The City of Guardian Stones

by Jacob Sager Weinstein

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because,” Little Ben said, “we got a message from Ben Franklin, my ancestor, and possibly my brilliant but unorthodox creator who forged me out of lightning in the very heart of a storm! Wait, what was I saying? Oh. Yeah. He warned us about the consequences. And the message was only between him and his descendants, so you wouldn’t know about it.”

  “That information belongs to all humanity,” Mr Champney said. “If he shared it only with his descendants, then he was of the same Elitist cult that produced Lady Roslyn – and I cannot trust anything he says.”

  Minnie floated up. Mr Champney smiled gently at her. “Sheep all ready, darling?” She nodded, and he turned back to us. “Excuse me,” he said politely, taking her hand. They floated back down to the ground.

  As he went, Dasra called, “Mr Champney, Lady Roslyn is my grandmother, and if she knows the secret to immortality, she’s never told me or my mother. Do you think she loves us any less than you love your daughter? Why would she keep it from us – unless there really was some horrible price associated with it?”

  For a moment, a look of concern flashed across Mr Champney’s face. Then he shrugged. “Because she’s an Elitist. She wants to keep things for herself. That’s what Elitists do.”

  Dasra turned to me. “You see? I told you an anarchist was behind all this.”

  CHAPTER 61

  With Mr Champney gone, the force field that was holding us in place lasted only a few seconds. We fell down, and I immediately jumped to my feet. I was, I realized, feeling a little better. At least being held up by hostile magic had given me the chance to recuperate a little from my swim.

  “Come on,” I called, and ran to the trapdoor. We squeezed ourselves back into the tower and crawled down the stairs. By the time we all emerged on the ground level, Mr Champney and Minnie had hooked the sheep up to a sleigh, loaded the London Stone onto it, and herded the sheep onto the bridge.

  While Dasra and Little Ben pursued them, I checked on Mom and Oaroboarus. They were unconscious and covered with bumps and bruises, but I was pretty sure they were going to be OK.

  Behind me, I heard a ZZZZZAP and a “Yowch!” I turned around to see Little Ben and Dasra holding their noses in pain, as if they had just walked into a wall.

  “Dere’s a bagical barrier,” Little Ben said through his swollen nose. He stood at the spot where the edge of the bridge touched the ground of the churchyard and reached his hand out gingerly. ZZZZAP! For a moment, a wall glowed into life, squares of fire appearing in the air stacked like bricks. “Cool!” Little Ben said. “Also, ow! But bostly cool!”

  As Mr Champney and Minnie drove the sheep along the bridge, the little clouds of fog around them soaked into their wool, and they began to glow like a dozen little furry suns. Meanwhile, the lights of the city’s buildings dimmed, until nothing shone in the night but the stars above and the sheep below.

  Soon, the halo around each sheep was big enough to touch the halo of the sheep next to it, and they merged into a single bleating sun. That sun flashed so bright that I thought it would sear my eyeballs, and then it lifted up from the sheep and disappeared into the London Stone. Now the London Stone was glowing, but it was a quiet, seething glow, like an ember that has been burning for hours but could still burn for hours more.

  Although … it was fog that had started that ember burning. And we had stopped Minnie from collecting anywhere near as much fog as she had wanted. Did that mean the London Stone was running on a half-empty tank? Could I delay her long enough to make it run out?

  The sheep reached the first of the bridge’s alcoves, and as the sled passed, the alcove sparkled for a moment, and across the entire bridge, fragments of stone twinkled in response.

  And across the city, all along the Thames, a few scattered buildings twinkled back. Little Ben gasped in appreciation. “The White Tower … Westminster Hall … the Church of St Bartholomew – those are the buildings that were already there when the bridge was first built.”

  As the sheep trotted on, the city fell dark. On the bridge, the twinkling shifted, as if different fragments within it were answering the glow of the London Stone.

  A few more buildings shone forth and faded – and then the city burst forth into twinkling light.

  “And those are the buildings that were rebuilt after the Great Fire,” Little Ben said.

  “Minnie built the bridge with stones from every age,” Dasra said. “I think each fragment is tuned in to buildings from the same era.”

  I thought about Grandma’s old-fashioned radio, which tuned into different stations as you turned a knob. Maybe London Bridge was an enchanted version of that, powered by fog and blood instead of electricity. And that would make the sled the equivalent of the dial that showed the station. I could bring it back to me, if only I could find the knob that controlled it.

  But how long did I have? I glanced up at the clock that stuck out of the bell tower, but it wasn’t especially helpful. It was spinning madly, as if it, too, was tuned to the London Stone and was frantically trying to keep up with the passing of years.

  “The clock!” I yelled. “The clock is the radio knob!”

  Dasra and Little Ben looked at me, baffled. I couldn’t blame them – it wasn’t a sentence that would make much sense if you hadn’t been listening to my thoughts – but there wasn’t time to explain. “Trust me,” I said. “We have to stop that clock from spinning. NOW.”

  “Great,” Dasra said. “All we need to do is strike it with a lightning bolt or a javelin. I seem to have left both of those at home.”

  “Ooh!” Little Ben said. “You know who’s made out of lightning? ME! (Possibly.) KAPOW!” He pointed his finger at the clock tower. Nothing happened. “Darn it!”

  Over on the bridge, the sheep were almost at the far end, and the hundreds of modern buildings along the Thames were shining so brightly, it was like daytime.

  The brightest building of all stood on the other side of the river, at exactly the spot where Minnie’s bridge touched the opposite shore. It was thirteen storeys tall, made of glass and pink marble, and it would have been an ordinary twentieth-century office building, if it weren’t for the ten-storey opening cut into its front, making the whole thing look like a giant open door. Under normal circumstances, the opening just revealed a glass atrium, set back from the river, but tonight was not normal. Instead of the atrium, there was a giant, spinning vortex.

  Minnie’s bridge led straight into the vortex’s heart, and she and her dad were nearly there.

  I had to stop her. I didn’t have a lightning bolt – but maybe I did have a javelin after all.

  I unsheathed Excalibrolly and took careful aim, trying to remember everything Aunt Uta had ever taught me about playing darts.

  And then I threw it.

  CHAPTER 62

  The umbrella flew through the air, straight and true, and when it crashed into the clock face, the minute hand swept over it, wedging it in place. The clock ground loudly to a stop.

  So did the sled. Minnie and Mr Champney climbed out and pushed it, but it wouldn’t budge.

  But the hands of the clock still strained against Excalibrolly. I didn’t know how long it would hold.

  Little Ben held out a tentative hand towards the bridge. BZZT! The barrier was still there.

  What had Brigadier Beale told me? Use the shield. The Roman one. But there weren’t any Romans in sight. In the churchyard, there were shrubs and a bench, and in the street, a bunch of statues and the detritus of battle – bits of brick, and a mangled HANDICAP PARKING ONLY sign, and a ripped-off car door, and…

  Wait a minute. That handicapped sign.

  Like every other handicapped parking sign I’d ever seen, it showed a person sitting in a wheelchair.

  And like every other handicapped parking sign I’d ever seen, it didn’t really show that at all. It showed a stick figure with a round thing. Everybody interpreted the round thing as a wheel – but it could ju
st as easily be a shield. And the stick figure could be somebody falling in combat.

  I thought back to the unusual number of handicapped symbols I had seen at the garage that held the Roman wall. I remembered the circles painted on the bascule chamber, which had seemed to contain and channel the ghosts of the crushed stones.

  This whole thing had started with the power of gladiator blood. Could a rune of a person wielding a shield be the thing to counter it?

  I picked up the signpost from the rubble and held it like a jousting knight’s lance, with the handicapped symbol where the point would go. I strode to the entrance of the bridge.

  As the sign touched the invisible barrier, ripples appeared in the air around it, as if reality were a clear pool and the sign had disturbed the surface. The circle on the sign rippled, too, transforming from an abstract blue shape to a metal shield, dented in some long-forgotten battle. “Stay close,” I told Dasra and Little Ben.

  We passed through the ripples and onto the bridge, and the air around us filled with faint images and not-very-faint noise. Flickering ghostly horses pulled flickering ghostly carts, with loud whinnies and rattling wheels, while their ghostly drivers yelled at the translucent owner of a translucent cow that was blocking the way.

  “What are they saying?” I asked.

  “I think it’s the same language as your lullaby,” Little Ben said.

  “Can we go through them?” Dasra asked.

  “Let’s try,” I said, and walked through the figures as if they were mist.

  The ripples we made when we entered the bridge had kept going until they reached Mr Champney, who spun around and saw us. He placed one hand on the London Stone and pointed the other at us. For a moment, his hand and the London Stone pulsed in bright synchronization –

  – and then the stone and his hand faded out. The phantasms all around us disappeared.

  “Not enough power,” I said.

  He must have come to the same conclusion, because he yanked his hand off the stone and it flickered back to life wanly. The phantasms reappeared.

  “We can go faster if you help me hold this,” I said. Dasra and Little Ben grabbed the back of the lance, and we ran.

  As we did, faint buildings rose up around us, houses of black wood and white plaster. The ghost traffic became narrower and slower, crowded by the houses into the centre of the bridge. Meanwhile, the costumes changed. The long gowns that both men and women wore became more colourful. The hems of the men’s gowns got shorter, showing off tightly stockinged legs. “Fourteenth century,” Little Ben said.

  The clothes became more diverse, changing faster and faster. The babble of voices around us was still overwhelming, but it was resolving itself into syllables that sounded more like the language I knew.

  “Fraysh ohnyons!” cried an onion seller as we ran through her.

  “Frish ahnyyens!” called the next one.

  “Fresh onions!” shouted the next.

  “Oooh! It’s the Great Vowel Shift!” Little Ben said. “We’re up to the sixteenth century.”

  I was less interested in the vowels than in Minnie and Mr Champney, who were a few hundred feet away. Their sled still refused to move, and the sheep stood motionless, legs paused in the air, frozen in time.

  And then the sheep began to move in slow motion.

  “Excalibrolly must be slipping,” I said.

  There was a final grinding noise from behind us, and a snap, which sounded terribly like Excalibrolly breaking.

  And the sheep trotted once more. They vanished into the vortex, pulling the sled and the London Stone and Minnie and Mr Champney behind them.

  The spectres around us disappeared. The bridge fell silent.

  “Awww,” Little Ben said. “I wanted to hear the beginning of non-rhotic pronunciation.”

  I didn’t know what that was, but unless it meant “the terrifying rumbling of a bridge on the verge of collapse”, Little Ben didn’t get his wish. Instead, the bridge shook furiously. Stone chunks toppled off the edges.

  “London Bridge is falling down,” Dasra said.

  “Not just the bridge.” I pointed to the buildings along the bank. They, too, were shaking.

  “London Stone isn’t in London anymore,” Little Ben said. “It’s in … wherever that vortex leads.”

  “Then we’d better get it back,” I said.

  No longer content with losing bits around the edges, London Bridge began to collapse, starting at the side where we had first entered.

  We turned towards the vortex and, the bridge falling away at our heels, we ran.

  CHAPTER 63

  I feel like I should come up with suitably grand language to describe the experience of passing through a building-sized portal powered by centuries of magical build-up, but it mostly felt like being a sock in a dryer. I was whirled around and around, tumbling head over heels, with the only light coming in through a small window. Only instead of looking out into the laundry room, the window looked out into – well, I wasn’t sure where. It was a little hard to make it out, what with my field of vision constantly spinning.

  Finally, the spinning slowed, the window swung open, and we toppled out into a narrow alleyway. The walls of the alley were simple blocks of stone, but the ground was paved with a crazy amalgam of materials – big granite slabs and little pebbles, Roman tile and modern asphalt, bits of broken glass and worn hexagons of wood.

  “I think the portal has sent us to another world,” Dasra said.

  “Like a dryer does with socks!” I exclaimed. The other two looked at me. “Well, I thought it was a good metaphor.”

  Behind us, the portal whirled. Ahead of us, from the other end of the alley, I heard bleating. “That way,” I said.

  The alley opened onto a vast square, paved with the same dizzying array of materials. The buildings were bizarre, too. At first, I thought they were striped, with hundreds of lines running from roof to ground. Then I looked again and realized that each stripe was a vertical sliver from a different building, just wide enough to include the front door.

  The doorways were hundreds of different ages and styles, but each one had something in common: the address above it. “It’s the number thirteens we couldn’t find on the streets of London,” I said. “They all ended up here.”

  The sled with the London Stone stood abandoned in the middle of the square. The sheep, now glowing more brightly than ever, milled around the square, nibbling on the few stray bits of grass that grew between the more dirt-heavy paving options. But other than them and us, the square was empty.

  “Where did those two go?” Little Ben asked.

  “They must be in one of these doors,” I said. “Let’s start opening them.” I strode up to the nearest one, a bright green door surrounded by a red brick arch. But as I was about to turn the handle, I heard an eerie noise from the other side – high-pitched laughter, combined with an occasional boing. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t want to find out.

  “Let’s try the next one,” I said. Before I opened it, I pressed my ear to the weathered wooden door. It was silent – for a moment. Then whatever was on the other side began screaming furiously.

  I leapt back. “What is this place?”

  “Based on how brightly the sheep are glowing, it must be brimming with magical energy,” Little Ben said. “They’re still soaking it up.”

  Dasra turned around, taking in the riot of building styles, and gasped. “It’s Thwonrtthreethreen Skwaforthree,” he said.

  “That’s not as illuminating an answer as I had hoped for.”

  “Look.” He pointed to the upper levels of the buildings in front of us. When the slivers that made them had been cut out of their original buildings, they had brought fragments of street signs with them. “Read them in order.”

  It looked like a random assortment of numbers and letters to me. “T-H-1-R-T-3-3-N-S-Q-U-4-R-3.”

  “Right,” Dasra said. “I heard my grandmother mention it once. It’s a legenda
ry containment facility for the most dangerous magical objects in London. Now that I see it written out, I see where the name comes from. TH1RT33N SQU4R3. It looks like Thirteen Square, but you say it like it’s spelled.”

  “Thwonrtthreethreen Skwaforthree!” Little Ben said. “Cool!”

  The thing on the other side of the wooden door was still wailing. “Whatever it’s called, I don’t think we should let anything out,” I said.

  Across the square, a black door with a single brass knob swung open, and Minnie and Mr Champney staggered out, looking pale and frightened. Minnie clutched an old leather-bound book.

  Mr Champney swung around to slam the door shut, but he was moments too late. Something slipped out behind him. I didn’t see it, but I heard it: a cacophony of rattling and banging, like a bull running into a rack loaded with pots and pans. I had never known a sound could have hostile intent, but this one definitely did. It shot past Mr Champney and rolled through the square, straight towards us.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  Right before it reached us, it passed the alley and hesitated. (Add “hesitating” to the list of things I hadn’t known a sound could do.) Then it turned down the alley and zipped off through the vortex.

  Whatever the sound was, it was now loose in London, but we had other worries. Mr Champney and Minnie floated towards us. Their tattoos glowed brighter than ever before. Like the sheep, they must have been soaking up the energy of the place.

  “I’m so sorry to do this to you, children,” Mr Champney said, looking at us kindly with his watery eyes. “I tried to keep you safe. I warned you to stay away, and when you insisted on meddling, I sent you off looking for buildings you could never find. But you can’t seem to stay out of trouble. All things considered, you’ll be safer here.”

  “We’ll starve,” Dasra said.