The City of Secret Rivers

by Jacob Sager Weinstein

  That didn’t seem too likely. But if I was going to figure out something utterly unlikely, maybe there were worse people to talk to than a sewer-dwelling eleven-year-old and his giant pig. That didn’t mean I was ready to trust them – but it meant that this time, I wasn’t going to run away.

  I sat down at the table.

  Little Ben beamed. “Excellent!” he exclaimed.

  I suddenly realized I hadn’t eaten for ages, and I was starving. I looked up at the woman behind the counter. “I’ll have a bacon sandw—” I began, and then I noticed Oaroboarus’s horrified expression. I cleared my throat. “I mean, a tuna fish sandwich.”

  “And three teas, please,” Little Ben added.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Last time we had tea, you did some kind of mind-control spell on me.”

  “I did?” he said. “I didn’t mean to!”

  “You must have,” I told him. “Lady Roslyn said you did, and we were floating down the Tyburn, surrounded by magic, so she couldn’t have lied, and …”

  … and, I realized, she had been very, very careful in her phrasing. It’s entirely possible that he was giving you some wonderful, generous magical gift. But some people – less charitably inclined than I – might guess he was casting a spell on you.

  She had totally gone round the glasshouse on me. “Triple crap,” I said. “You really were giving me some kind of magical gift?”

  “That’s what I was trying to do,” Little Ben said. “I’m still trying to figure out how this magic stuff works, but I know that when you make tea in a certain way, it gives you a burst of inspiration. You looked pretty scared. I thought you could use some help.”

  “Is that why you paid Newfangled Troy all your money to rescue me? That seems awfully generous.”

  Little Ben blushed. “Well, to be honest, Newfangled Troy told me you were my only hope for finding out who I am. So it was a little selfish. But back in the sewers, I was just being nice! I didn’t know you were my only hope then!”

  The lady behind the counter handed over my sandwich and our teas. The whole restaurant was so small, she didn’t even need to step out from behind the counter to do it.

  I wanted some answers, plus I wanted a few minutes to wolf down the first food I’d had in who knows how long. So I told Little Ben, “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “A couple of months ago,” Little Ben said, “I woke up in that room in the sewers where you found me. I couldn’t remember who I was or how I got there, or anything else. But I was holding a note in my hands. Here.”

  Little Ben fished around in his pockets and pulled out a well-worn piece of paper. He handed it to me, and I stopped stuffing my face long enough to read it:

  Dear Little Ben,

  I know this will seem alarming to you, but fear not. In time, it will all make sense.

  Sincerely,

  Benjamin

  “While I was trying to figure out what that meant,” Little Ben continued, “Oaroboarus came in. He looked pretty surprised to see me.”

  Little Ben nodded. “I guessed that maybe Benjamin was my father, and he kept me hidden for some reason, maybe? Or maybe I was away and when I came back, there was a curse on me that robbed me of my memory, and so he went off on a quest to get my memory back? Anyway, now you’re here, and you can explain everything to me!”

  By now, I had swallowed my entire sandwich, and I was ready to talk again. But I didn’t know what to say. “Wow. Um. I don’t know why Troy told you that. I’ve got no idea who you are.”

  Little Ben’s face fell. Oaroboarus gave me a stern look, and I knew exactly what it meant, since I’d often gotten it from my grandmother and various aunts. It meant, You can do better than that. I couldn’t help feeling guilty, so I searched my memory. “All I know is what Lady Roslyn told me. She said she knew a lot about you. And that you didn’t always take the form of a young boy. Maybe that would explain why Oaroboarus never saw you before?”

  “Ooooh, I can shape-shift? Cool! I’m going to try it right now! Abracadabra – form of a mighty eagle!” He scrunched up his face in an expression of intense concentration, but nothing happened. He still looked like an eleven-year-old boy. “Awww. I guess not.”

  “Look, I’d really like to help you, and I appreciate the whole paying-to-have-me rescued thing, plus this was a great sandwich. But I kind of have my own missing parent to figure out.”

  “Hey! Maybe that’s what Troy meant! He didn’t say you knew who I was. He said you were the key to my figuring it out. Maybe that means I’m supposed to help you, and I’ll find my answers along the way.” He must have noticed my sceptical look, because he added, “I know lots of stuff that might be useful. You saw all those filing cabinets in the print room? I’ve been searching through them ever since I woke up, looking for clues. I haven’t found anything about me yet, but there’s a ton of stuff about magic, and the history of the underground rivers. And it turns out I can remember everything I read perfectly – maybe because my memory was blank to start off with, so there’s plenty of room. Tell me what you need to do. Maybe I’ll know something about it!”

  Should I trust him? Since I was sitting with a giant pig, presumably there was enough magic around that something would have exploded if Little Ben had been lying. He must have genuinely believed everything he told me. But by the same principle, Lady Roslyn must have genuinely believed that he didn’t always appear in the form of an eleven-year-old. So what were the possibilities? Could the old man whom Oaroboarus had known have transformed into the shape of a child for a nefarious purpose, and then somehow forgotten he had done it? Or could the old man have summoned a child-shaped demon and lost control of it, and then the demon had eaten him too quickly, resulting in some kind of indigestion-related amnesia?

  I thought back to when I had come to Little Ben’s underground room, shivering and wet. He had offered me a blanket, and the expression on his face had been one of genuine concern and sympathy. It wasn’t a lot to go on, but it was something I had seen with my own eyes.

  And anyway, what alternatives did I have at the moment? I decided I’d take a chance on Little Ben. I filled him in on everything that had happened.

  When I was done, he shook his head. “One thing I can tell you is, Lady Roslyn wasn’t very fair to the other side. The anarchists, she called them? I think my dad was one. I found a lot of articles and pamphlets and posters in his files about how everybody should have access to the power of the rivers. Only, the people who wrote those pamphlets didn’t call themselves anarchists. They called themselves Egalitarians. And they never said anything about the Inheritors of Order. They called people who disagreed with them the Elitists, and the Elitists definitely sounded like the bad guys.”

  “But the anarchists – I mean, the Egalitarians – you guys started World War One.”

  “Hey, don’t blame me!” Little Ben said. “I might not remember much, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t even born then! But I admit, all those pamphlets I read just showed one side of the story. Maybe there’s goodies and baddies on both teams.”

  “Lady Roslyn said the Egalitarians did that,” I said, but then stopped myself. “No, I guess she didn’t. She phrased it pretty carefully so I jumped to the wrong conclusion … again. Anyway, whoever did it, why would somebody want to burn down the whole city?”

  Oaroboarus shrugged and handed me a card with a single word on it.

  “I don’t care which side is right. I just want to get my mom back. How are we going to do that?”

  “Wow. I have no idea. I don’t think a cup of tea is going to be enough inspiration for this one. We better put on our thinking caps.”

  Oaroboarus stuck his snout into a large carpet-bag that was sitting on the chair next to him and pulled out three silk top hats. He tossed one to Little Ben and one to me, and then flipped the last one onto his own head.

  “Top hats?” I asked.

  “One of the things I found in the
filing cabinet was a collection of hats, all labelled with the year they came from. I couldn’t figure out what hats had to do with magic. So I tried arranging them by age, and I noticed they got shorter and shorter as time went on. Now, one thing I already knew was, there’s some kind of connection between the river water and inspiration.”

  I nodded. “Which is why tea gives you inspiration. Or mixing hot and cold water in the shower – Lady Roslyn mentioned that.”

  “Exactly. So I started thinking, maybe inspiration comes out through the top of your head? And maybe hats stopped it from floating away? And maybe the bigger the hat, the more inspiration it could store?”

  I stared at him. “I admit, I’m sitting here drinking tea with a giant pig and an amnesiac eleven-year-old I met in the sewer, so I’m not really in a position to say this, but doesn’t that sound crazy to you?”

  “It doesn’t matter if people call a new idea crazy. What matters is what the evidence says.”

  “But you said hats have been getting smaller over time. Isn’t that evidence that bigger hats aren’t better?”

  Little Ben shook his head. “Something the Egalitarian pamphlets kept talking about was, the Elitists work really hard to keep magic away from ordinary people. You remember how Lady Roslyn told you that if you put the milk in first, then the tea, it neutralizes the magic? Well, if you go to a poor home, guess which order they’ll do it in? And she told you that if you put the tea in first, then the milk, it makes the magic more powerful? Well, guess how aristocrats make tea?”

  “What does that have to do with hats?” I asked.

  “It’s the same thing! Look at how people dress at the Ascot races versus a football match— In fact, hold on, I might even have the photos here…”

  He rifled around in the carpet-bag and pulled out two photographs. One showed a bunch of extremely well-dressed men and women watching a horse race, sipping champagne. Every one of them was wearing a huge, ornate hat. The other photo was a soccer game (or football match, as I guess I was supposed to call it). Everybody’s head was completely bare.

  “You see?” Little Ben said. “Somehow, over a couple of centuries, ordinary people have gone from wearing big hats to leaving their heads uncovered, while rich people haven’t. Doesn’t that prove something?”

  “Police officers still wear hats,” I said. “I don’t know many police officers with mansions.”

  “Oooh, good point!” Little Ben said. He thought about it for a minute. “But that just proves that working-class people can get fully inspired if the Elitists need them to keep order.”

  “But if that’s true,” I said, “then the more important person you were protecting, the bigger hat you’d get, and …” A thought occurred to me. “… and that’s why the guards at Buckingham Palace have the tallest hats ever. OK. Score one for the amnesiac with the giant pig.” I picked up the top hat and plopped it on my head.

  We all sat there, concentrating. Gradually, I could feel an idea beginning to stir. Something about the Great Fire? I waited but nothing else came.

  I remembered something Aunt Mel used to say: Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Maybe the tea could give me the initial inspiration, and the hat could help me hold on to it – but after that, I’d have to work the idea out myself. “Lady Roslyn told me that the Great Fire started because somebody mixed hot and cold water,” I said, figuring it out as I spoke. “When I mixed hot and cold water, it made that powerful drop of water. Maybe that’s why the Elitists did it. They didn’t mean to start a Great Fire; they just wanted to make a powerful drop to take control of the river.”

  “That makes sense,” Little Ben said.

  “And maybe they didn’t know the Great Fire was even a possibility. But Lady Roslyn does, so she wouldn’t do whatever they did, would she? I mean, she wouldn’t risk burning the whole city down, would she?”

  “You know her better than I do,” Little Ben said. “Does she seem like a reasonable person?”

  Gulp. “We’ve got to stop her. But how? The Great Fire started in a baker’s oven. If she’s trying to do the same thing, maybe she’d try to start in the same place. She said the oven was at… Um…”

  Fortunately, Little Ben knew the answer. “It was on Pudding Lane,” he said, jumping to his feet. “And I think we’d better get going.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Near Pudding Lane, in a wide courtyard set off by wooden bollards, there was a tall stone monument to the Great Fire. It was called the Monument, and it was on Monument Street. I guess sometimes, cities just kind of give up on naming things.

  Little Ben, Oaroboarus, and I stood there for a moment reading the plaque on the side of the Monument. “It doesn’t say anything about how to stop the Great Fire from happening again,” Little Ben said.

  “Here’s something weird,” I said. “It says the Monument is two hundred two feet tall, because it’s two hundred two feet from where the fire began. Which stops making sense as soon as you think about it. If you lay the Monument on its side, it’ll stretch to the actual spot the fire started, but who’s going to lay it on its side? Why not just put the Monument on the actual spot to begin with?”

  “I don’t know,” Little Ben said. “But one thing I’ve learned from my research. Ninety per cent of British life makes total sense. The other ten per cent seems absolutely bonkers … if you don’t know about the secret rivers. So if you’re trying to find magic, it’s that ten per cent you have to pay attention to.”

  We stepped through the door at the base of the Monument into a small, dim entrance hall. There was a ticket seller sitting there. He took one look at Oaroboarus and shook his head. “No pets.”

  I pointed to my ears and tried to look confused. Then I turned to Oaroboarus. “What’s that? What did he say?” I asked.

  Oaroboarus caught on immediately.

  I turned back to the ticket seller. “You allow service animals, don’t you?”

  “That usually means dogs.”

  “What did he say?” I asked Oaroboarus.

  The ticket seller looked at Oaroboarus, then looked at me, then shrugged. “Two pounds for each human under the age of sixteen. No charge for service pigs.”

  When we had climbed out of earshot, I gave Oaroboarus a little salute. “Nicely done. Great thinking on your feet. But how did you have exactly the right cards to repeat what he said?”

  “Every occasion? What if the Queen of England spilled peanut butter on your pet electric eel?”

  “Then you don’t have cards for every occasion!”

  Oaroboarus squinted at me stubbornly and rooted around in his card box. I was sure he was just bluffing, but no:

  “Wow,” I said. “You’re good.”

  Oaroboarus grunted modestly. We kept climbing.

  And climbing.

  And climbing.

  “Two hundred two feet seemed like a lot less when we were at the bottom,” I said.

  I had never really thought much about what kind of spiral staircases I prefer, but as we got higher and higher, I started thinking about it more and more. Some spiral staircases have walls on both sides. Those, I decided, are the right kind. In other spiral staircases, there’s no wall on one side, just a handrail, so you can see all the way down the stairwell, and it gets more and more dizzying as you get higher and higher. That’s the wrong kind of spiral staircase.

  The Monument? Definitely the wrong kind.

  And then we were at the top. We stepped out into the sunlight of the viewing platform.

  The view from the top was the highest view yet, but since I wasn’t looking straight down a big spiral, it wasn’t anywhere near as dizzying.

  There was a metal railing all around the edge of the platform. In fact, the metal railing stretched all the way above our heads, then curved back to form a metal roof. It was like we were standing inside a birdcage.

  “That’s weird, too, don’t you think?” I asked Little Ben. “I get why there’s a fence in f
ront of us. You don’t want people falling off the edge. But why is there a fence above our heads? What, are we going to fall up?”

  “Maybe they’re worried people will climb the fence and jump off?”

  “Then make the fence tall or put pointy bits on the top, or both. But why put a huge fence where the ceiling would be? To keep people from flying away?”

  I looked around, hoping to find more of that crazy ten per cent. All I saw on the walls was ancient graffiti – somebody calling themselves TIID had apparently been here in 1792, and to carve their initials and the date into the wall, they must have had a chisel and a hammer with them.

  The floor was more interesting. Built into it was a small drain, ending in an iron grate. A few days ago, I wouldn’t have paid much attention to drainage. But after the past twenty-four hours…

  I pointed at the drain. “Look at this. All drains connect to the sewers eventually, right? So this is like an outlet in a house – it’s a connection to the power source. But … how do we switch it on?” I felt an idea tickling the back of my mind, but it kept slipping out of my grasp.

  Oaroboarus stuck his snout into Little Ben’s carpetbag, pulled out a top hat, and handed it to me. I put it on my head, and I could feel the thought that kept slipping out of my head bounce right back. It was a memory.

  I had always gotten along better with Dad than with Mom, but there was one thing about him that drove me crazy: he’d rather do something badly himself than pay somebody else to do it well. Usually, I could live with that. When he tried to fix our windows and just made them draftier, I could put on a sweater. When he tried to fix a fuse and ended up plunging the whole house into darkness, I could read with a flashlight. But when he messed up the plumbing, the consequences were absolutely disgusting.