“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 showerheads 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.”
“Okay, this whole hot and cold water thing. Even with the dumb sink in my aunt’s flat, they mix in the basin. Why isn’t that a problem?”
Lady Roslyn looked at me as if this were the most ludicrous question in the world. “Because it’s an open space, of course. The magic can’t reach critical mass unless it’s confined. Now, where was I? Ah, yes: the shameful compromise. The anarchists felt it did not go far enough. The Inheritors of Order felt it went too far. But both sides agreed to it because Britain was at war with Germany, and everybody was willing to put aside their differences for the national good.
“Of course, when the war ended, the government didn’t want to let go of the power it had acquired. It continued to enforce the truce. When anybody got their hands on a particularly significant magical item, the government swept in and confiscated it, lest it give an advantage to one side or the other. And this drop of water”—she hefted the umbrella—“would be a significant advantage indeed.”
“But why the post office?”
“Partly because the Royal Mail was already in charge of the telegraph system, so they had experience in dealing with lines of power running underground. Partly because they had branches and employees (and, therefore, eyes and ears) all over the city. But mostly because, in the entire history of humanity, nobody has ever assassinated an archduke in the name of lower postal rates. And their strategy worked. In the century since, most people have forgotten the very existence of the magical rivers, and those few who remember don’t do much about it. Thus was the most important and noble cause in human history reduced to an endless series of bureaucratic quibbles.”
The Saltpetre Man had finally made it to the front of the queue. He shuffled up to the service window and put the self-playing ukulele through a Plexiglas door. The worker on the other side of the window pulled a lever. The Plexiglas door swung shut, and another door on the inside swung open.
I had seen the same security system in regular, aboveground post offices. There, it was to prevent somebody from sticking a gun in the clerk’s face and pulling off a robbery. I wondered what it was meant to prevent here.
I had a long time to think about it. It turns out that in England, epic magical quests involve an awful lot of standing in queues.
One by one, the people ahead of us turned in their magic items. Some of them got things back in exchange, although nobody seemed to get back their lost parents. (Except maybe the Saltpetre Man. After he gave up the ukulele, he got back an urn full of dirt. He hugged it so happily that it definitely could have been his mom.)
Finally, it was our turn. Up close, the Saltpetre Man behind the counter turned out to be a Saltpetre Woman. At least, it was wearing makeup and a flowered cap, although it had the same shapeless shape and Royal Mail uniform. When it opened its lipsticked mouth, it spoke in the same unisex gurgle as the other creatures. “How may I provide you with exssssellent sssservisse today?”
“I’d like to exchange this umbrella for my mom,” I said.
I slid the umbrella through the Plexiglas door. Just as the Saltpetre Woman swung it shut, Lady Roslyn leaned forwards and whispered something to the umbrella. Yes, that’s what I said: she whispered to the umbrella. I couldn’t quite hear for certain, but it sounded like she was saying, “My name is Lady Rosamond. I am one hundred sixty-eight centimeters tall.”
“What did you—” I started to ask, but Lady Roslyn gave a quick shake of her head, which I figured was her way of telling me to shut up.
On the other side of the window, the Saltpetre Woman picked up the umbrella. It was starting to tremble a little, and I realized what Lady Roslyn had done. She had lied to it. At least, the thing about her name was definitely a lie, and I was willing to bet the thing about her height was, too.
I wasn’t sure why, after everything she had told me, Lady Roslyn had suddenly decided that lying when magic was around would be a good idea. Still, they weren’t especially big lies. Maybe they wouldn’t have very big consequences.
The Saltpetre Woman apparently didn’t notice that the umbrella was shaking, because she just slid it into a glass cylinder and put it into the pneumatic tube. As it rose up, the shaking of the umbrella finally made the glass cylinder vibrate hard enough for the Saltpetre Woman to notice it. She reached out to grab it, but she was far too slow, and the cylinder got sucked up out of sight.
It must have been shaking harder and harder as it went, because I could hear it thumping around inside the pneumatic tube, louder and louder, as it rose.
As the thumps turned into bangs, Lady Roslyn leaned over and whispered a single word to me: “Duck.” She crouched down next to the counter. I didn’t need to be told twice—I crouched down next to her.
And just in time, too, because, from inside the pneumatic tube, the umbrella suddenly burst open with a BANG! The pneumatic tube flew into pieces, and dozens of flying bits of iron crashed into the Plexiglas safety window, shattering it.
The other customers screamed.
The Saltpetre clerks staggered backwards.
The umbrella hung there in the air, spinning around, with the drop of water hovering in the middle like a fiery red bowling ball.
Then Lady Roslyn, in one swift motion, leapt up, jumped through the jagged hole in the Plexiglas, grabbed the umbrella in midair, closed it over the giant glowing drop, and landed on the floor on the other side.
She glanced back over her shoulder at me. “Well, are you coming or not?” she asked. Then she ran through a door and vanished.
I climbed over the counter and ran after her. What else could I do?
Then I ran through the door. In the hallway beyond it, I managed to catch up to
Lady Roslyn. “Why did you do that?” I demanded. “They were about to give me my mother back.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Well, obviously, they— I mean, I’m sure— Fine. What about all those people? They could have gotten hurt.”
“But did they?”
“I don’t know! You didn’t give me the chance to look!”
From behind us, a voice called, “Ssssstop, pleasssse. You are tressssspassssing.” More voices joined in, repeating that last word: “Tressssspassssing. Tressssspassssing.” I wasn’t going to make the mistake of looking over my shoulder, but I could tell there were at least half a dozen Saltpetre Men behind us.
“They’ll never catch up with us,” Lady Roslyn said as we went through the door at the end of the hallway.
We were in a huge room—it looked like some kind of big mail sorting facility. Dozens of Saltpetre Men were working there. Some of them were tossing parcels into wheeled carts, and others were pushing the carts around, and still others were taking the parcels out and feeding them into giant, clanking machines. Then the machines spat the parcels out onto one of the hundreds of conveyor belts that ran in all directions, from the floor up to the ceiling.
From somewhere, an alarm went, “AOOOGAH! AOOOGAH!” and a voice over an intercom said, “Tressssspasssserssss…Tressssspasssserssss…Tressssspasssserssss…”
Immediately, every Saltpetre Man in that huge room turned towards us and joined in the chorus: “Tressssspasssserssss…Tressssspasssserssss…”
They started to shuffle towards us. “Tressssspasssserssss…”
And from the corridor behind us, I could hear more voices saying the same thing, getting closer and closer.
“Follow me,” said Lady Roslyn. She grabbed one of the wheeled carts, ran forwards with it for a few steps, and jumped in. I managed to jump in just behind her.
“Tressssspasssserssss…Tressssspasssserssss…”
The cart shot forwards, right between two of the monsters, and Lady Roslyn jumped back out again. She landed nimbly on one of the machines. I tried to do the same thing but missed the machine and landed on the floor.
I climbed up next to her, a little clumsily. As usual, she didn’t show the slightest sign of being out of breath. “How old are you again?” I asked her.
Instead of answering, Lady Roslyn pointed inside the machine. There were little wooden shelves spaced a few feet apart along a conveyor belt, and a panel that swung shut, then open, then shut again, every time one of the shelves passed by.
“Um,” I said. “You don’t seriously think we’re going to—”
Before I could finish, the panel flipped open, and Lady Roslyn dove forwards and slipped through it just before it closed again.
“Oh, boy,” I said. The panel flipped open again, and before I could think too hard about it, I leapt.
I almost made it, but the panel started to close just before I made it all the way through, and it slammed shut on my ankle.
“Ow!” I said, yanking my foot out. But Lady Roslyn was already two feet above my head, because the conveyor belt started heading straight up as soon as it came out of the machine.
“Are you coming or not?” she called down to me.
“Tressssspasssserssss…Tressssspasssserssss…”
I didn’t have much choice. I balanced as best I could on the shallow wooden shelf and let it carry me up.
And up, and up, and up, through a forest of belts and pipes, until we were almost at the high ceiling. We passed a narrow metal catwalk, and Lady Roslyn stepped off onto it, as casually as if she were stepping down off a bus. I tried to do the same thing, but in the few seconds it took me to work up my nerve, the conveyor belt carried me a little too high, and I misjudged the distance, and my foot slammed down on the catwalk, and it turned out that the catwalk was hanging from chains instead of fixed to the wall. It swung out from under me and I almost went plummeting down to the ground.
I grabbed the handrail tightly as the catwalk swung wildly back and forth.
“I’m sure you’re relatively lovely,” Lady Roslyn said calmly. “Nevertheless, you would not be my first choice for the last sight I ever see. Do try not to send me plummeting to my doom.”
I looked down past the tangle of conveyor belts stretching to the floor, where the crowd of monsters looked back up at me, all chanting that single hissing word: “Tressssspasssserssss…Tressssspasssserssss…”
Then I turned back to Lady Roslyn. “So where’s my mom?”
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
“WHAT?? After dragging me through the sewers—and blowing up the post office when they might have just given her back—how on earth can you—”
She put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Your mother is somewhere nearby, Hyacinth, and nobody is better qualified than you to determine exactly where. Close your eyes. Which way should we go?”
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I wasn’t exactly sure how I was supposed to do this, but I tried to sense where Mom was. It was no use. All I could sense was the chanting of the Saltpetre Men below, and the pain in my ankle, and a conveyor belt that I really needed to get onto, and a cramp in my—
Wait a minute. What was that about a conveyor belt? I opened my eyes and pointed to it. “That one. We have to get on that one.”
This time, I led the way. I jumped off the catwalk and onto a conveyor belt that took me down to another conveyor belt that took me over to another conveyor belt that took me up to exactly the right conveyor belt.
I don’t know how I knew. All I knew, as it lifted me out of the room and into a vent in the ceiling, was that I was closer to my mom than I had been since the monsters took her away.
Just past the vent, the conveyor belt twisted around suddenly, dumping us off. We fell into a dimly lit room.
We landed on a big pile of musty old scrolls—one of many that filled the room. Some of the scrolls were glowing, which, I realized, was where the room’s dim light came from. There were no bulbs overhead.
There were also no doors. The only way out was via the conveyor belt, now a good seven feet above our heads.
Lady Roslyn looked around. “Excellent work,” she said. “Apparently, your mother is some sort of rolled-up piece of paper.”
I ignored her, which was a skill I was getting plenty of practice in. Instead, I started to dig through one of the piles of scrolls. I don’t know how I knew it was the right place to start—I just knew.
I lifted up one of the scrolls and found a finger. I jumped, because I knew exactly whose finger it was. The ring on it still had the scratches from when I was four and Mom had made the mistake of telling me that the engraving on the ring was a bay leaf, like Grandma used in her recipes. The next morning, I had taken the ring from Mom’s night table, dropped it into the blender, and tried to make soup. It had survived, more or less, and Mom was completely forgiving about it. (Which, I have to admit, she always was about everything.) “Don’t worry about the scratches,” she had told me cheerfully as she put it back on. “That just gives it some extra history.”
Seeing my mom’s finger in the pile of scrolls, I had a moment of panic, until I pulled off more scrolls and discovered that the finger was still attached to her hand, which was still attached to her arm, which was still attached to…
“Mom!” I said as I frantically knocked away the scrolls. I was relieved to see that she was still breathing, and she didn’t seem to have been hurt. But she didn’t respond when I shook her shoulders and said, “Mom! Wake up! It’s Hyacinth!”
Lady Roslyn pulled me away. “That’s not going to work. It’s an enchanted sleep. Waking her will be simple when the time is right.”
“What are we waiting for, then?”
“Do you think having your mother awake will be a help in a complex and dangerous situation, or a hindrance?”
Okay, she had a point. Mom always reacted calmly when I screwed something up, but any other unexpected circumstance i
n life threw her into a tizzy. I had seen her react to a lost shoe like it was a major military catastrophe. I wasn’t sure how she’d deal with being woken up in the middle of a magical sorting facility full of lumbering, glittery-eyed monsters.
Lady Roslyn looked at me kneeling next to my mom. “Stay like that,” she said, and leapt onto my shoulders.
“Ow,” I said.
“Stop talking,” Lady Roslyn said. “It makes it hard to maintain my balance.”
“Then stop digging your heels into my—ow!”
Lady Roslyn stretched her arms up, but even perched on me, she couldn’t reach the conveyor belt. “Stand up,” she said.
“Are you kidding me?”
“Do you want to get out of here or not? Put your hands on my ankles to hold me on your shoulders, then stand up.”
The putting-my-hands-on-her-ankles part was pretty easy. The standing up part wasn’t, but I staggered to my feet, feeling like I was in the worst circus act ever. But somehow I managed to stay upright.
Lady Roslyn stretched out her arms until she could reach the conveyor belt. She pulled herself up onto it, then balanced carefully, one leg on either side of the moving bit, so she could stand in place. “Now pass your mother up,” she said.
It’s true my mom was pretty small for a grown-up. But I had never tried lifting her above my head. Still, I wasn’t sure how else we were going to get out of there, so I bent back down and picked her up.
Holy moly, my mother was heavy.
With a lot of grunting, I managed to get her up to my waist. With even more grunting, I managed to raise her up to my chest, but that was as high as I could lift her.
Lady Roslyn knelt down, still keeping one leg on either side of the moving walkway, and stretched her arms down. She couldn’t quite reach Mom. “Lift her higher.”
Easy for her to say. I tried with all my might, but I just couldn’t get Mom above my head. At least, I couldn’t get all of her. So I flopped her arms up, and Lady Roslyn managed to grab them. Finally, she pulled Mom off the ground and up onto the conveyor belt.
Hyacinth and the Secrets Beneath Page 9
