“I remember this,” said Billy, his voice an awed whisper.
“You do?” asked Dom, immediately followed by Billy, voice this time quite different, asking, “What is it? Let me think for a moment.”
“Your shadow has found himself again,” said Arithmos.
“I’ve seen this very event before,” said Billy, back to the first voice. “My God, I remember my name.”
“What is it?” asked Dom.
“It’s Blake. I’m William Blake.”
“Jesus,” said Dom. “The poet? Even I’ve heard of you.”
Billy nodded his head.
“Are you shitting me, or are you for real?”
“He speaks the truth, Dom,” replied Arithmos. “His memories have returned. Those numbers you saw when you arrived were the spark to remind the Shadow of who it was. This event we’re witnessing with the priests is an echo, something he saw here when he was a man such as you. And now that he has returned, things must move on again.”
With that, the box began to shake in Dom’s hands, and with a jolt Westminster Abbey fell away from them.
Subset
Slick with sweat and rain and ocean spray, shivering from exhaustion and cold and yet also fearful she was about to overheat from the strain of the descent, Jenna finally sat down on the first stable rock she’d come across in over an hour. In front of her stood a cat, and as she watched, the animal reached out and laid a paw on a large rock that sat directly across from her and, like a stop-motion film taken over eons instead of years, the rock eroded, just peeled away layer after layer and stripped it bare to the elements of the numbers, until eventually the only thing that remained was a small pile of stones, pebbles now, and beneath that pile rested a weathered wooden box. And with that, the numbers were once again gone.
Jenna brushed aside the stones and picked up the box, looking at it closely, feeling the grain with her fingertips, admiring the beautiful and delicate scrollwork along the edges and the fine filigreed brass clasp that held it shut. She wanted to open it but the fear she felt for the safety of Dom and Billy was suddenly replaced by a deeper fear about what she was about to find. When she lifted the lid, what would happen? Was this piece of mojo really something that she would be able to work, as opposed to watching the numbers do their level best to keep away from her? And if so, what did that mean for her life? After these short few days of radical change there would likely be an even more extreme transformation, a change she wouldn’t be able to undo.
As much as Arithmos had warned her, she knew that no matter what was said or shown to her she wouldn’t be ready for what might happen when she used this artefact. But she also knew that she couldn’t let that stop her, not with Dom and Billy in danger and not with her mother somehow a part of all of this.
She opened the box.
Inside was a simple coil-bound notebook, tattered at the edges and with faded printing on the worn leather cover, barely legible but apparently not in English. Zweiter Band—Anmerkungen, it read.
“What is it?” she asked, hoping beyond hope that Arithmos would be there to answer her question, but when she looked up the numerical being was still nowhere in sight. She couldn’t imagine that it was affected by the presence of Napier, who she was sure had gone off after Dom and Billy, but did wonder if perhaps it was scared that she would now be able to do something new with the numbers, something that it wouldn’t be able to handle.
Jenna peered closely at the notebook, searching for any numbers that might give her a clue as to what she would be able to do with it, but those few numbers she could see were almost unrecognizable, and, now that she was paying attention, acting in ways that completely flummoxed her. One moment a group of them would spew from within the confines of the book and immediately align themselves together in some strange fashion, and the next, those same numbers might disappear and then reappear just at the edge of her field of view, grouped now with other odd numbers but somehow unmistakably the same. And then that group of numbers would form into a cloud, each individual constituent bouncing about in the numerical equivalent of Brownian motion, but leaving bright glowing trails behind and then, once again, disappearing from view.
Disappearing from view but not, she found, from all of her senses. Something else about the coil-bound volume had triggered a new ability in Jenna, and suddenly she found herself able to keep track not just of actualities, but of probabilities. This was nothing she’d ever heard Dom or Billy talk about, and realized with a growing sense of wonder that her relationship to the numbers was really quite different than what her numerate friends experienced.
Numbers that disappeared had an infinite selection of points where they could materialize, and in the blink of an eye Jenna knew that she was now capable of tracking and processing an insanely large portion of this never-ending series, and also of narrowing down the possibilities—which, with any luck, would keep her from becoming completely overwhelmed.
Riffling through the pages, more and more numerical possibilities leapt out at her, and very soon Jenna realized that not only could she keep track of almost all of the boundless possibilities, she could now control them. She turned more pages, flipping back and forth through the notebook, and when she found her way to the inside of the front cover she saw a name that she recognized from something she’d once read: Heisenberg.
And with that, Jenna suddenly knew what she would do.
22
Darkness again. No weight, no feeling, nothing to sense, outside of his own feeling of being lost.
I don’t know how all this spinning is going to help us get away for real, thought Dom.
There seems to be as much working with us as against us, replied Billy. Eventually someone or something has to be able to stop Napier and Archimedes.
Dom tried to laugh, but of course no sound came out. Inside his head he felt a mild chuckle instead. Napier can get past two giants and he can turn numbers against us that had deliberately set out to work with us. I can’t imagine anything can stop him right now.
You still have the Bones, said Arithmos. He can follow you, but so far he can’t catch you. Besides, he currently resides years from now.
Weight and light began to return. Hold on a minute! Dom tried to call out. What do you mean? “What the hell do you mean by ‘years from now’?” His voice, returned to the physical realm, echoed back sharply to his ears.
They were in a small room, sitting on an uncomfortable wooden chair. A table sat beside the chair, a tall unlit candle in an ornate candlestick atop the table. Across the room, faded light blue curtains covered a window; the light behind the window shifted back and forth, fell briefly then returned to brilliance, like clouds were scudding across the sky at an unreal pace. Beside the window there was a plain wooden door with an old-fashioned brass knob.
Dom stood and walked to the window, pulled aside the curtain. “Sonofabitch!” he yelled, and stumbled back a few feet before finding himself sitting down hard on the same chair.
Outside, peering in through the window, was a giant eye, bigger by far than that even of the Soutar, unblinking. It didn’t shift its position to follow Dom’s progress from standing to chair and back to standing, this time behind the chair, but he was sure that at least a small part of whatever possessed the eye was aware of his presence.
“I remember this, too,” said Billy. “This is another memory from when I was still alive, in my own body.” His voice was a mixture of thrilled and awed, and Dom could feel it too, like the layers were more quickly being lifted away from the hiding places of time.
The eye slowly blinked. Massive folds of wrinkled, timeworn flesh dropped over it, followed by a swath of grey and white hair. The eyelid and brow.
“You remember this?” Dom felt his voice approaching hysterics, and took a breath to get himself under control. This was worse than the giant cobblers at Cromarty; at least they had only paid attention to Dom when it was absolutely needed.
Billy nodded. “It’s the e
ye of God, or so I called it.” He looked around. “But if that’s the case, then my younger self should be here.”
“The Bones have flung us across the land,” said Dom, “but do you think they can send us across time as well? Maybe we’ve gone deep into your memory instead.”
The eye moved, up and down. Dom sensed that the head the eye was a part of had just nodded in agreement. He blinked in surprise, and in the fraction of a second that it took for that blink to be completed, what Billy said was God’s eye had disappeared. Billy took charge of the body and rushed to the door, had his hand on the knob and was pulling it open before Dom could think to put a stop to things.
They were in a garden, and the trees were thick with angels.
Dom spun around, but the door, the room, the building they had been in, had all disappeared. They were surrounded by trees and flowers and, as a boundary, tall and carefully trimmed hedgerows, and on every branch of every tree perched angels.
Each one was lithe, very thin without being boney, and it seemed that each angel’s body shone with a different colour from the next, a vast, winged prismatic array. Great feathered wings stretched out from their shoulders or else tucked up above and behind their backs. One feather, immense and perfect in its shape and whiteness, slowly drifted to the ground at Dom’s feet, briefly dancing in the air as it was tugged by a warm breeze.
Dom looked up from the feather, saw that all the angels had their eyes on him, saw that those same eyes were hooded and dark in the harsh shadows caused by the high sun of noon. He finally forced some spit into his dry mouth, asked, “What the hell is this?”
Billy tucked a hand behind his neck and rubbed at a small pool of sweat that had gathered there. “They’re angels, Dom. Just what they look like.”
“Who the hell has memories of God looking in on him through the window and of a bunch of angels sitting on branches like something out of Hitchcock?”
Billy shrugged. “What can I say? I had a somewhat strange life. The numbers spoke to me in a rather different fashion, and what many of my contemporaries likely dismissed as drug-fuelled hallucinations or the ravings of a loon were, for me, very real events.” He smiled. “You’ll have to read some of my poems some day.”
“There’re hundreds of them,” whispered Dom, looking at all of the angels. “Maybe thousands.” Was this his next line of defence? Had spinning the Bones deliberately brought him to places where the number ecology would be able to at least try to protect him when Napier tracked him down? And would this hideously frightening flock of angels really be willing or able to protect him?
A figure approached them now, a human-shaped mass of numbers walking out of the hedgerow. Even from here, Dom was somehow able to tell that these numbers had nothing to do with Arithmos.
“Sir Isaac,” said Blake, nodding his head. He smiled. “Still feeling as rational as ever?”
“Don’t be so smug, Blake. The Mysteries I studied may have proved to be a fruitless dead end, but I stand here, safe amidst the Heavenly Host, while you seem to be on the run.” The numbers shimmied and swirled, then walked a circle around Dom. “In fact, I’m here, and you’re in the body of a much smaller host who seems unaware that the end is soon to come.”
Dom felt his eyes roll. “Spare us any talk of God’s return, Sir Isaac. He seems more than content to maintain an anchor in the Garden.”
Somehow, Dom could tell that the shifting storm of numbers had just raised an eyebrow. “Who said anything about God returning? You’re only here as a temporary respite from your own Armageddon.”
Another figure emerged, this one from the shadows cast by the wings of the angels. It was tall, almost reptilian in appearance, and carried a large metal bowl in one hand. Its body was mostly reddish-brown, its skin scaly, pointed ears set low and aimed backwards on a large, bumpy head.
“The Ghost of a Flea,” whispered Billy, likely for Dom’s sake. The numbers that Billy had called Sir Isaac, and Dom had guessed were Isaac Newton, turned and bowed low, then stepped back.
“I need blood for my bowl, Blake,” growled the creature, waving its bowl at them, its tongue flicking out a foot or longer. “Shall I have yours?”
Billy shook his head. “Today you are nothing but a manifestation of my mind, Ghost. And besides, I think Napier would prefer to take me himself.”
The creature leered, flicked its tongue. “Who says Napier doesn’t speak through me this day?”
“If Napier spoke through you, this would have ended much earlier,” replied Billy. “I don’t know why the numbers have chosen to show me this, but I know it is nothing controlled by our persecutor.”
“It was enough to fully bring you back to yourself, Blake,” said Newton. “And now that that has been accomplished, perhaps it is time for you to leave again.” There was a great whoosh from overhead as, in unison, the angels in the surrounding trees flapped their great wings, and the roiling air plucked Dom from his feet and into darkness.
Subset
Any fears about how long it would take to learn what she needed to learn were quickly allayed when Jenna realized that, outside of where she stood right now, time did not pass. More accurately, it did pass, but only when she paid attention to it. When focused on the task at hand, learning how to harness these new numbers and the strange new abilities they gave her, the world around her slowed to a crawl and sometimes even stopped completely. Several times, still not used to this situation, she forgot herself and looked up with a start, worried that she was leaving Dom and Billy in grave danger, and the world would pick up where she had left it, for the briefest of moments seeming like it wanted to dash madly to catch up to her, waves crashing forward with a renewed intensity and birds darting through the sky at almost dangerous speeds, but then something about the numbers would grab her attention again and she would turn her gaze back to them, and once again the world would slow down and finally, if she hid from it long enough, stop.
There was a lot to learn, and even with all the time she knew she had, there wouldn’t be enough. At best, she would have to leave here and march into battle to protect Dom and Billy and even the whole world with limited knowledge and abilities and just hope for the best.
“You can’t do that,” said a voice.
Jenna turned. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the world briefly try to start again before crashing to a sudden halt as her attention zeroed in on a new group of numbers, like Arithmos, only more dynamic, even unknowable, shimmying and shaking like they were caught in a curiously localized earthquake. “Can’t do what?” she asked.
“You must stay until you have mastered this new world you are about to enter.”
She shook her head. “I have to go soon. You know that.”
The numerical creature appeared to shake its head. “If you stay long enough, you will be able to do all, including bending time on purpose, rather than simply as you’ve been doing up until now, by accident.”
“What do I call you?” asked Jenna.
The numerical creature seemed to think for a second, and then replied, “You may call us Quanta.”
Jenna shook her head. “Well then, Quanta, I’m sorry but I’m getting too tired to concentrate,” she protested. “Soon I won’t be able to keep all my attention on the numbers, and then time is going to go on as it always does. When that happens, I won’t have much of it left to save Dom and Billy.” It was true: she knew as she spoke that the more tired she became, the more difficult it was to concentrate on what she needed to learn, which meant that she was turning her focus more and more to the world around her. Soon, time would travel as fast as it was meant to, and if she didn’t get moving soon she wouldn’t be able to do anything to save Dom and Billy. And her mother.
“We worry about what will happen if you leave now, without taking the proper time to align yourself and your abilities with this new universe we have presented to you.”
Closing her eyes and casting out her new senses, she could just detect a hint of pani
c emanating from far away, panic she knew was coming from Dom. After the briefest flash of her own panic, Jenna steeled herself and frowned at the numbers. “They need my help, and I’m going. Are you with me or not?”
Quanta seemed to heave a great sigh. “With you, of course. But may we recommend a course of action that might go a short distance to aiding both of us in our goals?”
23
They were back in London, and the Bones were still spinning. To his right was the Thames, and across the river sirens still wailed. To his left was a building that looked old, albeit in remarkably good shape.
“The Globe,” whispered Billy. “I remember reading with my previous host that they had rebuilt it.”
From over the edge of the wall that led down to the river they could hear the clatter and roar as metal lions with mooring rings stuck in their mouths came back to life. “Inside the theatre,” said Arithmos, suddenly beside them. “We think we know how we can end this.”
Dom turned and ran, hoping to hell that bringing all of this to an end didn’t include offering him up as a sacrifice. In the distance he heard a booming roar, and people around him screamed and scattered, blessedly none of them running for the building.
A security guard tried to grab him as he ran past the ticket seller, but he reached into his pocket and grabbed the puck, skated past the man and up some stairs, through another door and out into the theatre itself.
“Psalm 46,” said Billy, looking up at the sky over the centre of the theatre, away from the roof hanging low over the gallery where they stood.
“What?” There were no people in here. No metal or stone creatures, either, thankfully.
“I often thought that Shakespeare was a numerate.” He looked down and gestured at the stage, which Dom saw was crawling with numbers. “In the King James Bible, the forty-sixth word of Psalm 46 is ‘shake’ and the forty-sixth word from the end is ‘spear.’ I always thought he might have noted that and perhaps even set it down someplace. An attempt at becoming an adjunct, although I’ve never heard of him being anywhere.”
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