The City of Secret Rivers

by Jacob Sager Weinstein

  I didn’t have much time to admire it, though. Richard the Raker and Longface Lucky were still balancing their way across the gap, but they were nearly at Troy’s perch. Troy winked at me, picked up his hoe, and swung it around.

  Longface and Richard ducked under Troy’s first swing and leapt over his second. They managed to land nimbly both times, but it did force them to stop walking forwards.

  “Oi there, boy, what’s gotten into you?” Longface shouted.

  “Sorry, gents,” Troy said, swinging again. “I’ve been captivated by her beauty and charm.”

  Look, I don’t know how magic works. Maybe after a big magical catastrophe like the one I had triggered, there’s some kind of recharging period, where you can lie and get away with it. Who could say?

  All I know is, when Troy said he had been captivated by me, the ceiling didn’t collapse.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t know how much longer he could hold out, so there wasn’t time to ask him about it. I ran on, through the archway Lady Roslyn had vanished into a few minutes ago.

  Just inside it was another flight of stone stairs. This one was much shorter – or maybe it just seemed that way, since you can climb stairs a lot more quickly when the building isn’t trying to kill you.

  At the top was a doorway. I ran through it and slammed it behind me. There was a lock on the door, so I locked it, then looked to see where I was.

  The room was an octagon, with no decorations except for a Victorian drinking fountain in the middle. Something about the room’s low iron ceiling looked familiar, but what caught my attention was Lady Roslyn. She was slumped on the floor, unconscious, with a broken brick lying next to her. It looked like a piece of the wall had fallen off and hit her head.

  “Lady Roslyn? Hello?” I tapped her shoulder, but she didn’t wake up. I didn’t see any blood, and her breathing seemed normal, so (I hoped) she wasn’t too badly hurt. Probably she’d wake up soon. Until then, I was on my own.

  I looked around and realized why the ceiling looked so familiar: it looked like a giant manhole cover. And that drinking fountain was just like the one I had seen outside the shopping arcade, right before we jumped into the sewer. It was the exact same set-up – only this time, the manhole cover was above the fountain.

  Well, if it had worked before…

  I closed my eyes and remembered that night at the family reunion when Aunt Uta had sung me to sleep. And then I began to run in a tight circle around the little room, whistling as best I could.

  In the arcade, I had opened an umbrella first. But if I did that now, the drop of water would escape. Fortunately, based on the glowing water I had seen through the cathedral windows, the whole building was bathed in the same magic as the umbrella. I hoped that would be enough.

  And it seemed to be, because as I whistled and ran, the water started welling up from the fountain. At first, it was a little burble, and then it was a gentle line, and soon it became a blast that ploughed into the iron ceiling and quickly erased it.

  With the iron gone, I could now see a much higher stone ceiling beyond it. I wasn’t in a tiny room after all. I was at the base of a tall tower. Huge rusting bells hung high above me, with mouldy ropes dropping down almost close enough for me to reach. I jumped up, trying to grab one, but I couldn’t quite make it. Halfway up the wall, between me and the bells, I saw a door built into the wall, but a fat lot of good it did me there.

  I realized that my feet must have dried off at some point. And the reason I realized this was, they suddenly felt wet again. I looked down and saw that, having erased the ceiling, the water was now pooling on the floor. I wasn’t whistling or running any more, but the fountain was still shooting out water.

  In fact, it was shooting out more and more all the time, and the room was beginning to fill up. The water was already up to my ankles.

  Great.

  Over by the wall, as the cold water lapped over her legs, Lady Roslyn moaned a bit, then slowly woke up. By the time she had finished blinking and shaking her head, the water was already up to her shoulders, which woke her up completely. She leapt to her feet.

  Now the water was up to my shoulders, and now my chin. Before it could reach my mouth, I started paddling, and so did Lady Roslyn. We floated up, up, up, as the tide rose towards the rusting bells. I could easily reach the ropes now, but there wasn’t any need to grab them – the water was lifting me up more quickly than I could have pulled myself. In a moment, I was as high as the door in the wall, but before I could open it, the current swept me upwards.

  Within seconds, it had lifted us up to the very ceiling, and it was still going, filling in the rapidly narrowing band of remaining air. I tilted my mouth up and frantically breathed in a last few gulps – and then there was nothing left to breathe.

  Fortunately, the glow from the umbrella still lit up the water. I pointed to the door in the wall, which was now below us. Lady Roslyn nodded, and we both swam downwards.

  When we got close enough, I reached out and grabbed the door handle and tried to turn it. It wouldn’t budge. It must have rusted shut.

  I gestured to Lady Roslyn, who grabbed it as well. We each braced ourselves with our free hands on the wall and yanked frantically on the handle. The gulp of air I had taken was running out. I desperately needed to breathe, but the handle wouldn’t turn –

  – and then it did. The door swung open, and water started gushing into it.

  We gushed into it, too. Then we gushed out the other side.

  For a moment, I shot through the air.

  Then my face scraped to a stop on paved ground. I coughed out water, and I breathed in sweet-smelling night air. At long last, I was above ground.

  When my lungs stopped complaining, I sat up and looked around. It was dark out, but there were enough streetlamps for me to see where I was.

  I was lying between two parked cars in the middle of the parking lot in front of Charing Cross station.

  I had been to the station before, and I had seen the tall stone monument next to the parking lot. But I had always assumed it was just … well, just a tall stone monument. Now that we had shot out of a door in its side, I realized I had underestimated it. It was actually the bell tower of a massive underground cathedral dedicated to a magical river – the only part of that cathedral that poked out above ground.

  Well, boil me in Betty.

  As I watched, the last bit of water gushed out of the door in the side of the monument and the door swung shut. From the outside, it didn’t look like a door at all. It was just another stone panel on the side of the monument.

  We sat there on the ground, enjoying the experience of being able to breathe. Plus, the clean water inside the bell tower had washed us off, mostly. It was nice not to smell like something unmentionable.

  I took the moment to ask Lady Roslyn about something that had been bothering me. We had been a little too busy with the whole not-getting-crushed-by-a-cathedral thing for me to ask before now.

  “Why shouldn’t you lie around magic?”

  By way of answer, she cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “OK, yes,” I said. “I saw what happened. But why did it happen?”

  “Certain beings are so powerful, they can control magic with nothing more than their very will. The rest of us, when we can control it at all, must use words and pictures. And words and pictures are merely representations of reality. When we lie, we break the relationship between our words and our beliefs about reality, and the results can be” – she rubbed the bruise on her head – “unpleasant.”

  Now I understood why she had phrased things so carefully when she had been speaking to Longface Lucky – “going around the glasshouse”, as he had called it. She didn’t want to tell him the full truth, but she didn’t dare tell an outright lie. And that brought up another question.

  “Why did those people think I was a – what did they call it? A tosheroon?”

  “Every once in a while – once or twice a century, perhaps – the ener
gy of the rivers fuses several powerful items into one item whose power is even greater than the sum of its parts. Bazalgette’s Trowel is one such. It was found at the very source of the Tyburn River and used in the ceremonies that bound the rivers’ powers underground. It vanished shortly thereafter.”

  That was so much to chew over that I almost didn’t notice that she hadn’t answered my question. “OK, but why did they think I’m a tosheroon?”

  She sighed. “I’m not a mind reader, Hyacinth. I wouldn’t dare guess what goes on inside Longface Lucky’s unnaturally tall skull.”

  From a few blocks away, a church bell began tolling the time. I counted the strokes: eleven o’clock. There was one hour until that midnight deadline.

  Lady Roslyn stood up. “Come,” she said. “We have an appointment with some monsters, and we haven’t much time.”

  CHAPTER 16

  I had faced down a giant angry pig. I had escaped a collapsing underground cathedral. I had avoided being captured by scavengers. All that was just a prelude to the one insurmountable challenge of the day:

  Post office closing hours.

  Lady Roslyn and I stood on the deserted street, looking through the darkened windows. There was nobody inside.

  “Don’t you have late-night post offices here?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid we cling to the rather quaint notion that even postal workers ought to go home to their families on occasion.”

  “Then what are we supposed to do?”

  “I have done and experienced much in my long life,” Lady Roslyn said. “But I have never been so careless as to lose my own mother. I am at precisely as much of a loss as you.”

  I ignored the dig, and I thought about what I knew. What had the Saltpetre Men told me to do? They had said to report to the nearest post office once I had the drop of water. Then they had driven away with my mom—

  No, wait. Before they drove off, they threw something at me.

  I dug in my pocket, and despite all the rips in my jeans, and despite all the times I had been turned upside down and shaken around, the antique penny was still there. But what was I supposed to do with it?

  Built into the wall of the building was a stamp-dispensing machine. There was nothing else for me to do, so I slid the penny into the coin slot.

  The machine clicked, and an antique one-penny stamp slid out. I took it.

  “Well done,” said Lady Roslyn. “If we find ourselves in the early nineteenth century, we shall be able to send a postcard.”

  I’m sure I would have been able to come up with a really brilliant response to that, but fortunately, I didn’t have to. There was another click, and the machine, and the wall around it, swung open.

  Behind it was some kind of giant tube, curving back into a hole. From inside the tube came a loud whoosh.

  I felt like I had seen that whole set-up before, in one of my history books, but I couldn’t place it until a giant glass box, shaped like a huge pill, came hurtling out of the tube and landed with a thunk. Then I remembered. “That’s a pneumatic tube. They used to use them at banks, only those were smaller. You’d put a message in the glass box and put the glass box in the big vacuum tube, and it would get sucked up and shot off to whoever the message was for.”

  The door of the giant glass box swung open. It was cushioned inside, and it looked like there was just enough room for us both to squeeze in. It didn’t exactly look comfortable.

  But what alternative did we have? I looked at Lady Roslyn. She looked at me.

  We climbed in, and the door swung shut behind us. Then, with a mighty whoosh, the glass box, and us with it, got sucked upwards.

  Over the past couple of hours, I had been hurtled up and down through enough dark passages that I would have thought I’d get used to it. But having my cheek pressed up against Lady Roslyn’s, with a glowing umbrella wedged between us, added a whole new level of oh-my-God-I-hope-I-don’t-vomit to the experience.

  Plus, the giant glass pill kept slowly turning around as it shot through the pneumatic tube, so first I’d fall onto Lady Roslyn, then she’d fall onto me, and then we’d repeat. (On the plus side, the water never leaked out of the umbrella, despite the tossing. I guess there was some kind of magic force field keeping it in.)

  “I have noticed,” Lady Roslyn said as we toppled back and forth, “that young people are particularly – OOF! – susceptible to fads. In my youth, for example, there was one of bright red lipstick. I mention this because – OUCH! – now that we’re face to face, I’m curious to know if leaving your teeth unbrushed has become suddenly fashionable.”

  As crazy as my mom and dad were about a lot of things (like whether macaroni belonged in pancakes, or whether moms and dads belonged together), they had brought me up pretty well, and I knew it was wrong to insult an elderly woman. Which meant I couldn’t say about 99 per cent of the things I wanted to say when Lady Roslyn insulted me. I just bit my tongue, metaphorically.

  And then I bit my tongue literally. I also bit both cheeks and a lip, because the glass box came to the end of the pneumatic tube and crashed into the floor with teeth-clattering force.

  The box swung open, and we staggered out.

  We were in a room that hadn’t been dusted in half a century. It must have been some sort of arrival hall. In a row along one wall were the open ends of a dozen different pneumatic tubes. There was leather padding on the floor, probably to make for a soft landing, but it was tattered, with only a few bits of stuffing left. No wonder we had landed with such a loud crash.

  Old propaganda posters clung to the wall. One of them showed two men fighting each other next to a glowing underground river, while a big image of a soldier wearing a spiky helmet loomed over them, rubbing his hands in glee. The caption said, WHEN WE FIGHT EACH OTHER, THE KAISER WINS. Another poster showed a burning building, with the caption DID THE GERMANS DO THIS? OR DID YOU MIX HOT AND COLD WATER?

  Lady Roslyn looked around and sighed. “One might imagine that when the Royal Mail’s budget was cut, it would siphon money from its less important functions, like delivering the mail. One might hope that the facilities for preventing magical catastrophe would be updated regularly. Sadly, one would be wrong.”

  A group of dusty, burned-out light bulbs was arranged in an arrow, pointing out the door. We followed them and headed down a long corridor, lit by a few flickering fluorescent lights.

  The corridor opened out onto a road, and on the side of the road was a post office. It looked exactly like the post office outside of which we had entered the pneumatic tube, but with two key differences.

  First, it was clearly open. Through the dirty windows, we could make out a line of people waiting inside.

  And second, it was underground. Instead of the night sky above us, there was a jagged rock ceiling. The road in front of it wasn’t more than twenty feet long, and it led from one jagged rock wall to another.

  We crossed the road, opened the door, and stepped in, and took our place at the end of the line. There were two dozen people ahead of us, all clutching parcels and envelopes. And the parcels were all glowing, or trembling, or rumbling ominously. From inside one of them, a muffled voice was calling out, “I say! A fellow can’t see in here! Who turned out all the lights?”

  Now that I looked closely, not all the people were actually people. A number of places ahead of us was a Saltpetre Man, calmly holding a ukulele that was frantically playing itself.

  Just like in an above ground post office, there were long counters, with clerks standing behind Plexiglas windows. These clerks, though, weren’t human; they were Saltpetre Men. The monsters weren’t any faster-moving down here than they had been when we had run away from them before. That explained why the line was moving so slowly, but it raised another question.

  “If the Saltpetre Men work here, why is that one waiting in line with everybody else?” I asked.

  “Presumably because he is here in his off hours, rather than in his capacity as an employee of the Royal Mail.
”

  “But why does the Royal Mail hire monsters in the first place? What does the mail have to do with the secret rivers?”

  “Ah, it’s taken you a mere thirteen hours to ask that. No doubt you arrived at it so quickly thanks to all the time your generation saves by not working hard at anything.”

  Fine. I wasn’t going to insult her back, but maybe I could borrow her trick and dance right up to the edge of insulting her without technically crossing over. “So is dodging questions something your generation is good at, or is that just you?”

  She looked pleased. “You do have the tiniest bit of spirit after all! My dear, you don’t know how happy that makes me. If I seem hard on you at times, it is simply because you’re about a hard business. I’m hoping all my little digs will let you build up a thick skin, for when you have to face genuine horror.”

  I tried to imagine what the genuine horror she was preparing me for was, but then I realized: “You did it again. You still haven’t answered my question.”

  She smiled again. “Well spotted. When magic is around, no one will dare lie to you, but many will do everything they can to dodge the truth. Now, then. The Royal Mail hires monsters as the result of a century-old compromise. I’ve already told you that there is a demented faction of anarchists that wishes to see the power of the rivers handed out like candy. That faction has cells around the world – in Paris, and New York, and Tokyo, and anywhere there are similar sources of magical power. In 1914, one of those foreign cells assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. I don’t wish to presume too much historical knowledge on your part, since you are an American, but you may have heard of the consequence of that assassination: a little disagreement known as World War One.

  “Now, were I in charge of the government, I might have responded by crushing the British branch of the anarchist cult that started the war. Then, heeding the wisdom of the Inheritors of Order, I would have forbidden the use of magic by all but a specially trained elite. However, our democratically elected representatives chose a different path. They shut down all sides in the fight over the rivers’ power. They imposed a truce, buttressed by a series of compromises. For example, hot and cold water could be mixed in the shower, since shower heads break the water up into lots of tiny little streams, which diminishes their power to a small, safe dose. Anybody who took a shower in the proximity of a secret river would get a modest boost of inspiration, without risking another Great Fire.”