“The Crimean War, and Darwin discovered evolution, and Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations,” Little Ben said. He was still crying, but it seemed like nothing could stop his memory for facts. “Good and bad things happen in every era. It doesn’t prove anything!”
Lady Roslyn shrugged. “We’ll settle this debate soon enough. Within an hour, I will control the secret rivers. And you’ll see: Britain will enter a new golden age. We’ll—”
She kept talking, but honestly, I could not have cared less about this particular debate if I had tried. I didn’t know how the steam engine was invented or slavery was abolished, but I was pretty sure it hadn’t involved bleeding innocent moms to death. And maybe Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations while wearing a top hat to preserve his precious inspiration or maybe he didn’t.
But. While Lady Roslyn was caught up in her argument with Little Ben, she had loosened the knife against Mom’s throat just a little, which let me calm down just a little. And that let me think a little more clearly about the situation.
JB was a threat, but I knew from past experience that I could dodge him if I had to. And Lady Roslyn had already admitted that she’d rather not cut Mom’s throat. So if I lunged for her, she’d hesitate for at least a second.
I hoped.
So I lunged.
That was obviously not what Lady Roslyn was expecting, because she stopped mid-sentence and stared at me for one brief moment, which was just long enough for me to grab her arm with all my might and pull it a little bit loose. “Slide free, Mom!” I yelled.
For once, Mom listened to me. She slipped down, out of Lady Roslyn’s grasp.
Lady Roslyn lashed out at me. I stumbled backwards, the tip of the knife a fraction of an inch away from my skin. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see JB lumbering backwards towards me, but I wasn’t worried about him –
– until two hooves slammed into my back, making it explode with pain and sending me tumbling forward, just as JB spun around and grabbed me. He held me tight to his chest, and I got a look at where those hooves had come from.
It was a unicorn. There was a jagged, broken stub on top of his head, and the rest of the horn hung from a chain around his neck.
“You’re … what was your name? Sirion, right?” I said.
The unicorn just glared at me.
“It’s probably a good thing we can’t hear what he’s thinking,” JB chortled. I struggled as hard as I could, but he had me in a tight grip.
CHAPTER 34
I kicked and I screamed, but in minutes, Little Ben and I had been dragged down the spiral staircase and tied to an ornate iron railing. Lady Roslyn hadn’t even tried to move Oaroboarus. She just had JB tie up his legs, which I hoped was a good sign. If Oaroboarus was dead, they probably wouldn’t have bothered tying him up, right? I was going to assume that was the case. Please let that be the case.
Through the holes in the iron ceiling above us, I could see Lady Roslyn tying Mom to the drill. “Please, let us go,” Mom said. Lady Roslyn ignored her. “Fine,” Mom said. “Then let Hyacinth go, and that little boy. They’re just children. They – ouch!” She winced as Lady Roslyn pushed the tip of the Fire Hook into her arm.
Plink. I shivered. Mom’s blood was once again dripping down from above.
Lady Roslyn strode down the spiral staircase. “I believe we’ve wasted enough time,” she said. She knelt down and went back to listing names. “Alderman Mechi. Lord Claude Hamilton.”
I struggled with the ropes around my wrists, but they wouldn’t budge. Little Ben leaned over and whispered, “You don’t need to—” He stopped and looked over at Sirion, who was guarding us with an intent, hostile expression. “Can that unicorn hear us?”
Good question. I figured there was only one way to find out. “Hey, Sirion,” I whispered. “Unicorns drool. Lions rule!” Sirion didn’t react. He just kept staring at us with the same focused expression. Was he reading my mind? Hey, Sirion, remember how I broke your horn? That was fun, I thought. He still didn’t react.
I turned back to Little Ben. “He’s used to communicating telepathically, so I don’t think his ears are that good. And with his broken horn, I don’t think his mind-powers work.”
“Great. In that case, I was going to say, I think I can untie you. Should I—”
“Not yet,” I whispered back. “Wait until he looks away.”
By now, Lady Roslyn was reaching the end of her guest list. “… Mr James McCann, Mr John Locke, and Mr S. Gurney, I welcome you in the name of the queen. I summon the power of your witness! I summon the power of the rivers! I summon you, Queen Victoria. I call you to life!”
The spectral glow in the air intensified. I held my breath, ready for the ghost of the queen to appear. But instead, the glow flowed to a massive iron machine in the corner of the building and vanished inside its gears. The machine churned to life. I never thought of machines as having names, but apparently, this one was named Queen Victoria. It let out a tremendous Hssss and steam began to belch out of it – glowing steam, as though it were made out of that same strange ghostly energy.
Queen Victoria was a steam engine.
A massive wheel inched to life, turning slowly at first, then more and more steadily. It hissed again and let out a kchick chick chick, like there were dozens of gears rattling inside it.
The engine’s iron parts shone brighter and brighter, until its rich red paint looked like fire.
Plink. Mom’s blood still dripped downwards – but now it glowed, too, so that each drop was like a little light bulb falling through the air. Plink.
And it wasn’t just Mom’s blood. Everything that was touched by the billowing cloud of spectral steam became transformed. The parts of the building that had been rusty unrusted themselves. Where the paint had been flaking, it smoothed out and once again gleamed royal red and forest green, and then began to glow with its own light.
Soon, the billowing cloud had spread to the opposite corner of the building, where another old steam engine sat unmoving.
“I summon you, Prince Consort!” Lady Roslyn called, and that machine let out its own HSSSSS. Kchick chick chick. It started turning, slowly, so that at first, it was out of sync with the Queen Victoria engine, and the two of them together sounded like a syncopated rhythm of steel and metal. Then the Prince Consort got up to full speed, and the two engines spoke with one voice, loud enough to hurt my eardrums on the HSSSSS.
As terrified as I was, it was an amazing show. And I wasn’t the only one to think so – Sirion was staring at the throbbing steam engines, too.
Which meant he wasn’t looking at us any more. “Whatever you’re planning, now would be good,” I whispered to Little Ben.
He nodded and began wriggling in his ropes.
“You’re not going to slip out of them,” I whispered. “They’re too tight.”
“I’m not trying to slip out,” he whispered back. “I’m trying to reach … this.” He managed to stick his face below the collar of his shirt, and using his chin, he pulled something out.
It was the long stick with the grabber claws at the end that he had used to get me a blanket when we first met.
He glanced up at Sirion, but the unicorn was still watching Lady Roslyn, who in turn was too caught up in the momentum of her ceremony to notice us. “I summon you, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales!” she called, and the glowing light, and the ornate paintwork, spread to a third engine off in the corner.
Slowly at first, and then as fast as the others, it added its hissing, rattling voice to the chorus: HSSSSS. Kchick chick chick. HSSSSS. Kchick chick chick.
Using the grabber clutched under his chin, Little Ben had loosened the knots around my wrist, but not enough for me to escape. He kept working on them.
Now that all four engines were churning, the puffing clouds of steam began to contract, narrowing into tight columns, like bridges made out of smoke, stretching from each machine to the other, growing ever brighter and denser.
The ropes dropped off my wrist. I stumbled forwards and bent down to untie Little Ben, but he shook his head. “I’ll untie myself,” he whispered. “Get to your mother before it’s too late.”
I ran for the steps.
As the hissing and kchicking reached a crescendo, the beams of light and smoke changed direction, so that instead of connecting the machines with each other, they were pointing at the centre of the building – exactly at the spot where Lady Roslyn was kneeling. The glowing steam poured into her, and she rose to her feet, and then kept rising, hovering in mid-air.
She, too, began to glow.
Sirion was still staring at her, fascinated, and I hoped his poor hearing would mean he wouldn’t notice my footsteps. Unfortunately, when you run on a metal floor, you don’t just make noise – you make vibrations, too. He felt them through his hooves and snapped to attention. As I reached the steps, he whinnied angrily and galloped after me.
Up on the mezzanine above, JB heard me, too. He came running down the steps, trapping me in the middle.
To manage the steps, he had turned forwards, pointing his eyes away from me. I kept running up the steps, right towards him, and just at the last minute, I knelt, letting him trip over me. As he tumbled down, right into Sirion, I could hear angry curses and whinnies, but I didn’t stop to look.
Up on the second floor, I made it to where Mom was strapped down. I tried to lift the drill, but it was still too heavy.
“Untie my other arm, honey,” Mom said. “Maybe I can help.”
I looked over at the steps. Sirion and JB had gotten to their feet and were on their way back up.
Frantically, I worked Mom’s knots loose, and with her free arm, she shoved and I shoved. The drill swung up easily.
“Press your shirt against the wound,” I told her. As soon as Mom’s blood stopped flowing, the whole sound-and-light show down on the ground floor came to a sudden stop, with only the glow around Lady Roslyn remaining. She dropped to the floor with a tremendous clang – it was like being full of magic made her heavier. She lay there, moaning, looking confused, probably because I had interrupted the charging process.
JB and Sirion made it to the top of the steps. JB looked at me, then down at the moaning Lady Roslyn. He reached a decision. “I’ll be back for you in a moment, girlie,” he said. He headed back down, while Sirion stood guarding the top of the steps.
Mom, meanwhile, looked pale. “I feel dizzy,” she said.
“You’ve lost blood,” I told her, and looked at her wound. Fortunately, it was small enough that the shirt had stopped the bleeding completely. Lady Roslyn had been careful with the Fire Hook.
I needed to get us out of there. But I couldn’t exactly fight my way out with sheer physical force. I was going to need more information. “Mom,” I said. “Why is this happening to us?”
“I wish I knew, sweetie.”
“Is there anything unusual about our family? Did Grandma ever say anything about magical powers?”
Mom squinched up her forehead, the way she always did when she was trying to remember something. “Back when we all moved to America, she said … what was it? Oh! I remember! She said, ‘Our family has long been the servant of one of the most powerful and beneficent magical forces in the world, and that force is intimately associated with London’s hidden rivers, but now we must journey to a distant land for complex reasons you will one day understand.’ Or, you know, something like that.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “And you never mentioned that to me? You told me every single one of Grandma’s nine billion sayings about the best way to brush your teeth, but you never thought to mention the whole powerful magical force thing?”
“Well, sweetie, it wasn’t in rhyme. That made it much harder to remember.”
Down below, Lady Roslyn was beginning to come to her senses. Unfortunately, that was the exact moment that Little Ben managed to get his own knots untied. He took a step forwards, and Lady Roslyn heard his footstep.
She whirled around and pointed a single finger at him. The glow that surrounded her entire body surged for a moment, then focused down to an incredibly bright light on the tip of her finger. A ball of something eye-woundingly bright shot out, straight into Little Ben’s chest. He flew backwards, slamming into a wall.
Crap. Maybe I had freed my mom before Lady Roslyn could be fully charged, but she obviously had plenty of power to work with.
Which was terrifying, but it also gave me an idea.
Once, when I was little, Aunt Rainey came over to our house to babysit while Mom went out on some errand. Somehow, Aunt Rainey got started on how amazing the little socket in the wall was. She told me it was full of something called electricity, which was a wonderful force that made modern life possible, and it could move through metal objects, like that fork on the table over there. That would have been fine if it weren’t for two things:
1. She forgot to mention that electricity was dangerous, and
2. Right after our conversation, she went off to the kitchen to get a snack, leaving four-year-old me alone with a metal fork and the wonderful, life-giving electrical outlet.
Fortunately, she came back into the room moments before I stuck the fork in the socket, and her terrified scream stopped me from doing it, so I didn’t die.
Even so, Aunt Rainey had felt really bad, and she had tried to make up for it by teaching me everything she knew about electricity. The way she explained it, she’d nearly killed me, so she wanted to give me information that could one day save my life.
Of course, I was four, so most of it went over my head. But one thing had stuck with me:
Lightning rods.
Lightning rods, Aunt Rainey told me, were made of iron, and iron conducted electricity. That meant they steered dangerous forces away from people, right down into the ground.
So as I stood on the cast-iron mezzanine of the Crossness Pumping Station, I took out the wire that Inspector Sands had given me and I wrapped one end around my chest. Then I took the other end and tied it to one of the little iron curlicues that decorated the iron floor of this humungous iron building.
I had no idea if it would work, but Inspector Sands had told me that the wire would transmit magic as easily as it would have transmitted electricity. So wouldn’t the whole building work the same way?
I didn’t want to think about what would happen if it didn’t, but I didn’t have much choice.
I took a deep breath. I swallowed. I got my courage up as much as I could and yelled down over the mezzanine. “Hey! Roz! I just freed my mom and we’re taking our blood home with us. See ya later, lady!”
Lady Roslyn cocked her head, as if choosing from among a dozen sarcastic retorts. Then she just shrugged and pointed.
Unimaginable magical power poured out of her finger, straight at me.
CHAPTER 35
The power streamed into my chest, my skin tingled, and my hair stood up straight, and my eyes watered …
… but I didn’t go flying backwards. It didn’t even hurt.
The magic flowed into the wire, circled around my torso, and plunged down. For a moment, I could see it rippling through the floor, and then down through the columns to the level below, before it vanished.
The beam of light faded out. I stood there, unharmed, grinning.
“How interesting,” Lady Roslyn said, and for once, she didn’t sound sarcastic. “I have no idea how you managed that.”
When she realized I wasn’t going to answer that one, Lady Roslyn shrugged and pointed her finger at me again.
Nothing came out of it. “Out of power,” she tsked. “This is what comes of half measures. Hyacinth, I’m truly sorry, but I think I’m going to have to slit your mother’s throat after all.” She nodded at JB and Sirion.
If my little trick with Inspector Sands’s wire had worked, all that magical power had flowed down into the ground, and he and his Saltpetre Men would be on the way. But I had no idea how long it would take them to get here. I
n the meantime, if I couldn’t get Mom away outright, I’d have to keep us both alive as long as I could.
I looked around frantically, left, right, up, down … and then I saw it. Hanging from the ceiling were a bunch of chains on pulleys. I guessed they must have been for lifting up fuel or equipment, back when the pumping station was in operation. Some of them were still connected to heavy cauldrons lying on the floor or up in the rafters. And the end of one of them was lying curled up a few feet away from us.
“Mom,” I whispered. “Do exactly what I do.”
“OK, dear, but what—”
Before she finished, I ran forwards and grabbed the chain. Mom did exactly what I asked her, which made it twice in an hour – possibly the most amazing thing that had happened so far. Anyway, she ran after me and grabbed the chain, too.
“Jump!” I yelled, and, still holding tight to the chain, I hopped over the edge of the mezzanine. Mom followed me.
As we swung down, desperately clutching the chain, I could see the big cauldron on its other end being lifted up into the air. Fortunately, the cauldron was just a little lighter than Mom and me combined, so our speed was slow enough to give me a little control. I kicked my legs, swinging us towards a stairwell that led down into a faintly glowing darkness. I didn’t know what was down there, but as long as it didn’t want to cut Mom’s throat, I was willing to deal with it.
Hanging on for dear life, we rode the chain down through the stairwell and landed on a shaky iron crosswalk in a small, cramped basement. In each of the four corners of the basement was a big steel tube. Those must have been the furnaces that, under normal circumstances, would have powered the giant machines on the ground floor. But these weren’t normal circumstances, and the power was coming from somewhere else. In the middle of the room was a rough dirt pit, and sitting in the pit was the baker’s oven that had started the Great Fire. Beams of light shot out from it into the furnaces, pulsing in time with the HSSSS. Kchick chick chick from above.
The City of Secret Rivers Page 17
