The City of Guardian Stones
Page 19
Mr Champney gestured to a door across the square, and it swung open. “In the course of my research, I learned quite a bit about what’s kept here. Mostly it’s horrible magical forces that must never be unleashed, but that door simply holds Dodgson’s Pitcher. Get it, speak the name of any food or beverage, and it will issue forth from within. Now, if you’ll excuse us. We have humanity to save.” He and Minnie floated towards the alley.
CHAPTER 64
I had only moments to stop them from going, and all I had to work with was doors and sheep. My grandma had taught me plenty about sheep – how to shear them, what they ate – but if there had been a lesson on using them in a desperate last-ditch effort to overcome a magical enemy, I must have been absent.
Unless…
“Are you sure Dodgson’s Pitcher works?” I asked.
“My research hasn’t been wrong yet,” Mr Champney answered.
“But you’re dealing with myths and folklore. Things get mangled in the retelling. If it turns out the pitcher only produces spoiled food or something, we’ll starve to death, and it will be your fault. Let me go and get it and test it out. Then you can leave us with a clear conscience.”
“All right,” Mr Champney said, but Minnie interrupted.
“It’s a trick,” she croaked. “I can see it on her face.”
She had seen right through me. Well, it wasn’t surprising that somebody who had words all over her skin was good at reading body language.
Maybe I could make it work to my advantage. I made my most sincere darn-I’ve-been-discovered face. I let my shoulders slump as though my plan had been foiled. “Fine,” I said. “But there was some truth to what I told you. You really should check out the food supply before you leave us.”
Mr Champney waggled his fingers, and a giant clay pitcher flew to him from the open door. It wasn’t like any pitcher I had ever seen. The lip curled up and backwards to form the handle, twisting in a dizzying way that reminded me of the Coadeway. The whole thing was large enough that he had to hold it with both hands, and heavy enough to bring him floating back down to the ground.
“Strawberries,” he said to the pitcher, and a fountain of strawberries poured out. He tasted one. “Delicious. All seems in order, so we really must —”
“MOLASSES MOLASSES SYRUP SYRUP MOLASSES!” I yelled. A huge plume of sticky stuff erupted from the pitcher, coating Mr Champney and Minnie both.
“What are you —” he began.
“CLOVER CLOVER CLOVER CLOVER CLOVER!” I yelled, and the pitcher erupted into a volcano of green leaves. They clung to the syrup-covered librarian and his daughter, transforming them into human pastures.
Mr Champney sputtered angrily, but I wasn’t paying attention to him. I watched the sheep. They lifted their heads in the air, noses twitching. Leaving behind the meagre grass they had been nibbling, they trotted up to the sticky, clover-covered pair and began to graze.
“Get away from me,” Mr Champney said, but the sheep ignored him. He gestured at them. Nothing happened.
“Sheep absorb magic, remember?” I said. “They’ll soak up any force fields you throw at them.”
“Shoo!” croaked Minnie. She tried to float up, but the sheep had her clothes in their jaws, chewing away and holding her down.
In a moment, she’d slip free. So I had to act fast. “MONTMORILLONITE! MONTMORILLONITE! MONTMORILLONITE!” A powdery grey mass spewed out of Dodgson’s Pitcher, coating Minnie and Mr Champney in a new layer, making them look like statues.
“It’s a kind of mineral,” I explained. “My aunt Mel told me about it once. It’s technically edible, so I could ask the pitcher for it. But more importantly…”
The glow from the sheep shot out of their wool and into the montmorillonite. Little Ben gave an excited squeal and finished my sentence. “More importantly, stones absorb magic from wool…”
Dasra nodded, impressed. “Which we saw happen with the London Stone on the bridge.”
“Know what else I saw, Mr Champney?” I said. “I saw the little trick you did with the Coade stone statues. You overcharged them.”
The glow from the sheep kept streaming into the layer of stone powder, which grew brighter and brighter. I could hardly bear to look at it now. “Those words of power on your arm – they soak up magic, too, don’t they? That’s why you’re so much more powerful here in TH1RT33N SQU4R3. But how much is too much?”
Their tattoos flared so brightly, they shone through the powdered stone and the clover and the syrup and their clothes. I had to look away.
It’s a good thing, too, because when the tattoos exploded, sending powder and clover and molasses and clothing everywhere, I didn’t get anything in my eyes.
CHAPTER 65
The force field that had held us in place evaporated.
Mr Champney and Minnie lay unconscious on the ground, completely naked and no longer glowing. Their skin was bright red but otherwise unmarked, as if the tattoos had blown themselves off their bodies.
The sight of two naked evildoers was pretty eye-catching, but Little Ben was only interested in one thing. He knelt down and pried the leather-bound book out of Minnie’s hand. He flipped it open and showed us the handwritten front page:
Being a Full and True Account
of Certain Remarkable Experiments of
Benjamin Franklin,
with a Complete Explanation of
London’s Magical Rivers and
the Source of Their Powers,
by Moira Herkanopoulos.
“This is it,” Little Ben said. “I know it! This is the book that will tell me who I am.”
“Herkanopoulos is my mother’s maiden name,” I said. “This might be the book that explains what’s going on with my family.”
“Great,” Dasra said. “Now put it back behind the door, and let’s get out of here.”
“Seriously?” Little Ben said. “This is one of the most important books in human history.”
“And yet somebody chose to store it here. If we don’t know why they locked it up, we don’t dare bring it out into the world.”
“We don’t know why it’s here,” I told him, “but we can guess. Ben Franklin said there was some terrible price to immortality. I’m guessing it has something to do with that living sound that Minnie and Mr Champney unleashed. There’s plenty of doors here, so why would they store the book and the sound in the same place? I bet it’s a safety measure. I bet the book tells us how to catch the sound.”
“Then let’s read it here,” Dasra said.
“That will take hours,” I said. “London was already falling down when we left. How much longer can it stand? We’d better stop gabbing and get the London Stone back.”
Dasra looked like he wanted to argue, but he held his tongue. I was impressed – I didn’t know he was capable of that.
I could feel the adrenaline that had kept me going all this time ebbing out of my body, but Dasra and I managed to drag Minnie and Mr Champney onto the sled, while Little Ben lugged Dodgson’s Pitcher back to the door that had held it.
We harnessed the sheep back up to the sled. “Yah, sheep!” Little Ben cried. “Giddyup!”
“That doesn’t work with sheep,” I said. “Here, I’ll show you. You stand behind their shoulder and walk forwards like this…”
Together, we herded the sheep down the alley and up to the vortex. Time to be a sock again, I thought.
CHAPTER 66
When we were through being tumble-dried, we all spilled out onto London Bridge. It was in exactly the same almost-collapsed state in which we had left it. Time must have passed differently inside TH1RT33N SQU4R3.
Dasra turned to me triumphantly. “I was right!” he said. “We could have stayed there and read the book for BLURB BLURB GLUB.”
I might have wondered why he had ended the sentence that way, but since I was standing next to him when the bridge finished collapsing and we both plunged into the Thames, I was too busy blubbing and glubbing myself.
I tried to swim back towards the surface, but something pulled me down. In all that spinning inside the vortex, my foot had got tangled in the lines of the sled. I tried to pull myself free, but the line was tangled tight, and I had no strength left to fight.
Everything began to fade to black. Only little grey dots were left, swirling through my vision. They were, I realized, the last, crumbled remnants of Minnie’s bridge. My ears were full of water, and above the muffled river noises they transmitted – above the occasional clang of a distant boat hull – I heard a sound with surprising clarity: weeping.
It’s the artists who carved all those stones, I thought. They had left something of themselves in everything they made, and Minnie and Mr Champney had used not only the blood of gladiators but the sweat and tears of artisans to power the bridge. And now all that blood, sweat, and tears – the life’s work of countless Londoners – was being swept away by the tide.
My butt scraped the bottom of the Thames, and I felt something poke me. With what would probably be my last movement ever, I reached back and felt what it was.
It was the chisel the weeping ghosts had given me.
It was all that was left of their work, and I was all that was left to remember them.
And I was going to be gone soon.
NO.
I felt the anger welling up inside me. NO, I thought. NO. All that creativity can’t be for nothing.
And with sudden strength, I pointed the chisel at the nearest swirl of dots. The anger surged up from my stomach and through my heart, mixing as it went with my awe at the beauty those poor dead sculptors had carved, and my respect for their hard work, and my gratitude for the heritage they had created. And all those twisty, mixed feelings poured down my arm and through my hand and right into the chisel, and a glowing beam shot out of it.
When I had wielded Excalibrolly and Bazalgette’s Trowel, I had sensed the magic within them. This time, I knew, there was no magic in the chisel. It was just a hunk of metal. The magic was coming from somewhere inside me.
The river lit up. The swirling bits of stone turned to swirling bits of flame. No longer tossed by the current but driven by some internal purpose, they spiralled and coalesced, seeking each other out, meeting up and fusing, as if it was their destiny to be together. The bits of flame became chunks of statues and chunks of wall and chunks of sarcophagi, and the chunks spun together and were reunited.
My lungs must have long ago run out of air. But I felt only strength as the churning Thames began to fill with reassembled treasures.
I became aware that I was rising up towards the surface. I looked down and saw a pillar assembling beneath my feet, pushing me upwards as it did. The ropes that were tangled around my feet snapped.
I broke the surface at the same time as Dasra and Little Ben. They looked down at the newly reassembled archway that had lifted them up. They looked at the river, filled now with a thousand years of stones floating improbably, as if waiting to be collected and returned to their proper places.
And they looked at me. My hand was still extended as the magic from within me finished its work and the last glow faded from the chisel.
“Amaaaaaazing!” Little Ben said.
“How did you do that?” Dasra asked.
“I think…” I said, and stopped. It wasn’t doubt that made me hesitate. I knew the answer with utter certainty. But I knew that once I said it, nothing would be quite the same again. For better or for worse, that’s what happens when you learn a new truth about yourself.
Finally, I said it. “I’m a tosheroon.”
CHAPTER 67
By the time the pillar and the archway dropped us off on the banks of the Thames, the Saltpetre Men had arrived. They wrapped us up in shiny silver blankets. They carted away Minnie and Mr Champney, who had washed up onto the shore, still unconscious, each floating in a separate sarcophagus.
“Brigadier Beale iss in the hosspital,” Inspector Sands said, “but he iss well enough to confirm your innossensse. He hass already released Chapel, and you are free to go. I trusst you will give yoursself a well-desserved resst.”
“Absolutely,” I told him. I caught Little Ben’s eye and winked. “In fact, I think I’m going to go home and curl up with a good book. What could be more relaxing than that?”
Mom came running up and grabbed me in a tight hug. Then she reached out one arm and pulled Little Ben into it.
Dasra stood off to the side, awkwardly. I caught Mom’s eye and, with a slight motion of my head, pointed him out to her. She reached out and pulled him in, too.
I was glad. I mean, despite everything he had done for me, he was still Lady Roslyn’s grandson. I wasn’t going to hug him myself. But if my mom pulled him into a group hug that I happened to be a part of, I wasn’t going to stop her.
When we were done hugging, I stood up straight, cleared my throat, and turned to my mom and my friends.
“Come on, everybody,” I said. “It’s time to find out who we are.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Most of the places that Hyacinth and her friends visit are real, and you can visit many of them, too, although if you are a magical stone creature, please try to do it discreetly.
Borough Market has existed for about a thousand years, and you can still buy all sorts of delicious food there. You can check the opening hours at boroughmarket.org.uk.
If he’s not off on some adventure, Hungerford can be found standing on a plinth at the east end of Westminster Bridge. His fellow Coade stones can be found throughout the city. The less-than-subtle caryatid holds up the roof at St Pancras Parish Church.
The engineers in charge of Tower Bridge run occasional tours into the bascule chamber. See towerbridge.org.uk for tickets. If you plan on using the bascule chamber to crush thousands of years of London’s heritage into magically charged rubble, please ask for permission in advance, as the engineers may frown upon this.
The graveyard of St Pancras Old Church
In the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church, you can see the tree with dozens of gravestones clustered around it, as well as John Soane’s tomb, which is said to have inspired the design of London’s famous red phone boxes. (Note that Hyacinth and her friends were able to get close to Soane’s tomb only because the fence that usually blocks it was mysteriously absent. Please respect any barriers that are there when you visit.)
The clock that used to look out onto Old London Bridge
At the Church of St Magnus the Martyr, the clock that looked out on Old London Bridge and the bit of wood from the old Roman wharf are not the only relics worth seeing. Out in the courtyard are stone fragments of Old London Bridge. Inside the church is a scale model of the bridge as it would have looked in the time of King Henry V. While you’re there, you can pay your respects to Thomas Farriner, the baker in whose oven the Great Fire of London began. He’s buried within the church. Church hours and more information can be found at stmagnusmartyr.org.uk.
The building in which the London Stone used to be halfheartedly displayed behind scratched glass is no longer standing. This is because it was destroyed in the battle between Hyacinth and Minnie Tickle, although the history books will probably claim it was torn down by developers. By the time you read this, the London Stone may once again be on display at 111 Cannon Street, in a brand-new building. I don’t know whether the stone will be more visible in its new home, but I certainly hope it’s better protected against magical theft.
London Bridge alcove
Alcoves from London Bridge stand in Victoria Park, Bow, London E3 5TB. The park is open from 7:00 AM to dusk, 365 days a year.
If you want to get inside the Mount Pleasant Mail Sorting Facility, you have two options. You can commit a serious magical crime, or you can visit the Postal Museum that’s housed there. While you’re there, you can even ride on Mail Rail. (The Mail Submarine is suspiciously absent.) Book tickets at postalmuseum.org.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank ever
ybody who helped me with this book.
For taking the time to answer my questions: Huda Abuzeid, Lucy Hornby, Otis Jennings, Dan McKee, Eric Peng, Lucinda Shih, and Janice Tsai;
My agent, Joan Paquette;
My editors, Diane Landolf at Random House and Gill Evans at Walker UK, and the entire team at both houses;
Teme Ring, Matthew Brozik, Zeba Khan, and Georgina Kamsika for reading early drafts and giving me their feedback;
All my children’s teachers and caregivers, but especially Laura and Sara;
My whole family, with special love and gratitude for Lauren, Erin, Joseph, Mom, and Dad.
Jacob Sager Weinstein is the author of The City of Secret Rivers. He has written for the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, HBO and the BBC. Along with his wife and two children, he lives in London, where he frequently talks to statues. None of them have talked back yet, but he remains hopeful. Visit him at www.jacobsagerweinstein.com, or follow him on Twitter:@jacobsw.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used
fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information
and material of any other kind contained herein are included for
entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for
accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.
First published in Great Britain 2018 by Walker Books Ltd
87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ
Text © 2018 Jacob Sager Weinstein
Cover art and illustrations © 2018 Euan Cook
Photographs © 2018 Jacob Sager Weinstein
The right of Jacob Sager Weinstein to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with the