Napier's Bones (30 page)

Jenna shook her
head. “But I can feel something similar in here,” she said, and shook the box
in her hands at the numbers in front of her.

Arithmos shrugged.
“What happens if you succeed, if we are indeed right about not only you but the
artefact you hold, is that we are freed completely, not reduced to slavery ever
again. There may be pockets of time and space where this does not happen, but
we believe that it will work in our favour.”

“Provided I’m
able to use this and somehow figure out how to stop Napier.”

The numbers
slowly nodded. “Provided so, yes.”

Jenna untied the
string, a difficult task with the knot being so old and her fingers chilled and
tired. But finally she managed, and opened the lid. Inside were some papers
loosely bound into a book, each imbued with numbers that didn’t run away from
her, instead seemed to see who she was. They rose through the air at an almost
languid pace, touched down on both of her shoulders, then reached in and
tickled her mind, gave her hints of what could be, what might be, what would
be.

She smiled, and
behind her the cat hissed, for a moment almost impossibly appearing to be both
dead and alive. And then at that very moment, Jenna seemed to
multiply
,
to be everywhere at once. Learning, finally finding what it was she was meant
to discover.

Now Jenna found
herself fighting her way through the crowd of numbers towards the doorway, the
time she’d spent learning and gathering her resources gone in the blink of an
eye, and her journey from the hillside at the Point of Stoer to here at the
Globe had even shifted her backwards in time, if only by a fraction of a
moment. The numbers above and around her, those that didn’t seem committed to
the coming battle, seemed to confirm that backwards slide in time for her newly
tuned senses. It was like a universal clock that all this time had surrounded
her, before this moment always invisible.

Napier,
Archimedes, and her mother were approaching, but she couldn’t yet get a handle
on the direction. For this the numbers were too scrambled, too many siding with
them, whether or not it was voluntary.

She entered the
theatre, and all the strange mystical creatures she had seen as the new type of
numbers had dropped her back into this world, this small sliver of space and
time, stopped moving, frozen into unfamiliar positions. In response, the
numbers that had been spilling from the Bones in Dom’s hand gathered themselves
back up into a tight ball and flung themselves towards her, a tight angry
tornado of numerical hornets looking to sting Jenna to death.

She didn’t even
blink. The new numbers that accompanied her smeared reality, and the numbers
forced into action by Napier’s Bones were suddenly everywhere and everything
else.

But in that
moment a woman—her mother, she was sure, even though it had been so long since
she’d seen her—appeared out of nowhere, dropped onto the stage and, before
Jenna could warn him, cracked Dom on the back of the head with a large club
shaped from numbers.

Dom rolled over
to look at the woman. She definitely resembled Jenna, but the shadows that
overlapped her body seethed and skittered, played harshly on her face. She held
the Bones in her left hand.

“It’s about time
I caught up to you,” she, or rather, Napier said. She reached up and pulled
some numbers from the air, flung them down in a pattern that pinned Dom to the
stage and left him gasping for breath, the weight on his chest almost unbearable.

“And you!” she
called, looking now across the theatre at Jenna, while Dom struggled to free
his hands, looking for any mojo he could use to get them out of this. “Family
or no, you’ll have to be punished for helping them.” She sent more numbers
Jenna’s way, a horrendous torrent of them, but every single one of them crashed
to the ground between them, numerical shards of glass that had run into an
invisible barrier.

She frowned,
then shook her head and spun the Bones. Instantly the creatures that surrounded
the stage came back to life. “Deal with her,” she said, pointing a finger in
Jenna’s direction.

Dom and Billy
found some numbers embedded in the stage, numbers that were still not under
Napier’s control. They used them to get out from under the crushing weight of
the numbers that held them down, and, still with some difficulty, stood.

Dom
was back with Jenna again. He tried to look to see what was happening on the
stage, but he had no control over what she did.

Every creature
called up again by Napier attacked Jenna, but a simple wave of her hand was
enough to halt their progress. Every single stone and metal creature stopped in
mid-step, and the numbers that accompanied them continued to disappear or to
become something else as they attacked Jenna, spinning off into uncertainties
and fluctuations as the numbers found new universal laws to observe.

She reached the
stage and pulled herself up, in time to see Billy, in Dom’s body, rush her
mother. She closed her eyes and put her hands back down onto the stage, felt
the flow of numbers, looking for the right sequence.

The numbers in
the stage were still unwilling to go to work for Napier, that much was obvious.
The wood under Napier’s feet buckled and twisted now, although the host,
Jenna’s mother, was doing well keeping her—their—balance.

Back in his own
body again, Dom was thrown off balance as he, as Billy, ran after Jenna’s
mother. More numbers came after him, trying their best to pin him back to the
stage, but with Billy’s help he was able to find sequences he could use to fend
them off. Although Napier’s numbers were tough, they had the advantage in that
already Napier’s mind seemed to be on other things, and the numbers could do no
more than try to hold their own; they were not set forth to behave
autonomously, and so each one could be batted away.

Napier was
concentrating on the Bones now. Dom knew that the body was Jenna’s mom and that
Archimedes was in there as well, but it suddenly seemed obvious to him this was
all Napier. Instead of spinning them into random numbers and equations, which
had only kicked Dom and Billy randomly across the Britain, the adjunct was
cautiously turning one Bone, and then another. As he did so, numbers hovered
overhead, waiting their turn to interact with the Bones and create whatever it
was Napier was after.

Dom sat up,
fingered the copper wire still around his wrist, then sought out other numbers
in the frantic ecology that surrounded them. Ignoring the momentary pang of
guilt, he pulled down a rain of formulae, and bolstered the attack with a small
wave of imaginary numbers that had found their way to the theatre.

The first attack
buffeted Napier, and the second hit him hard enough to almost make him drop the
box of Bones. Jenna’s mother looked up, rage written across her face, but
before she—Napier—could counterattack, Dom grabbed hold of Barylko’s puck and
skated across the newly frozen surface of the stage, knocking the Bones from
her hands.

The box went
flying through the air, and Napier and Jenna’s mother fell to the stage, the
ice having caught them by surprise. Dom spun around and moved to catch it, but
a new series of numbers dropped in his path at shoulder level, and he had to
fall to his knees as he slid to avoid being shredded by the razor sharp edges
that Napier had given them. The box dropped to the ice and skidded to the far
corner of the stage, the Bones all of a sudden spinning again. Once more, Dom
found himself in blackness, off to yet another random location.

They were on a
small hill overlooking the ocean. Jenna’s mother stood on the beach down below
them, the Bones at her feet. Numbers rose from her head and body in a twisting,
raging storm and fell hard towards Jenna, only ten feet away. Jenna’s response
was almost negligible; some strange numbers rushed from her fingertips and her
forehead and kept her mother from reaching down for the Bones, but she did
nothing that Dom could see to fight off the numbers attacking her head on.
Instead, the attacking numbers just dissipated, motes of dust in a powerful
wind, before they got to her. The roar of the numbers overpowered any sounds of
wind and waves, and made it difficult for Dom to think about what he could do
to help.

For a brief
moment again he found himself in Jenna’s head, but this time she whispered,
seemingly right in his ear, “Not now, Dom. Go back to your own body, and I’ll
explain later.”

Back and looking
through his own eyes again, he jumped forward to help, but before he could get
close sand and gravel exploded around Jenna’s mom, a tall curtain of earth that
surrounded her and would not return to the ground. An identical wall of sand
jumped up to surround Jenna, and then, slowly, each curtain leaned in towards
the other, until the two were almost parallel with the ground, enormous,
ferocious sandblasters. Jenna stepped out from the midst of her own curtain,
smiled at Dom, then lifted a hand and stepped back into the midst of the dry
conflagration, towards her mother. Rocks and sand curled around and over her,
none touching her, the most damage being a slight ruffling of her hair.

“Jesus,” said
Dom, coming to a halt.

“No doubt,”
replied Billy. “I’ve seen much in my life, but never such as this.”

Both curtains of
sand dropped down to nothing, and Jenna’s mother frowned, and then took the
opportunity of the silence to reach down and grab the Bones. New numbers were
conjured, and Dom made to call up his own numbers to try and stop them, but
Jenna held up her hand and shook her head. He stopped, aware of something in
her eyes that he hadn’t seen before.

Napier had the
last Bone in place. For a moment that seemed to Dom to stretch on forever,
everything seemed to stop: birds out over the water hung in mid-air; waves
reached out and waited for gravity to return; the few clouds that had been
rushing across the sky came to a halt. Silence hung ominously over everything.

And then with a
crash of renewed sound the world sprang back to the present, and the sudden
onslaught of numbers turning back towards Napier was both awe-inspiring and
hideously frightening. Dom watched as the shadows within began to split off
from Jenna’s mother, as both Napier and Archimedes coalesced into solid masses
of numbers, then smoothed out and filled themselves in, becoming real bodies.
Now both Napier and Archimedes seemed real, living people again, no longer
shadows inhabiting an unwilling hostess.

Instantly, the
blue sky turned pitch black, even though the sun still shone overhead. Static
charges flashed and noisily crashed and broke up overhead, fuzzy motes of
brilliant whiteness like temporary splashes of white pollen on black felt.

Jenna’s mother
and the Archimedes shadow both stumbled back, and Napier reached up and called
more numbers down onto Jenna, but everything he threw at her went astray, many
of the numbers just seeming to give up interest as they approached her, others
finding themselves in places that they hadn’t intended to be.

“I’ll kill you
if I have to twist your neck with my bare hands!” yelled Napier over the angry
buzzing and crashing, his accent thicker than before, his voice shaking with
rage and exhaustion; the storm of numbers he was controlling would have wiped
out Dom by now, and likely, any other numerate. Napier had very short hair and
a thick, long goatee, and he wore a black robe with a slightly soiled white
ruff around his neck. His face was contorted with rage, and his prominent ears
were flushed bright red.

Jenna spread her
arms and tilted her head to one side. “You’re welcome to try,” she answered,
also yelling to be heard over the noise of the crashing numbers. “But it won’t
do any good.” She flicked her eyes to the ocean, sad smile on her lips. “We
have visitors.”

Everyone turned
to look, saw that a large pod of dolphins had come ashore, all of them eerily
calm, and even from here, Dom could tell that they all had their eyes focused
on Napier. The shadow—no, now a man, no longer an adjunct—seemed to count them
all, then grunted in surprise and dismay. He attempted several attacks on them,
but all of the numbers again just petered out.

“Cetacean math
and our math are not the same things,” said Jenna’s mom, now standing so close
behind Dom that he jumped in surprise. He turned, prepared to fight her, but
she put a gentle hand on his arm and shook her head. “They’ve come for you,
Napier.”

“You control us
no longer, John Napier,” called Archimedes in thickly accented English,
standing not far behind Napier. He smiled nervously, a short, dark-haired and
somewhat plump man in a loose-fitting yellow robe and sandals, fretful numbers
dancing around his head, anxious to protect him.

Napier himself
made to conjure up a new attack, but Jenna silently stepped forward and laid
her hands on the Bones. A shadow eased out from inside of her, and replicated
itself over and over and over again. And suddenly the numbers that surrounded
them were not only doing things that Dom had never before seen, but things he
never even would have thought possible. They were disappearing and reappearing
in random fashion, some of them copying themselves before his eyes and others
changing from one form to another and back again as he watched them.

The sky changed
then, no longer black, but suddenly a spectrum of colours, and Dom got the idea
that it wasn’t changing from one to the other but rather was all of them at
once, as if he could see each and every possible colour at the same time. He
turned to look back at Jenna and saw that the same was happening with her, that
he could see two, a dozen, a hundred, even a million different Jennas, all at
the same time, shifting and sliding in through and around each other, all of
them with one hand on the Bones and the other reaching for Napier himself.