The City of Guardian Stones Read online

  Contents

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 1

  I had saved London, and my mother, and possibly the entire world. I had uncovered a vast magical conspiracy stretching back centuries.

  Not bad for one week of summer holiday.

  Still, it wasn’t enough. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know why a group of sewer-dwellers thought I was a valuable magical treasure. I wanted to know why my mother’s blood was so powerful that a mysteriously strong elderly lady had tried to drain it. I wanted to know why Mom’s memory was supernaturally bad.

  Most of all, I wanted to know why my family was linked to the secret magical rivers that ran under the streets of London. I was pretty sure that why would answer all my other questions. And if I didn’t get them answered – well, I had a feeling that Lady Roslyn wouldn’t be the last person who wanted to get her hands on Mom’s blood.

  When most kids have a question about their family history, they just ask their parents. Believe me, I tried.

  I asked Mom, but she had a hard enough time remembering the details of yesterday’s breakfast, let alone decades past.

  I called my grandma and every one of Mom’s eight sisters, and none of them answered the phone. None of them answered my emails. In desperation, I even sent them actual postal letters, which I hadn’t done since I was little. I doubted any of them would write back, but Grandma had raised all nine of her daughters to be big on putting things on paper, so there was at least a chance that a handwritten note would prompt some sort of reaction.

  I even called Dad in America. It wasn’t his side of the family – but at least he was taking my calls. “What do you know about Mom’s family?” I asked him.

  “Well, Hyacinth, Mom and her sisters grew up in London and then moved to America. And Grandma’s parents were from Greece.”

  “I know that,” I said. “But don’t you think it’s weird that that’s all we know?”

  “I never met Grandpa Herkanopoulos, but I gather he had some huge fight with his father and cut off all contact. And your grandparents were cousins – which wasn’t considered that weird in the old country – so cutting off Grandpa’s family meant cutting off Grandma’s, too. It all sounded very painful, which is why I always figured Grandma didn’t want to talk about it.”

  And that was it. That was the best answer I could get.

  If nobody in my family could explain our mysterious connection to London, maybe London could. Maybe if I retraced my steps, I’d be able to spot new clues, now that I didn’t have the whole trying-to-save-my-mother-from-doom thing to worry about.

  Lady Roslyn and I had entered the sewers through a manhole outside a dusty and faded shopping arcade near Baker Street station, so that’s where I started. The manhole cover was still there, as was the battered marble fountain next to it – but the entire arcade had vanished. Where once there had been a large arch, there was now a solid wall.

  After splitting off from Lady Roslyn, I had gone to the top of the Monument to the Great Fire of London with my friend Little Ben and a giant pig named Oaroboarus, and it had fallen completely on its side, exposing the hole beneath it where a magical fire hook was kept. The Monument was standing upright back in its usual place, of course, but in the plaza next to it, at the exact spot where the Monument had landed, there was a small one-storey building, built out of stone blocks covered with reflective glass. The sign on the door said it was a toilet – but if you were going to build something to stop a giant, heavy monument from lying flat, and to bounce off any magic that hit it, that’s what you’d end up with.

  Everywhere I looked, damage had been repaired. Entrances had been sealed. The only evidence of my adventure was the care that somebody had taken to cover it up. And an antique stamp that had still been in the pocket of my sewage-soaked jeans when I finally changed out of them. After it dried, I had tucked it into my phone case so that I could look at it whenever I started to think I had imagined everything. During my long day of fruitless investigating, I had looked at it a lot.

  So when I trudged up the three flights of steps to Aunt Polly’s flat, I was tired and frustrated.

  Then I noticed that the door to the flat was open.

  I ran inside. “Mom?” I called. There was no answer.

  CHAPTER 2

  “MOM!” I yelled.

  “Down here, honey,” Mom’s voice called from outside the flat.

  I followed it out of the door and to the flat below us. It had been Lady Roslyn’s flat before Inspector Sands and his Saltpetre Men took her away. Now the door swung open, and Mom leaned out.

  “Hi, honey! I’m just meeting our new neighbours.”

  I followed her inside. The flat had the same layout as Aunt Polly’s, but instead of being covered with elaborate geometric patterns, the walls were plain white. The smell of fresh paint hung in the air. There were half-unpacked boxes everywhere, with a Manchester return address.

  A woman about the same age as my mom stood up from a sofa and held out her hand. “I’m Zarna,” she said. She turned to one of the larger boxes and said, “Dasra, we have another guest.”

  Dasra popped up from behind the box, his arms full of shirts. He glared at me as though I had done something horribly offensive. “Do you live upstairs also?” he demanded.

  I admit it: I sometimes have a problem talking to cute boys, and Dasra certainly qualified. Plus, his posh English accent added thirty cuteness points, easily. If he had been charming or even vaguely friendly, I might have got a little tongue-tied. But the fact that he was making small talk in the tones usually reserved for police interrogations made him a lot less attractive. And that made me more at ease.

  “I’m absolutely delighted to welcome you to the building,” I said in the warmest voice I could manage. As I had hoped it would, my friendliness made him visibly more annoyed. Without answering, he turned ar
ound and carried his shirts out of the room.

  “You’ll have to forgive him,” Zarna said. “Moving is always hard, and it’s been a turbulent summer for us.”

  I was pretty sure his summer hadn’t been more turbulent than mine, but Zarna was being very friendly, and based on the fact that she hadn’t yet tried to kill Mom, she was already turning out to be a better neighbour than Lady Roslyn. So I nodded politely and said, “I understand. If you’ll excuse us, I wanted to have a word with my —”

  “Zarna was telling me that her mother just moved into an assisted-living facility,” Mom said.

  “That must be tough,” I said to Zarna, then turned back to Mom. “If we could go —”

  “It’s so hard when your parents get old,” Mom said. “I’m constantly worried about my mother, although of course she’s in perfect health and she never forgets anything. The other day, she was saying – wait, what was she saying? Honey, do you remember?”

  By the time I extracted Mom, Zarna had served us a dozen samosas, a plateful of sweet, chewy spirals called jalebis, and three cups of tea (putting the milk in second, I noticed).

  Dasra came in and out on various unpacking missions, but he never made any effort to join in the conversation. In fairness, nobody but my mom got many words in edgeways, but at least Zarna and I tried.

  Eventually, I dragged Mom back upstairs. “You didn’t tell Zarna anything about Lady Roslyn, did you?” I asked as we walked in.

  “No,” Mom said, and for a moment, I began to have a small glimmer of faith in her common sense, until she added, “I completely forgot to mention it. Should we go back and tell her?”

  “No!” I said. “We finally have a neighbour we get along with. Let’s not make her think we’re crazy.”

  “Whatever you say, dear. How was your day? You were going to do some shopping, weren’t you?”

  “What? No. I was investigating the whole magical-conspiracy thing. Remember?”

  “Of course, dear. I’d have to be awfully scatterbrained to forget that.”

  I briefly considered about ten million possible responses, but all I said was “I didn’t find anything.”

  “Good for you for trying, though!” Mom said, patting me on the shoulder. “Maybe you can ask your friend the monster if he has any thoughts.”

  “You mean Inspector Sands?” I asked. “I’d love to, but I don’t know how. He didn’t exactly leave me his phone number.”

  “You didn’t see him at the amphitheatre?”

  I stared at her. “The what?”

  “The ancient Roman amphitheatre. Here.” She fished around in a pile of newspapers and handed me one.

  ROMAN RUINS BURGLED

  Stones that have lain undisturbed beneath London for nearly two millennia have been stolen, The Times can reveal.

  Since being discovered beneath the Guildhall Art Gallery in 1985, the ruins of London’s Roman amphitheatre have been carefully preserved in their original location. Between 5 PM yesterday, when the museum closed, and 6 AM today, when the cleaning crew arrived, hundreds of stones, forming the bulk of the old Roman walls, disappeared.

  “These stones are a priceless part of London’s heritage,” said Brigadier Valentine Beale, head of the Royal Special Investigatory Corps. “We will not rest until they are returned.”

  Brigadier? Corps? I wondered. Aren’t those military terms? Why is the military investigating some stolen rocks?

  Accompanying the article was a photo. A square-jawed man in a military uniform – I guessed he was Brigadier Beale – knelt down, apparently looking for clues. Set in the floor at his feet was a glass panel, now shattered. The photographer’s flash had turned the remaining shards into little mirrors, and reflected in them was a face that looked like it had been sloppily sculpted out of mud, then decorated with a red line around the forehead. Once, I would have thought it was just a distorted reflection in the broken glass. Now, though, I knew exactly who it was.

  “Inspector Sands! Mom, why didn’t you show me this before I left this morning?”

  “I did show you, sweetie.”

  “No, you didn’t! You showed me an article about a penguin that plays cricket!”

  “But that was interesting, too, wasn’t it?”

  I glanced at the clock. It was a little past four, and the article said the Guildhall was open until five. If I hurried out of the door, I could probably make it.

  “I’ll be back, Mom. I’ve got to check out that article.”

  “But, honey, the penguin isn’t playing any matches until next week.”

  “What? No. The one about the Roman stones.”

  Mom grabbed her hat. “Then I’ll come with you.”

  “Um, that’s really kind of you to offer,” I said. “But I think you should stay home and make dinner. The key to any good magical investigation is a full stomach. So, really, I’m trusting you with the most important part of the whole equation.”

  Every once in a while, Mom had a lucid moment, and she had one now. “I know I’m not always as focused as you’d like me to be, sweetie. But you looked without me and you couldn’t find anything. Maybe magic is more likely to happen when I’m around.”

  I wasn’t excited about the idea. Mom had a tendency to make a mess out of things, and if I brought her along, I was going to have to spend time looking after her instead of looking for clues.

  On the other hand, if I left her at home, she would probably get into trouble anyway. Maybe I was better off keeping her where I could see her. Plus, she was looking at me with big, sad eyes. “All right, Mom. Let’s go and look for a monster.”

  CHAPTER 3

  If I were telling you where to find an ancient Roman amphitheatre hidden under a building, I’d make a pretty big deal about it. But here’s what the sign in the Guildhall Art Gallery said:

  Personally? I would have ranked the ancient Roman ruins above the cloakroom and the toilets.

  We followed the signs past paintings and sculptures until we arrived at another staircase. The top was blocked by yellow POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS tape. At the bottom, a pair of glass doors led into darkness.

  I lifted the police tape and ducked under. Mom hesitated. “Are we allowed to do that? It says ‘do not cross’. Doesn’t that mean we’re breaking the law? What if we set off a chain of events that ends with us locked in jail with a murderer?”

  “What if we don’t go through and we end up being trapped in this room with a murderer?”

  “That’s a very good point, sweetie,” Mom said, and followed me.

  We stepped through the glass doors, and for the first time since we left the Crossness sewage pumping station, I knew I was in the presence of magic.

  It was a long, dark room, filled with strange glowing people. Rippling lights swam across the floor. The roars of an ancient crowd mingled with an unearthly grinding sound.

  Then my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I realized that the glowing people were figures painted on glass. The rippling lights on the floor came from spotlights with rotating covers, and the grinding noise just meant that the covers were overdue for some lubrication. And when the roars of the crowd paused, then started over again, I realized they were an audio loop coming from discreetly recessed speakers in the walls.

  It wasn’t magic I was witnessing. It was tourism.

  A path stretched through the middle of the room, between the remnants of two old stone walls. I don’t know how tall they had been originally, but now they were barely three inches high. They had been cut in a perfectly straight line, as if a laser beam had sheared them off.

  Further inside the room, I found the shattered glass panel we had seen in the photograph. I looked around, half expecting to see Inspector Sands, but of course he was long gone. Instead, I knelt to see what the glass had been protecting: a long series of wooden planks. I wasn’t an archaeologist, but if my experiences had prepared me to recognize anything, it was this.

  “It’s a sewer,” I told Mom. “The water must
have come down this narrow channel, and the muck and sand would drop into this deeper part so they wouldn’t clog things up.”

  “Somebody stole part of an old sewer? There are so many nicer ones. Like the one where Lady Roslyn tried to kill me. That was lovely.”

  I looked more closely. “The funny thing is, I don’t think they did steal any part of it. I mean, there’s bits and pieces missing, but these edges are jagged, like they fell off over the years. It’s not smooth like the spot where the Roman wall was cut off.”

  Someone stepped outside from behind a pillar. In the dim light, it was impossible to see who it was, but Mom and I jumped to the same conclusion.

  “The police!” Mom said. “Don’t lock us in jail with a killer!”

  “Oooh, is there a killer on the loose?” the new arrival asked. “Are you going to catch him? Can I help?”

  He stepped forwards enough for me to see that he was much too short to be a policeman – and in any case, I had recognized his voice immediately. “Little Ben!” I said, and ran over to him.

  When we had finished hugging, we both asked at the same time, “What are you doing here?” Then we both said, “I bet I can guess.”

  “You go first,” he said.

  “You saw the same newspaper article I did, didn’t you?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I would have been here sooner, but I only get newspapers when they drift down the drain, and it can take a few hours.”

  “But why were you hiding?”

  “I thought you were the police.”

  “I’m sorry we crossed your police line! Don’t arrest us!” Mom said.

  “Mom, Little Ben isn’t the police. Don’t you remember him?”

  “But I wasn’t talking to him,” Mom said. “I was talking to them.”

  She pointed over our shoulders. Between us and the exit stood a dozen tall men. With their square jaws and their thick muscles bulging under military uniforms, they would have looked like old-fashioned film stars if it weren’t for their complexions, which were a weird, mottled orange. Only one of them had normal skin, and I recognized him from the newspaper article.

  “Crossing police lines to trespass on an ancient monument-slash-crime-scene,” said Brigadier Valentine Beale. “I hope you have a very good explanation.”