“We made it ourselves, out of stuff that washed down the sewer,” Little Ben added, although I could have guessed. It was a mishmash of elements and a dozen different shades of red. One of the wheels was from a horse cart, and another was from a bicycle, and none of them were the same size. The “driver” was a stuffed toy gorilla wearing a Prince Charles mask. Plus, although Oaroboarus was huge for a pig, he was awfully small for a bus. Still, I couldn’t fault their attention to detail. They had even put an ad on the side, made from whatever fragments they could find:
DR CLARET’S EFFERVESCENT BRAIN SALTS.
NOW WITH A FIVE-MEGAPIXEL TV DINNER.
Groovy!
Little Ben was looking at me with his usual eagerness, waiting for me to say something. I didn’t want to tell the truth and hurt his feelings, but I also didn’t want to lie and make things blow up. “It’s unbelievable!” I blurted ambiguously. Then, before he had time to figure out whether or not that was a compliment, I climbed on board. “Let’s go!”
“You’re not going anywhere until you give us back the stones,” a voice boomed.
Brigadier Beale stood between us and the exit Minnie had used, dozens of Corkers behind him. From the opposite side, more Corkers poured in, blocking the only other exit.
CHAPTER 26
The megaphone in Beale’s hand kind of seemed like overkill – he wasn’t more than ten feet away from us. Still, the ringing that his overamplified voice left in my ears was the least of my problems. “This isn’t how it looks,” I said, pointing at the freshly cut wall. “Unless it looks like somebody else stole it and we’re about to catch her.”
“Present arms!” Brigadier Beale boomed. Behind him, the front row of Corkers raised their guns. These guns weren’t like any I had seen before – they had the big round cartridges of a gangster’s tommy gun, but in place of a gun barrel, there was a large slingshot.
“Put up your hands, get off the pig, and walk slowly forwards,” Beale said.
“Let me make a counter offer,” I said. “We’re leaving, and if your men don’t get out of our way, Oaroboarus is going to knock them all down.”
Picking up my cue, Oaroboarus trotted forwards menacingly.
“Warning shot,” Beale called. The Corker closest to him pointed his weapon at Oaroboarus’s feet and pulled the trigger. Gunfire raked the ground, forcing Oaroboarus to stop.
Then one of the bullets bounced up in the air and landed on my lap, and I realized it wasn’t gunfire at all. They were shooting pebbles at us.
I didn’t have much time to wonder about it, though. “Stop her!” Beale yelled. The Corkers stood shoulder to shoulder and began to swell, until both exits had been filled by an impenetrable mass of uniformed orangey skin.
“Did he say ‘stop her’ or ‘stopper’?” Mom asked.
“Ooh, good question,” Little Ben said.
I was about to be annoyed with them for getting distracted when I realized that Mom might have somehow hit on something. He had said “stopper” – and it wasn’t the first time I had heard the word used as a verb.
Once, a bunch of my aunts got together for a big wine-making project. But when they stoppered the bottles – that is, when they put the corks in them – they had done something wrong.
A few weeks later, we were in the basement to check on them and the corks all popped out. As we dodged the flying corks, we slipped on spilled wine, and we all ended up flat on the floor, laughing. Afterwards, Aunt Rainey explained what had happened. “As the wine fermented,” she said, “air pressure built up inside the bottles, and eventually, it forced the corks out.”
So I knew what stoppering was – and I knew that you could pop corks out from the inside, if you put steady pressure on them. I leaned over and whispered in Oaroboarus’s ear. “This is going to seem crazy, but trust me.” Then I sat up and pointed at Brigadier Beale. “ATTACK!” I yelled.
Oaroboarus charged. As the massive pig bounded towards him, Brigadier Beale’s eyes widened, but he didn’t blanch. “Fire!” he yelled.
“Reverse!” I told Oaroboarus. “Head for the other exit.”
Surprisingly nimble for such a giant creature, Oaroboarus pirouetted, dodging a hailstorm of pebblefire, and ran back towards the other side of the garage. That way was blocked by Corkers, too, of course – but that was part of my plan.
“Keep running back and forth in front of them,” I told Oaroboarus. As he did so, I ducked down, and Mom and Little Ben did the same, while pebbles pocked and pinged off the metal plates of the bus costume.
More importantly, they pocked and pinged off the wall of Corkers. I stuck my head up long enough to see that the pebbly onslaught was slowly pushing them back. “Keep going!” I called to Oaroboarus.
The Corkers moved back a little more … a little more … a little more … and then all at once, they exploded backwards, flying out of the garage and into the street beyond.
CHAPTER 27
As pebbles pinged behind us, Oaroboarus sprinted through the newly opened exit. The Corkers beyond were already bouncing back up, but now that they were separated, Oaroboarus barrelled through them easily.
Little Ben pointed up at the sky. “Wow! They’ve got a helicopter!” he said.
He was right. The chopper hung in the sky, firing pebbles downwards at something several blocks away from us.
“I bet it’s chasing Minnie,” I said. “Follow that helicopter.”
While Oaroboarus ran towards it, I pulled the pebble out of my pocket and held it up. “They’re not using regular ammo,” I said.
“That’s good,” Little Ben said as Oaroboarus swerved to avoid running over a group of toddlers crossing the street. “Otherwise, this could be dangerous.”
By now, we were in sight of Minnie, who was weaving wildly through traffic while the helicopter sprayed pebbles at her. The streets were full of cars, honking as they dodged Minnie, and the pavements were full of people, screaming and dropping their lunches as they dodged the pebblefire.
“I can see why Inspector Sands said the Corkers were unsafe for bystanders,” I said, and then another thought occurred to me. “Hey, remember what else Inspector Sands said? About what stones do?”
“Ooh, yes! They absorb magic. You think they’re trying to turn off her powers?”
“That’s my guess.”
Minnie’s tattoos were swirling once more. Keeping one hand on her handlebars, she lifted the other and pointed a finger towards the helicopter. Her hand glowed a fiery red – but then a pebble hit it, and the flow fizzled out immediately.
By now, traffic had come to a complete standstill. Minnie zipped between two rows of stopped cars and vanished around a corner.
Oaroboarus’s eyes narrowed into a familiar look of stubborn determination, and I knew he was not going to let her get away. He jumped up onto a car and began to hop from roof to roof in a highly un-buslike way. Then he leapt off onto the pavement, skidded around the corner, and squeezed through a row of bins, and we found ourselves on London Bridge.
Mom and I had seen London Bridge in our first few days in the UK, and I had found it pretty disappointing. It was an ordinary, not-very-attractive bridge. But now, as we got closer and closer to Minnie, I finally found something to appreciate about it: it had a lovely pavement, just wide enough for a giant pig in a bus costume.
CHAPTER 28
As we galloped off the bridge into a short tunnel under a railway, we finally caught up with Minnie’s motorcycle. It was parked next to a pedestrian passage leading off to one side. The only problem was, she wasn’t on it.
“Ooh, smart,” Little Ben said. “She got off under the railway tracks, out of view of the helicopter.”
“Let’s steal her idea,” I said. “Oaroboarus, let me and Little Ben climb down. Then you keep going. I bet the helicopter is tracking us as well – let them see you come out of the tunnel.”
Mom started to climb down with us. The next bit was going to require some subtlety and good judgement,
which were not qualities I thought Mom particularly possessed. So I quickly added, “Mom, you’d better stay with Oaroboarus. We … um … we might need him in a hurry, and we can’t wait for a message to work its way through the sewer system. Stay close and be ready to answer your phone.”
The pedestrian passage was made of arched brown brick, thick enough to block out the sound of gunfire and the helicopter, and there was no sign here of the panic we had seen on the street outside. Instead, a meandering mob strolled in both directions. We pushed our way through.
The passage opened up into a broad market square, with stalls selling all kinds of food under a wide awning that said BOROUGH MARKET. As the smells wafted by, I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since last night. I turned to Little Ben. “You know what the problem with magical adventures is? Not enough lunch breaks.”
“When we catch Minnie, we’ll make her cook us hot dogs with her fingers,” he said.
“Speaking of flaming fingers, you seemed to recognize the words she was writing,” I said.
“Oh, yeah! They’re from the Bible. The book of Daniel, chapter five. King Belshazzar of Babylon threw a feast, and in the middle of it, a disembodied hand appeared. With its finger, it wrote a mysterious message on the wall: mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.”
“The same words Minnie wrote. But what do they mean?”
“You’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom will be divided.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It wasn’t. The king was killed that night, and his kingdom was broken up.”
“Is there anything in the story about the Precious Man?”
Little Ben shook his head. “Not that I remember.”
“Wait!” I said. “Remember that book that Mr Champney read us? It said the Precious Man’s daughter was named Minnie Tickle. But it was an oral history. I bet the stone carver said Mene Tekel and the author misheard.”
“Ooh, I bet you’re right!”
“I’m going to stick with ‘Minnie Tickle’,” I said. “She’s kind of intimidating. I’m hoping a silly name will help.”
We made our way past a stall selling noodles fragrant with sesame oil, and another one overflowing with fresh-baked bread. There were mushrooms sautéeing in a pan as big as a wagon wheel, and —
Look at the people, Hyacinth, not the food.
I searched the faces around me. None of them were Minnie – and any of them could have been the Precious Man.
We came to a small road that ran through the middle of the market. Parked along it were delivery vehicles, and rubbish bins, and fork-lifts … and one familiar white van.
Little Ben spotted it, too. “There’s nobody in the driver’s seat. He must have met her here.”
“PSST!” a voice whispered. “Over, over here.”
We followed the sound to a mound of rubbish bags with a large stone snout sticking out. Hungerford lifted his head, sending the bags above cascading downwards. “I stuck close to, to, to my prey. Alas, I didn’t get a, a, a good look at the driver when he parked and exited here, but I’ve staked out this, this vantage point, and I’ll spot him when he returns.”
“Well done!” I said.
“In, in, in my humble opinion, it was nothing out of the ordinary. But if you, if you happen to think it was a spectacularly impressive display of hunting instincts, would you mind mentioning it to Oaroboarus?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll— Hey! Over there.”
Across the road, two tall green cast-iron pillars led into a roofed part of the market. And between them – was that a flash of red scarf, tied around someone’s waist? “Keep an eye out here,” I told Hungerford as Little Ben and I headed for the pillars.
We pushed our way through the workers in office attire and tourists in T-shirts, catching an occasional glimpse of red fabric through gaps in the mob. Suddenly, the crowd opened up, and there was Minnie, queued up at a stall selling sizzling-hot sausages.
“Should we grab her?” Little Ben whispered.
“Even if we turned her over to Brigadier Beale, he’d say we were trying to keep the stolen stones for ourselves. Until we get them back, we’ll never prove we’re innocent.” I pulled him into the nearest queue. “Look inconspicuous,” I said.
We waited there, turning our backs whenever it looked like she was about to glance over our way. She moved forwards in her queue; we moved forwards in ours.
Finally, she reached the front and whispered something to the sausage man. He nodded. She gave him a handful of change.
“Can I help you, miss?” someone said to me. Surprised, Little Ben and I turned our attention away from Minnie and discovered we were at the front of our queue.
“Um, I’ll take one, please,” I said, looking back at Minnie. She was already walking away from the sausage stand – but she wasn’t holding a sausage. What had she bought there?
The vendor at our stall handed me a cup of something, with a fork sticking out. “That’ll be —”
“Here,” I said, grabbing a note from my pocket. “Keep the change.”
Little Ben and I hurried after Minnie. “Did you see what she bought?” I asked him.
“No!” he said. “I was hoping you did!”
So far, I thought I had handled our investigation pretty well. Taking our eyes off Minnie had been my first big mistake. I was so determined not to repeat that mistake that I made a different one:
I ate what was in the cup I had bought without checking to see what it was.
And what it was, was a jellied eel.
Jellied eels, it turns out, taste like a delicious piece of delicate cooked fish, soaked in fresh snot.
“Blhrmmmmmh,” I said, which is the sound of somebody who wants to shout in disgust but has to keep her mouth shut so she doesn’t give herself away to the person she’s tailing.
Up ahead, Minnie had made it to the van. She unlocked the back, revealing a large wheeled suitcase. For a moment, she pointed her finger at it, as if she was about to magic it down to the pavement. Then, remembering she was in a crowded place being hunted by soldiers, she heaved it out the old-fashioned way. It crashed onto the ground.
I mouthed the word Stones? to Little Ben. He nodded.
As she shut the van, Little Ben and I ducked behind a pile of potatoes and waited for her to pass us by.
But we weren’t the only ones watching her. From all sides, orange-skinned men began to close in on her. It’s a good thing they don’t know we’re here, I thought.
“HYACINTH!” roared Hungerford. He popped out of the mound of rubbish and bounded right to us. “I see that, that tattooed young woman!”
The Corkers and Minnie whirled around. Hungerford looked at them and then back at us. “Who, who are those orange gentlemen? Friends of yours?”
CHAPTER 29
A group of Corkers wobbled towards us, cutting us off from Minnie. “Can you clear a path?” I asked Hungerford. “We need to go —”
Before I could say “that way” and point, Hungerford roared out “Yes!” and bounded off in the wrong direction. He barrelled into a Corker, sending him tumbling and creating a beautiful gap in the line of Corkers, precisely where we didn’t need him to.
“Come back!” I yelled, but he didn’t hear me over the noise of the crowd and just bounded enthusiastically out of sight.
On the opposite side of the market, I could see Minnie about to leave, unimpeded. So not only had Hungerford failed to help me, he had created a distraction that was letting her escape.
If I’d been a huge magical animal, I could have just barrelled my way through to her, but unlike Hungerford and Oaroboarus, I didn’t have the mass of several dozen people combined. Although … you know who did have the mass of several dozen people?
Several dozen people, that’s who.
“Fire!” I yelled, and started pushing towards Minnie. “Fire!”
Little Ben caught on immediately. “Fire!” he yelled. “Flood! Famine! Sorr
y, I got carried away.”
By that point, other people in the crowd had already picked up the call, setting off a stampede to the exit. If the Corkers had had the chance to squeeze together, they could have bounced the mob right off, but the mass of panicked market-goers surged over them too quickly. I saw several orange men bouncing over the crowd like balloons at a concert as we poured onto the street.
Minnie had a head start, but the weight of the suitcase must have slowed her down, and as we spilled out of the market, I spotted her across the street, heading into London Bridge Tube station.
We crossed as soon as the light changed, but by the time we got inside the station, she had a two-minute lead. “There!” Little Ben said, pointing down a flight of steps to a concourse below. We couldn’t see her over the heads of the commuters, but we could see people stumbling over her suitcase, as though a wave of clumsiness were passing through the crowd.
“She’s heading for the ticket gates. Do you have an Oyster?” I asked Little Ben as we ran down the steps.
“Yes!” He reached into his carpetbag and pulled out an oyster shell.
“No, not an actual oyster. An Oyster card. It’s, like, a ticket for the Tube.”
“I mostly travel by sewer.”
“No problem.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out two of the blue-and-white cards. “I don’t trust Mom to carry hers. I’m sure she won’t mind you using it.”
We passed through the gates and spotted Minnie lugging her suitcase into a lift. “This is our chance!” I said – but the doors closed just as we got there.
We turned around and ran back to the escalator.
In my short time in London, I had learned that it was a very diverse city. There were mosques and churches and synagogues and Hindu temples. But if there was one religious belief that all Londoners held with equal fervour, it was this:
Stand on the right. Walk on the left.
The City of Guardian Stones Page 8
