Oaroboarus skidded to a stop. He looked at the taxi disappearing off into the distance. He looked down at the woman desperately clawing at the water as the current swept her away. He was too stubborn to let the taxi get away, but he was too stubborn to let the woman drown.
I figured I’d better resolve the dilemma for him. “You have to save that woman,” I yelled, slapping him on the head as Little Ben and I slid off him.
He shook himself off, as if emerging from a trance, and leapt over the railing. With a huge splash, he plunged into the river, then rose up to grab the astonished woman’s shirt in his jaws. As he paddled with her towards the shore, I looked up and saw the taxi exit the bridge and vanish around the corner. I wondered if my chances of finding Mom had vanished with it.
“We have to figure out where Lady Roslyn is going,” I told Little Ben. “She went the opposite way from the Houses of Parliament, and she passed right by St. Paul’s Cathedral. She must be going someplace more important than either of them.”
“Oooooh. OOOH! There’s only one place that can be,” Little Ben said. “She’s going to the Crossness sewage pumping station.”
CHAPTER 32
I smelled the sewage plant before I saw it. Somehow, the scent was even worse than it had been inside the actual sewer pipes. There, the odour had been so overpowering that I just got used to it. Here, it kept getting fainter or stronger, depending on how the wind blew, so that I could never quite forget about it. It made my stomach squirm.
Or maybe that was fear.
OK, it was definitely fear. But the odour didn’t help.
A chain-link fence surrounded the Crossness Pumping Station. Oaroboarus leapt over it. Little Ben and I climbed down, and I looked around. It was a blandly modern utility complex, with wan grass growing between clean, dull buildings. There were no guards and no workers in sight. That was probably just because today was Sunday, and not because Lady Roslyn had done something horrible to them, probably the same thing she was about to do to my mother—
Hold on, Hyacinth. Calm down. I took a deep breath. Then I gagged a little and decided that henceforth, all deep breaths would go through my mouth and not my nose.
A gravel road led through the complex. I pointed to it, then put my finger to my lips. Little Ben and Oaroboarus nodded, and the three of us crept along, walking on the grass next to the road, rather than on the noisy gravel.
We turned a corner and came upon a building that looked totally out of place. It must have been a hundred years older than all the others. It was smaller, and made out of grey and black brick. The stones set above its large, arched windows might once have been orange, but now they had the same dirty, faded look as the rest of the building.
From the other side of the building, I thought I could hear Lady Roslyn’s voice, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I looked around for cover, but there were only a few scattered trees. I stuck as close to them as I could, although given that I was being followed by a giant pig, hiding behind the occasional scrawny tree probably wasn’t going to make us less conspicuous. I just had to hope that Lady Roslyn wouldn’t come this way.
We made it to the edge of the old building, and I peered around the corner. Around the other side, Lady Roslyn and JB were wheeling a large, industrial-looking machine out of a side building. I jerked my head back and waited there as Lady Roslyn’s curses and JB’s grunts and the machine’s squeaky wheels grew closer and closer. Then they were right around the corner, no more than a few feet from us. I held my breath.
The curses and the grunts and the squeaks faded away. They had gone inside.
I counted to ten, then dashed around the corner, Little Ben and Oaroboarus right behind me.
Inside the building, long skylights let the daylight into a wide, low entry hall with no furniture, leaving no place to hide. I hesitated at the entrance.
Somehow I could sense that Mom was nearby. I took a deep breath and ran as silently as I could towards the archway at the other end of the hall.
As I got closer, I could hear Lady Roslyn’s voice again. I couldn’t quite make out her words, but it sounded like she was chanting.
When we reached the archway, we stopped, crouching in the shadows there, and peered into the next room. As quiet as I was trying to be, I couldn’t help gasping.
The main hall of the Crossness Pumping Station was a madhouse of ironwork. There were tall red columns topped by ornate green curlicues holding up arches overflowing with yellow and green swirls. Some of it was rusting and falling apart, and some of it must have been recently restored, with brand-new royal red and tree-green paint.
It was like a merry-go-round had exploded inside a palace.
And in the middle of it all, Lady Roslyn knelt on a floor of iron grating, chanting strange words: “Lord Lucan. Viscount Sydney. Viscount Eversly. Lord Duffering.”
“I know those names,” Little Ben whispered. “In the 1800s, they had a big opening ceremony for this building, and they invited all the most famous and powerful people in the country. She’s reciting the guest list. But why?”
“Hmmm…” I whispered back. “Remember what you said, about how ninety per cent of British life makes sense, but it’s the crazy ten per cent where the magic is? Well, it’s crazy to make a sewage processing plant this beautiful. They couldn’t have built it to just process waste. If all the sewers run through here, then so do all the magical rivers. Maybe this was the centre of magical control. And if the magic of the rivers can inspire people – well, maybe it works both ways. Maybe if you gather all the artists and leaders, having so many inspired people in one place generates magical power.”
“That explains why they invited them a hundred and fifty years ago,” Little Ben whispered. “But now they’re dead. They can’t help her tonight!”
“Remember the Bun Eaters? Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you can’t get involved. The oven summoned the ghosts of the people who had been in the jail. Maybe she brought it here to summon the spirits of those first visitors.”
And, in fact, as Lady Roslyn continued reciting names, I could see the air beginning to take on a familiar glow. It wasn’t as bright and vivid as it had been in the underground cells where the oven had been stored – but it was still enough to send a shiver down my spine.
Oaroboarus gave me a nudge and pointed his hoof at something near Lady Roslyn’s feet. I squinted and saw what he was gesturing at. Something was dripping from the ironwork high above her head and passing through the iron grating at her feet.
“What is it?” I asked.
Oaroboarus leaned forwards and took a deep sniff through his enormous snout.
Back when they were trying to kidnap me, Richard the Raker had started to say something about my bloodline before Longface Lucky cut him off. I’d thought that he meant it as a figure of speech, and that he was just talking about my family heritage. But as I watched the blood drip from the ceiling, I realized he must have meant it literally, too. My family had some connection to London’s magical rivers, and that connection ran right through our veins. And that meant there was only one person whose blood that could be.
I reached out and grabbed the nearest iron column, because if I didn’t hold on tight, I was going to run right over and take a swing at Lady Roslyn, and that wouldn’t do any good. If I wanted to rescue my mother before she bled to death, I was going to have to be subtle.
Forcing myself to stay calm, I looked around and assessed the situation. There was a circle of iron columns around Lady Roslyn. If we stayed in the shadows behind them, we could get past her and make it unseen to the steps that led up to the next floor.
I crept forwards, lifting each foot gently so it wouldn’t clank on the iron grating. Every muscle in my body was screaming at me to run, but I held them back, and went step by gentle step. I had the sense that, behind me, Little Ben and Oaroboarus were doing the same thing, but I was so focused on moving forwards, it didn’t occur to me to look back.
We
moved closer to Lady Roslyn, and closer still. I could hear the faint plink as each drop of blood – of my mom’s blood – hit the iron floor and dripped through.
“Mr A. T. B. Beresford Hope,” Lady Roslyn said. Plink.
Now we were within two feet of her. Immersed in the shadows, we were safely out of her sight – but JB must be somewhere nearby. Maybe he was patrolling the area. Wherever he was, he could come back and spot us at any moment.
But still we crept on, slowly, slowly.
We passed Lady Roslyn and headed towards the narrow spiral staircase that led up into the darkness, towards where my mom must lie bleeding.
Plink. Plink.
I needed to be patient. Plink.
But that was my mother’s blood dripping down. How much did she have left? Plink.
I picked up the pace. Now my feet made the faintest echo on the iron floor. I prayed that Lady Roslyn would be too immersed in her chant to hear it.
She kept going. “Sir John S. Pakington.” Plink.
At the staircase, I put my foot on the lowest iron step, then lowered my weight onto it, as slowly and carefully as I could bear. It squeaked softly. I paused.
“Mr Heywood, engineer to the City Commission of Sewers.” Plink.
I kept climbing. Little Ben followed me, with Oaroboarus behind him. Oaroboarus had somehow managed to tread silently until now, but when he reached the stairs, his hooves made a little ting! on every iron step. I winced each time, but Lady Roslyn kept chanting.
“The Honorable Colonel Luke White.” Plink. Ting! “Sir Colman O’Loghlen.” Plink. Ting!
At the top of the steps, I stuck my head just up high enough to peer into the iron mezzanine above, and I saw three things.
The first thing was the big machine that Lady Roslyn and JB had carried in. It was some kind of industrial drill, but instead of a drill bit on the end, it had King Charles’s Fire Hook attached to it. The machine’s whirring engine made the pointy bit of the Fire Hook spin around rapidly.
The second thing I saw was my mom, eyes closed but still breathing, lying on a table below the machine. The Fire Hook was boring into her arm with an amazingly gentle touch, teasing out drop after drop of blood.
And the heck with the third thing, because at that point, I was running up the steps as fast as I had ever run, towards the machine and my mom, completely forgetting about being quiet or hiding, which was too bad, because right when I was in the middle of my frantic, loud-clanging run, I finally noticed the third thing.
It was JB. He was sitting next to the machine, slowly lowering the drill onto Mom’s arm.
I felt a moment of panic, then a moment of relief when I realized his back was to me, and then a moment of even greater panic when I realized the one place you couldn’t hide from JB was behind his back.
CHAPTER 33
With a roar, JB leapt to his feet and ran at me, backwards. Then he looked up at something over my head, and suddenly, he looked as frightened as I felt.
I tracked his eyes upwards and saw Oaroboarus above me in mid-leap. He crashed into JB, sending him tumbling.
I ran to the machine and pulled with all my might, trying to remove the spinning Fire Hook from Mom’s arm. I couldn’t budge it.
Frantically, I searched for an off switch, but there wasn’t one. There was a long electrical cord trailing out of the machine, though. I grabbed it and yanked hard. It came flying out of the socket in the wall, and the machine whirred to a stop.
By now, Little Ben had caught up to me. “I can’t lift this up,” I told him. He grabbed one part of the metal arm holding the Fire Hook, and I grabbed another, and we strained and pulled and grunted, and finally it swung up.
“Mom! Wake up! It’s me. It’s Hyacinth! Wake up!” I shook her shoulder gently, then harder, but she still wouldn’t wake up.
What had Lady Roslyn said? Waking her will be simple when the time is right. But how were you supposed to wake somebody from an enchanted sleep—
Oh. Right.
I bent forwards and kissed her. (No, it was NOT on the lips. I was perfectly happy to wade through a massive river of poop to get Mom back, but I wasn’t going to do anything gross.)
As my lips brushed her forehead, Mom’s eyes flickered for a moment, then opened.
“Hyacinth?” she murmured, smiling up at me.
There was so much I wanted to say, I couldn’t even decide where to begin. Finally, I settled on a key fact. “I love you, Mom,” I told her.
“That’s nice,” she said dozily. “Can you get me up in fifteen minutes?”
“NO!” I said, and I guess I said it pretty intensely, because her eyes popped completely open and she grabbed my arm.
“What’s wrong?” she said as I helped her to her feet. “Where are we? Why is that man’s head backwards? Is he about to stab a pig? Have you eaten? You look hungry.”
I whirled around. JB had somehow clambered on top of Oaroboarus, who was bucking wildly, trying to throw him. And JB had a knife. And he was holding it up, about to strike.
I jumped at him, grabbing his arm, but I only slowed him down a little bit. He was just too strong. Little Ben grabbed on to his wrist, too, but even that only slowed him down a little. The knife moved closer to Oaroboarus’s back … closer…
And then another hand grabbed JB, stopping the movement of the knife immediately. “That will be quite enough,” Lady Roslyn said, snatching the dagger from his hand. “You will not stab that boar.”
My jaw dropped. Was she somehow on my side after all?
She handed JB a thin wire. “Strangle him instead,” she said.
JB grinned his disturbing sideways grin. Then he whipped the wire around Oaroboarus’s neck and started pulling. Little Ben and I tried to yank him off, but it was no use. Oaroboarus was choking and turning purple. His kicks and jumps became less and less energetic. I pounded my fists against JB’s back, but he didn’t even seem to notice.
Lady Roslyn had saved Oaroboarus from stabbing only to have him strangled, and now he was going to die, and there was nothing I could—
Wait a minute. Why did she save him from being stabbed? She was clearly happy to have him dead. And based on what she had been doing to my mom, she had no objection to drawing blood with sharp pokey things, so why—
Ohhhhhhh. I figured it out.
“Little Ben! What would you do to save Oaroboarus?”
He stopped his futile wrestling with JB and looked up at me, tears streaming down his face. “Anything!”
“Then give me your hand.”
I dragged him over to the Fire Hook and held his hand beneath it, as if I were about to impale him on it. Then I called out to Lady Roslyn, “Call off JB!”
She stared at me in disbelief. “Or what?”
“Or I’ll give Little Ben a really bad cut.”
She snorted. “You’re trying to intimidate me by threatening somebody on your side? An interesting strategy.”
“No, what’s interesting is that you didn’t want Oaroboarus stabbed. The only reason I can think of is, you don’t want his blood mixing with all that blood from my mom that you’ve so carefully collected. There’s something special about my family’s blood, isn’t there? Well, Little Ben isn’t in my family.” I looked at Little Ben, and he nodded. I moved his hand closer to the Fire Hook’s sharp edge, keeping my eyes locked on Lady Roslyn’s.
“You’re right, as far as it goes,” she said. “I wouldn’t want his dirty, common blood contaminating your mother’s lovely pure stuff.” Lady Roslyn grabbed Mom and pressed the knife she had taken from JB against her neck.
Until now, Mom had been watching everything with a slightly drowsy confusion. Now her eyes opened wide with fear. “Please,” she whispered, too terrified to say more.
Lady Roslyn ignored her. “Therefore, Hyacinth, if you spill a single drop of Little Ben’s blood, I’ll have to overwhelm it with quite a lot of your mother’s blood to compensate. Are you willing to spill more of your friend’s blood th
an I am of your mother’s?”
“You’re bluffing,” I said, trying to sound a lot more confident than I felt. “If you wanted all her blood at once, you’d have killed her already. I think you need a slow, steady flow for whatever magic you’re doing.”
Lady Roslyn held the knife even tighter against Mom’s throat, so that the slightest additional pressure would cut the skin. I dug my fingernails into the palm of my hand just as tightly, trying to stay calm. It was not easy. Mom was now making little frightened whimpers.
Lady Roslyn smiled at me. “I’d certainly prefer a steady flow of blood. Unleashing too much power at once would have unpredictable consequences. It might grant me the power I seek without the trouble of a long and difficult ceremony. Or it might destroy London and kill everybody in it. But if the unimaginable magical powers of London don’t belong to somebody as reasonable and selfless as me, I genuinely think we’d all be better off dead. Here, let’s not waste any time. I give you my unambiguous word of honour, unbreakable in the presence of all this magic: if you so much as prick Little Ben’s finger, I will cut your mother’s throat wide open.”
Mom finally choked out a few words. “Hyacinth, honey, what is happening?”
“It’s OK, Mom,” I told her. “We’re saving you.” I let go of Little Ben’s hand, and we both stepped away from the Fire Hook.
While Lady Roslyn and I had been negotiating, JB had carried on throttling Oaroboarus. I watched in horror as Oaroboarus gave one last, desperate buck, then collapsed with a mighty clang. I wanted to rush to him, but there was still the whole knife-to-my-mother’s throat thing going on.
“You told me you were on the side of good!” I yelled at Lady Roslyn. “You said your family had a strict code of ethics, passed on from generation to generation!”
“I spoke the truth,” Lady Roslyn said. “I would never take a life unless it was strictly necessary. I’m not doing this to hurt you, Hyacinth. I’ve got nothing against your mother, and believe it or not, I actually like you quite a bit. But this is necessary for the greater good. While the Inheritors of Order controlled the rivers’ power, the steam engine was invented, slavery was abolished, Keats wrote his poetry, and the British Museum opened. Then we lost control, and what happened? The Crimean War and the Sepoy Mutiny.”
The City of Secret Rivers Page 16
