious of it than I was of my own hips. It just felt like a part of me.

  But now, without thinking what I was doing, I grabbed it, opened it, and leapt forwards, all in one motion. The stones ricocheted off the umbrella, pinging like hail.

  The hail stopped. “On the count of three,” I said, “I’m going to close the umbrella. We’ll leap for her and try to finish her off. One … two … three!”

  I shut Excalibrolly – revealing Minnie standing right in front of us.

  Maybe I should have counted to “One”.

  She lifted her hand up and a cantaloupe-sized mass of rubble coalesced around her fist.

  She swung.

  I only had a fraction of a second to react, but I had trained for exactly this circumstance. When I was seven, Aunt Uta had taught me something she described as an “improvised umbrella dance”. I held the umbrella, and she led. Depending on what move she made, I had to make various moves in response. If she tried to touch me, I had to block her with the surface of the umbrella. If she did a high kick, I had to catch her ankle with the handle.

  We even did a dance show for my mom and all her sisters, with Aunt Polly playing “Singin’ in the Rain”, and that was fun. But Aunt Uta wouldn’t let it rest – for months and months, long after I was bored with the game, she kept drilling me on it.

  And so, instinctively, as Minnie’s stone-encrusted hand shot towards my chin, I popped open Excalibrolly. It blocked her fist, and I could feel the handle shudder with the impact. I wondered, as I often had lately, how my aunts had known exactly which situations to prepare me for.

  Then I stopped wondering and started dancing.

  “I’m singin’ in the rain,” I sang.

  I blocked three more punches.

  “Doo de dee, dee,” I belted. (Aunt Uta hadn’t made me practise the words anywhere near as much as the movements.)

  Minnie’s foot shot towards me in a high kick, stones flying through the air to encrust it as it went. I shut the umbrella, flipped it over, caught her ankle in the crook of the sword handle, and sent her flying.

  “Dum dee, dah dee dah. Dee da, dee dah.”

  She rolled, leapt to her feet, and came towards me, arms swinging wide. I rammed the point of the umbrella into her chest. She toppled over.

  I leapt onto her. This was not part of the umbrella dance, by the way. It just seemed like a good idea.

  And it was a good idea, and I was even smart enough to hold down her wrists so that she couldn’t hit me.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to hold down her fingers. They made a series of rapid magical gestures, and I heard a rumble behind me. I didn’t look back, because I wasn’t going to fall for the old make-somebody-look-over-their-shoulder-and-then-hit-them trick.

  Something grabbed my shoulders and lifted me off the ground, and as I twisted in its grasp, I realized I had instead fallen for the rarer but more deadly create-a-giant-creature-out-of-rubble trick. The thing that held me had massive feet made out of broken bricks, and arms and legs of bent steel girders, and a torso of cracked marble, and a head made out of jagged fragments of window glass. Nearby, Mom and Little Ben dangled from the steel hands of two more rubble monsters.

  I swung my umbrella, sending bits of its head flying. The fragments instantly re-coalesced.

  It reached over with steel fingers and snatched the umbrella out of my hand, flinging it away.

  CHAPTER 55

  I kicked my legs and swung my arms, but the creature was holding me too far away for my fists to reach him – and even if they could have, what use was my soft human flesh going to be against a building personified?

  “By Royal Proclamation, We command you to unhand those servants of the Crown,” a shrill voice piped up. The rubble monster looked down. There, barely coming up to its ankles, stood Coade stone King George III.

  With a slight flick of its leg, the rubble monster kicked George flying. The little king spun through the air, crying “This is treeeeeeeeeason” right up to the moment he smashed into a traffic light and crashed down …

  … and landed on Hungerford’s back. Lined up next to the lion was an army of his Coade stone cousins: elephants and miniature horses and massive Egyptian gods and flowers and urns and sheep, not to mention the tall, flat-headed caryatid, who waved excitedly at me. “THIS IS A SITE OF GENERAL TOURIST INTEREST, AND MY PRESENCE HERE IS PERFECTLY EXPLAINABLE!” she shouted.

  Hungerford glared at Minnie. “Prepare to face the, the, the, the… Oh, dash it. ROAAAARRRRRR!” He leapt towards her.

  Minnie summoned a wall of rubble in front of her. Hungerford smashed into it, bouncing off, and the rubble re-formed into a giant humanoid twice as big as the one that held me. Its massive fist smashed down onto Hungerford – and exploded into brick dust, leaving Hungerford unharmed.

  “Perhaps you, you were misinformed,” Hungerford growled, “but Coade stone is, is vastly stronger than natural rock.”

  Minnie waved her fingers wildly, filling the streets with flying shards of concrete and smashed bricks, which coalesced into an army of rubble monsters.

  The rubble monsters glared at the Coade stone statues.

  The Coade sto
ne statues glared at the rubble monsters.

  And then the battle began, beautifully carved Coade stone creations against hulking and misshapen humanoids.

  “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!” yelled Coade stone Shakespeare, poking a rubble monster in its glass eyes with his Coade stone quill.

  “,” exclaimed an Egyptian god, hurling a stone lightning bolt.

  “I AM FORCED TO ADMIT THAT THIS MAY BE SLIGHTLY UNUSUAL,” yelled the caryatid, smashing her flat head into a rubble monster’s marble torso.

  The ground was soon coated with heaps of pulverized concrete, and Coade stone fish swam through it as naturally as if it were water, sliding under rubble monsters’ feet and sending them tumbling.

  Like Hungerford had said, the Coade stones were too hard to smash, but most of them were smaller than he was, and without his mass, they were easily sent flying. And when a rubble monster was destroyed, Minnie could wave her hands and it would re-form, although once it reached a certain level of pulverization, she seemed unable to put it back together. The battle was about even, and in the chaos, it took me a moment to realize that Minnie was flying upwards.

  She shot to the top floor of Cannon Street station, which had been left unprotected when the metal cage dropped down to cover the entrance. Minnie pointed at a chunk of masonry the size of a compact car, yanking it towards her on a thin rope of fire. She swung the chunk around her head and smashed it into the station’s unprotected roof.

  She’s breaking in, I thought. But why? If Brigadier Beale is really on her side, couldn’t he let her in?

  There was only one way to find out.

  “Hungerford!” I yelled. “Get me down from here!”

  Hungerford didn’t need to be asked twice. He dove between the steel legs of one rubble monster and bounded through the brick hand of another, pulverizing it into brick dust. Then he launched himself towards the one that held me. Stone shrieked against steel as Hungerford’s teeth crumpled against the monster’s arm. With a voice that sounded like wind howling through a poorly sealed window, it shrieked in pain and dropped me.

  High above, Minnie was still smashing her enchanted wrecking ball against the roof, which looked like it was about to give way. I had to get up there, and quickly. But how? I wasn’t going to climb up eight storeys, and Hungerford couldn’t pull himself up on the metal girders with those clumsy paws of his.

  Fortunately, there was someone there with big, strong hands and long enough arms to reach from bar to bar.

  “Hey, Carrie!” I called. “CLIMBING IS A COMMON HUMAN SPORT AND ENTIRELY INCONSPICUOUS.”

  CHAPTER 56

  Minnie gave one last smash with her wrecking ball and the roof of Cannon Street station caved in. She flew in through the gap.

  Two storeys below, I clung to the caryatid as she pulled herself swiftly upwards. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” she said. “You can’t imagine how dull it gets, supporting a building from the bottom. Finally, I’m going to see one from the top. PERHAPS IT IS AN OPTICAL ILLUSION AND PASSERSBY ARE NOT ACTUALLY SEEING A LIVING STATUE IN ACTION.”

  In a few rapid motions, she pulled us up onto the roof and leapt into the hole.

  We plummeted into the wreckage of an office. Fluorescent lights hung limply from the shattered ceiling, and computer monitors had been cracked and splintered by pieces of plaster. Fortunately, there was no sign of workers – Beale must have cleared the area before the battle began.

  The caryatid jumped through the floor into another scene of workday devastation, and then down again. “We’re catching up to her,” I said. “She has to keep making these holes. We just have to jump through them.”

  And indeed, as we dropped down to the third floor, we could see Minnie below us on the second. She pounded one last time on the weakened floor, opening it up, and flew through. Seconds later, we crashed down behind her.

  Thanks to the height of the concourse, it was a two-storey drop. The caryatid’s feet smashed into the floor, sending bits of tile flying.

  “You can put me down here —” I began.

  “LET’S GET HER BEFORE SHE NOTICES WE’RE HERE!” the caryatid bellowed.

  Fortunately, the Corkers opened fire, which was probably the only thing less subtle than the caryatid. They were arranged in a semicircle on the other side of a metal ticket barrier, next to a parked train car. Behind them, Beale sat on an iron cage with the London Stone secured inside it. He had changed into a puffy white uniform that looked familiar, but what with the whole magical-cork-creatures-firing-guns thing going on, I couldn’t quite focus enough to place it.

  As the guns rang out, Minnie repositioned her wrecking ball in front of her, using it like a shield. Ricocheting bullets smashed the TV screens showing train times and knocked light fixtures off the ceiling. Dangling wires sparked frantically, setting a newspaper rack ablaze.

  As I watched from my hiding place behind the giant stone woman’s back, I couldn’t help thinking that Beale’s attempt to destroy Minnie looked awfully sincere. On the street, he might have been putting on a show for any civilians watching from a distance. But here, where the security cameras were broken and there were no witnesses that anybody would believe, who was he trying to fool?

  What with being stomped on by the caryatid and shot up by the soldiers, the tiling on the floor had peeled back in several places, revealing the concrete floor beneath. Minnie shot a beam of fire at it with her free hand, carving out a slab of concrete. She swung that slab in front of the wrecking ball as a new shield, which freed her to do something else with the ball.

  She rolled it at the soldiers.

  If it hadn’t been so terrifying, it would have been impressive. With a giant ball on a torn-up floor, Minnie looked about to bowl a perfect strike.

  If the Corkers could feel fear, their stiff, mottled faces didn’t show it. But for the first time, Beale looked terrified. I suddenly knew: he was not in control of this situation.

  Yeah, Beale was a big, stupid, hot-tempered jerk. He deserved a good talking-to, and probably a good yelling-at. But unless Parliament had implemented the death penalty for jerkiness, he didn’t deserve a rolling-over.

  And that meant taking out the girl who controlled the bowling ball.

  “ATTACK!” I yelled in the caryatid’s ear.

  CHAPTER 57

  We charged forwards. Minnie spun around, but it was too late. We crashed into her, sending her and her concrete wall crashing through the row of metal ticket barriers. The concrete ball wobbled off course, banging into the wall.

  Lying underneath the caryatid, Minnie shot beams at the living statue, but they simply bounced off. Her powers must not have worked on Coade stone.

  She stretched her arm out and summoned the wrecking ball. As it flew towards me, I rolled off the caryatid and onto the ground next to her.

  The ball whizzed above my head. Minnie swung it around again and smashed it into the caryatid, sending her whizzing above my head.

  As the caryatid crashed into the wall and dropped to the floor, Minnie jumped up. With her wrecking ball high over her head, she hammered the caryatid again and again, pounding her deep into the floor.

  “MMPRH MPRH RMPH PHRM,” the caryatid proclaimed. I couldn’t make out the individual words, but it was probably something about how perfectly ordinary it was for a giant statue to be embedded face down in the floor of a train station.

  “Now!” yelled Beale.

  The door of the nearby train slid open, and a large wax sphere rolled out. Minnie glanced at it contemptuously and smashed it with her wrecking ball. As she did, Beale flipped a hood over his head, and I finally recognized his puffy white uniform. It was what Aunt Mel wore when she was gathering honey from her hives.

  Uh-oh. I knew what was in that wax ball, and I almost felt sorry for Minnie.

  A thick cloud of angry bees shot out of the wax, but instead of swarming around Minnie, they surrounded the concrete ball and began buzzing madly into it.

  Gr
andma’s house had once got infested by masonry bees, but it had taken months. These bees must have been bred in some sort of magical bee-breeding facility, because they managed to dissolve Minnie’s weapons in a matter of seconds.

  “Surrender,” Beale said. “You’ll save us all a lot of trouble.”

  In response, Minnie pointed a finger at the bees. Beale looked confused, but I knew immediately what she was up to.

  “The bees!” I called. “They’re full of masonry. And Minnie can control —”

  Beams shot out, enveloping the bees, and they coalesced into a single buzzing ball, which shot towards Beale. He lifted his gun, but as he stepped forwards to fire, he stumbled over his loose shoelace, costing him a fraction of a second. That was all it took for Minnie to smash the bee-ball on top of him, trapping him inside it. She flung it off to the side, and he went flying, too, still surrounded by bees.

  The Corkers had their guns – but Beale was too busy screaming to bellow out orders, so the Corkers just stood there, gaping.

  Minnie gestured to the London Stone. It didn’t budge. The iron cage that held it must have kept out whatever magical force she was using. With a shrug, she pointed at the ceiling above the cage. A heavy chunk of it toppled down, shattering the cage.

  With a casual Come here gesture, she summoned the London Stone to her, and she levitated towards the other end of the platform.

  I was about to follow when I heard a shriek from Brigadier Beale. He was still trapped in the ball of bees, swatting wildly as they stung him.

  “I’ll get you out of there,” I told Beale.

  “Don’t – OW! Don’t bother with meAAAAAEE! Save the – OW! London – AH! – St – OW – one.”

  He was probably right. Saving the entire city was more important than saving one particular person. But I still had no idea how I was going to save London – and as my eyes fell on the smoking remains of a newspaper stand, I thought I knew how to save Beale.