Napier's Bones (26 page)

Jenna closed her
eyes and shook her head, then put a hand down to help push her back up to a
standing position. “What if I fall?”

“We’ll be there
to aid you,” replied Arithmos. “You won’t fall, we guarantee.”

She shook her
head. “Some guarantee. Every time I’ve tried to do something with numbers, you
all have scattered away from me. What are you going to do, hold me up with good
wishes?”

“Good wishes and
some decent climbing gear,” replied the numbers as they set off for the edge of
the hill.

“Climbing gear?”
Jenna didn’t know whether to be appalled or amused.

Arithmos nodded.
“We can’t carry you, we can’t grant you wings, and we certainly wouldn’t wish
for you to fall to your death climbing down amongst the rocks, since even if
you did have experience in these sorts of things the weather would not be
terribly conducive to a safe endeavour. Therefore, we have enough climbing gear
to be able to help you down safely.”

The climbing
gear turned out to be a simple harness, carabiners to clip into place, and a
rope long enough to descend from where it was already tied around one large
rock. It was cold and wet and Jenna wished that she had gloves and a warmer
coat, but at least she was wearing decent enough shoes for making her way down
towards the water. With Arithmos leading the way, she cautiously set off,
hoping that she would make it in time to be able to help Dom and Billy, hoping
just as much that she would just be able to make it in one piece.

Images crashed
into Dom’s mind:

In a museum, it
looked like, jars of all sizes, yellowish fluid inside them the final resting
place of plants and animals from all around the world. Somehow, Dom was
watching from the side and above as a man leaned down, looked through curved
glass of an extra-large jar at the visage of a fox, long dead, eyes shut tight
against the light and its mouth pulled back in a final leer. Close now, the man
fell back to the floor with a terrified scream when the fox opened its right
eye and slammed its head, once, against the jar. Bubbles rose from its mouth,
bursting one after the other as they reached the lid.

We are in
London,
said Arithmos.
The Bones, they won’t stop spinning.
The
numbers were nowhere in sight, but he could still hear them.

Dom blinked away
the vision, looked down at the box in his hands. Sure enough, the Bones hadn’t
stopped, if anything seemed to be going faster.

As long as
they keep spinning, there is much they awaken here,
continued Arithmos.
I
am showing you some of it.

“Why?” asked
Billy.

They create
chaos. Some for you, most against you. The ripples travel widely, wake
everything in their path. It’s best you see what’s coming.

There was more
to see: high on the side of an old building, statuary scraped to life, relief
carvings of saints leaned out over the streets, stretching to escape from their
stone captivity, succeeding only in dropping shards of rock onto pedestrians
below. One finally pulled itself completely free, wrestled with freedom for the
briefest of moments, and then plummeted to the sidewalk, narrowly missing
several people with its initial bulk, but hitting many in the explosion of
hundreds, thousands of tiny fragments. Numbers glistened in the blood of every
wound, fell to the sidewalk to mingle with the stone and dust, struggled to
escape and join the search for Dom and the Bones.

“I don’t
understand,” mumbled Dom. He’d finally been able to take stock of where he
stood, knew he was on a sidewalk alongside a river.
The Thames
,
whispered a voice in his head, many thousands of people jostling for position,
not one of them concerned that he might have popped up seemingly out of
nowhere.

Closer now, the
ripples were visible, easy to see now that Dom knew what he was looking for.
They stroked and prodded a great metal lion nearby, and with an immense
creaking and grinding that stopped everyone in their tracks, it stood and
turned its head to look at Dom.

And he suddenly
realized he wasn’t seeing this somewhere in his mind’s eye.

There were
screams from all around, and a mad rush of people running in all directions,
some out into the street where a couple were hit by vehicles unable to stop in
time. Dom opened the box, tried to put his hands to the Bones to make them
stop, but no matter how hard he pushed he couldn’t touch them, his hand shoved
away, like a magnet against the same pole.

The lion stepped
out onto the sidewalk, staring down at him with blank eyes. It opened its mouth
to roar, but the sound that came out was far more hideous and frightening,
metal against metal, a high pitched scrape that drove right down through his
bones. “What the hell is happening?” he asked, voice a hoarse whisper.

Help is
coming,
said Arithmos.
Just stay alive until it does.

“Just stay
alive
?”
Dom’s voice cracked as he yelled this. “What the fuck sort of advice is that?”
His voice seemed to break the spell, and the lion jumped forward and swiped
with one immense paw. Dom reached into his pocket, made contact with the puck,
and skated away over fresh ice around and behind the lion, bounced off a nearby
lamp post and fell to the pavement. The metal beast turned its head, sensed him
again, and with a grinding crash lunged forward, teeth clamping down on air
only because Dom was able to find the puck again. This time it led him out over
the stone wall and down a madcap slide of ice onto the river, the water below
and ahead of him freezing over, a spreading fan of translucent white stopping
the surface flow of the river. He pushed it as hard as he could, skating away
from the shore, but the lion leapt over the stone wall and down onto the ice
he’d left behind, and even though Dom concentrated everything he could on his
escape, Arithmos showed him his pursuer, more images like a movie running
through his mind. The lion crashed to the ice, which buckled and cracked under
the impact, but it held, thick and strong and not yet ready to melt. The
beast’s metal feet quickly gained purchase and then it was rushing after him,
cheered on by dozens of green copper lion heads embedded in the walls along the
river’s embankment, their chorus of approving, frightening voices muffled by
the rings lodged in their mouths.

The ice reached
far ahead of Dom, and a distant part of him thought to be amazed by the
incredible power of the puck in his pocket. The river buckled and froze around
a tour boat off to his right, and pieces of the vessel broke away from the
sudden stop; several people standing outside at the front of the boat were
pitched over the edge, and Dom caught a glimpse of red staining the ice where
they lay.

Ah,
came the voice of Arithmos.
The ripples have reached help.

Dom looked
around but couldn’t see anything, and then Billy said, “Up!” From above came
two creatures, both something like small dragons.

The
closer one dropped onto the lion, a crash of metal on metal, while the other
fell into place, still flying, beside Dom. “Keep moving,” it said, voice
scraped from a place dry and deep.

Dom glanced
over, saw that it wasn’t a dragon, but rather a gryphon, and that it was made
of stone. Numbers from the spinning Bones rolled over it in fast waves; these
were what kept it animated and flying, the numbers shifting and bending like
muscles overlaying its body in a flickering grid pattern. “Where am I going?”
he asked. A look back now showed that the lion had batted away the other dragon
or gryphon, which was lying in pieces scattered across the ice, and it had
resumed its pursuit.

“Swing left,
back to the shore you were on,” it said, leading the way. Dom turned hard and
pushed even harder for the shore, and the lion, seeing he was scribing an arc,
moved to cut him off.

“Now let go of
your artefact!” yelled the gryphon, and it swung around and grabbed Dom by the
shoulders. He felt a tearing pain in both arms as he was lifted into the air,
but as soon as he let go of the puck in his pocket the ice stopped forming in
front and began to melt in behind.

On the sidewalk
above the river, hundreds of people scattered when the gryphon let him down,
but many more stayed closer to take pictures. Dom turned and looked, saw the
lion drop through suddenly thin ice, plunging to the bottom of the river with
no sound and only the feeblest of motions.

Dom could hear
sirens now, from all directions. The gryphon that had pulled him off the river
stood motionless for a few seconds, then said, voice growling but quiet,
“You’ll be safest at Westminster Abbey. Consecrated ground offers some
protection against my kind rising at times like this.”

“You saved me.
Don’t I want your kind to be around?”

Life from
stone and metal,
said Arithmos.

More images in
Dom’s head:

Soldiers,
stepping down from the pedestals that celebrate their contributions in wartime,
waving metal rifles and swords as they read the numbers in the air, looking for
the path towards Dom. Around them people scattered, fear as thick as the
numbers right now.

In a distant
green park, monsters that looked like a child’s primitive idea of dinosaurs
come to life, stretching long petrified legs as they began their march to the
Bones. A child at the park, too slow to respond, was knocked to the ground by a
swinging tail, bleeding and shattered in his mother’s arms, as still now as the
statues once were.

“The dragons and
gryphons will work with us,” said Billy. Dom could feel his sudden
understanding wash over both of them. “The rest won’t, or can’t. Napier can
work those numbers in his favour.”

“Correct.” The
stone gryphon nodded its head. “No matter how we were created, stone and metal
know their ancestry and allies, and while all of the others may bend to
Napier’s will, our kin—dragon and gryphon both—have always given freely of
their essence when we’ve been created, been there to help defend the land and
the city that was once, millennia ago, our home.” It flapped its wings, rose
into the air. “Now. Use your artefact and follow me to the Abbey. It’s your
only chance, at least until the Bones finally stop their spinning.”

Dom pulled the
puck from his pocket and held it tight in his hand, skated after the gryphon,
dodged traffic and pedestrians and raced between buildings, trying to keep it
in sight. Twice in the distance he saw large stone or metal figures walking
towards him, but both times they were too far away to worry about, at least for
the moment.

He rounded a
corner and found himself in a narrow lane, this one miraculously free of
people. The gryphon hovered just above the pavement, facing him. “Follow this
road,” it said, gesturing with its head. “There’s a back entrance to the Abbey;
it will be open for you. Once you’re in you’ll be safe, at least from marauding
stone and metal.” It flew straight up then, launching itself high above the
buildings.

Dom again put
the puck back into his pocket and ran, hoping he wouldn’t come across any more
creatures, and hoping almost as much that any witnesses down by the river
wouldn’t have been able to keep up with him. More sirens were sounding, and the
police were another worry, but he made it to the Abbey after only a moment of
panic, when from around a corner a walking statue had stepped and caught him in
its dead stone glare, a sight that caused him to run even harder. And then he
was there, and sure enough, a small door was open, and he dashed across the
open space and into the old church. Numbers seemed to jump out of a distant
nook as the door shut itself behind him, but they were far gone before he could
do much more than blink. He ran down some hallways, made a couple of wrong
turns that he had to double back on, and then he had joined the crowds of
tourists that regularly filled the Abbey, thankfully none of them likely even
aware of what had happened down by the Thames. Across the open space of the
Abbey, past the crowds, something flashed in the corner of his eye, but when Dom
turned to look it was no longer there, no matter how long he stared.

“I’ve . . . been
here,” said Billy, interrupting Dom’s searching.

“Can’t
come as much of a surprise,” replied Dom, trying to keep his voice low. “You’re
British and this place is pretty damned famous. But were you here as yourself
or as an adjunct? That’s the question.”

Dom could see no
place to sit and rest, so he walked over to a corner and leaned against the
stone wall, watched the people walk by. He opened the lid to the box, saw that
the Bones were finally slowing down. Numbers still sloughed off of them and
spilled to the floor, but the seismic waves that had emanated from the box
earlier were no longer so apparent.

“Consecrated
ground,” said Billy, as he watched the numbers drop to the floor.

“Good thing,”
responded Dom. Everywhere he looked there were statues decorating crypts,
representing the dead kings and queens and knights of old. Tourists shuffled
past them, some pausing long enough to read badly worn memorial inscriptions, but
most just taking the time to try and read the dates, those numbers so old and
worn that they could barely rise above the metal or stone where they had been
written.

Dom felt a
grinding sensation from the stone he leaned against, something distant and huge
moving either outside the old church, or somewhere deep inside. Numbers poked
at his back, and he stepped away from the wall and moved on, casting a glance
over his shoulder, hoping like hell something new wasn’t going to burst through
the stone and come at him.

He fell in with
the flow of people, but only passively paid attention to the sights as a
tourist might see them. Instead, he watched the statues for signs of movement,
watched the numbers coming from them for anything new or different. One tableau
was a remarkable sculpture of a grinning skeleton Death, rising up from below
and threatening a man and a woman with a sword. He stood and watched that one
for long enough that eventually the numbers from the spinning Bones had built
up enough to seep into the floor and travel the distance to the skeleton. Its
toes wiggled slightly, and Dom quickly stepped away.