Day of the Djinn Warriors (15 page)

T
he Reliquary Room in St. Mark’s Church was at the top of the building, in a dusty-looking room that was more like a prison cell in a castle tower. There was a high, barred window, and around the walls was a series of outsized wooden filing cabinets with deep drawers, in alphabetical order, according to the names of the saints whose relics were supposed to be kept in them.

The Keeper of the Relics was an elderly American nun by the name of Sister Cristina, who John thought looked like a bit of a relic herself. But he thought she must have been fitter than she looked: There were two hundred steps from the ground-floor entrance to the Reliquary Room, and Finlay’s body was wheezing breathlessly by the time Nimrod and the children had climbed all the way up there.

Groanin had chosen to stay at the hotel, nursing a large bee sting on the top of his head that made it look like the red light on an ambulance. He was sulking because John and
Finlay thought it was very amusing to make noises like a siren every time he came into the room. Faustina had gone to Babylon by whirlwind. Her mother, Jenny Sachertorte, had taken a plane back to the United States after a very emotional good-bye scene with her daughter.

Sister Cristina was helpful and informative as was only to be expected given Nimrod’s high status as a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Mark. But she was also quite honest about the dubious origins of many of the Reliquary’s so-called relics.

“I don’t know why we keep some of this junk,” she confessed. “Really, I don’t. Because that’s what most of it is: junk. We’ve got everything from the toenails of St. Blaise to the earwax of St. Mungo. At my last count, we had thirty-three of the fingers of St. Anthony, fifteen toes belonging to St. Munditia, six thigh bones of St. Bartholomew, and three skulls of St. Barnabas. Teeth are in the greatest supply. We could probably replace half of the dentures in Italy with the teeth we have here. There are boxes full of them.”

“What about St. Mark?” asked Nimrod. “Do you have any of his bits and pieces?”

Sister Cristina smiled. “You mean you don’t believe that he’s underneath our high altar?”

“I think, like a lot of people, I have my doubts,” admitted Nimrod.

Sister Cristina shrugged and went over to a drawer with the word
MARCO
painted neatly on the outside. She opened the drawer and pointed at a jumble of bones, teeth,
vials of blood, locks of hair, fingernails, toenails, arm and leg bones, and vertebrae. Wrapped in a piece of pearled velvet was a skull, complete with glass eyes and jeweled teeth. There was even a golden leg that allegedly contained Mark’s femur.

“Quite a choice, isn’t there?” said Sister Cristina. “We had most of these things carbon-dated a while back and none of it’s older than a thousand years. In other words, most of this stuff is fake. But we keep it because it’s a part of our history, from a time when relics mattered to people. When the faithful thought they had the power to heal them.”

“Is there anything you keep here that you think really might have genuine power?” asked Philippa.

Sister Cristina thought for a moment.

“Yes, there is,” she said. “Funnily enough, these are also supposed to be relics of St. Mark. And although they can’t possibly be genuine, the box they’re in, which is finely crafted and too big for the drawer, does emit a sort of power or energy, depending on what you want to call it. I find it most curious.”

“Then why do you say these relics can’t be genuine?” asked Philippa.

“Because we had them carbon-dated, as well. To find out how old they really are. From books, we know that St. Mark died in Alexandria during the eighth year of the Roman Emperor Nero, in about
A.D.
63. But this particular skeleton has been dated to the early fourteenth century. About 1320. So you see, it can’t possibly be that of St. Mark.”

“Yes, I take your point,” said Nimrod. “1320. I wonder.”

“There’s another thing,” said Sister Cristina. “There are Chinese characters carved and inlaid with gold on every one of the two hundred and five bones.”

“Did you say two hundred and five?”

“Exactly two hundred and five,” repeated Sister Cristina.

“What kind of Chinese characters?” asked Nimrod.

“Numbers,” said Sister Cristina. “Of course, there’s no record of St. Mark ever having been to China. Egypt and Jerusalem are as far east as he ever traveled. So it simply can’t be him, can it?”

“No. All the same, if you don’t mind I would like to take a look at this particular skeleton,” said Nimrod. “Just to satisfy my own curiosity.”

Sister Cristina unlocked a large closet, moved a selection of bishop’s miters, shepherd’s staffs, crucifixion crossbeams, Roman pikes and spears, and longbows, and dragged out, along the floor, a dusty-looking wooden box that could have held a dozen rifles. Finlay, whose offer of help had been politely declined, was surprised at the strength of the old nun.

“It’s kind of you to have offered, but this is my work, you see,” she explained to Finlay.

She opened the box to reveal an ornate, polished brass chest that was inlaid with various Chinese numbers. “That’s the name of St. Mark there, in Chinese,” said Sister Cristina,
pointing to an ivory plate mounted on the foot of the chest. “At least that’s what the people who speak Chinese have told us it is.” She laughed. “Although for all I know, it might say ‘Made in Taiwan.’”

Nimrod ran his fingers across the ivory nameplate and the two Chinese characters that constituted “Mark.”

Sister Cristina had been right, thought Nimrod. His fingertips detected that the box was charged with a sort of strange energy, but it was the design on the lid of the box that commanded his immediate attention.

“As you can see, it’s a diagram of the human skeleton,” said Sister Cristina. “Look at the way all of the bones are identified. Fascinating, isn’t it?”

“Like something a medical student would use,” agreed Philippa.

Then the telephone rang, and Sister Cristina went to answer it.

“It’s a lot more than that, I think,” Nimrod said quietly, so the old nun would not hear him. “Each bone seems to correspond with a number on this other design.” He pointed to a square of thirty-six numbers that had been carved into the lid of the chest immediately above the head of the skeleton.

“What is that?” asked Philippa.

“If I’m not mistaken,” said Nimrod, “that’s a Chinese magic square. It’s said the magic square was invented by a powerful djinn many centuries ago. And squares like this were often placed under the foundation stones of houses in
China to bring good luck. But they were also sometimes used to make a discrimens. You know, a wish that can exist independently of a djinn. Sometimes good and sometimes bad. And for an indefinite length of time. Only I’ve never ever heard of one lasting as long as this before.”

“But what does it do?” asked Finlay.

“If only Mr. Rakshasas were here,” said Nimrod. “He knows much more about these things than I do. I
think
, this is something called a
chuan dai zhe
. I’m not quite sure exactly what that means. Only that this box of bones has been designed to deliver some kind of message. I believe you have to draw a magic square on the floor, with all the numbers in the correct position, and then place each bone on the square indicated in the diagram. The message can then be delivered.
In person.”

“You mean the person whose bones these are?” said Philippa.

“Exactly so,” said Nimrod.

“You’re kidding,” said Finlay. “A few lousy numbers can do all that?”

“On the contrary,” said Nimrod. “Numbers are the basis of all matter. And therefore the basis of all mind over matter, too.”

“It would certainly explain why the
Jade Book
mentioned Mark’s bones specifically,” said John.

“Indeed, it would,” agreed Nimrod.

“But who is this Mark if it’s not
St
. Mark?” asked Philippa.

“1320, Venice, China,” said Nimrod. “Can’t you guess? Goodness, what do they teach you in schools these days?”

Sister Cristina was winding up her telephone call.

“The question is,” said Nimrod, “by what subterfuge are we to listen to the messenger without dear old Sister Cristina seeing him, too? It could prove to be a bit of a shock for her. She might even be frightened. It’s not every day you get a message delivered by someone who’s been dead for almost seven hundred years.”

“Why not just zap her somewhere else?” said Finlay. “You’re a djinn, after all.”

“At her age?” said Nimrod. “I think not.”

“How about one of us takes your cell phone outside,” said John. “And then telephones her in here to say there’s an urgent package for her at the front door. It takes fifteen minutes to get up here. There and back. She could be gone for as long as thirty minutes. More than enough time.”

Nimrod bit his lip. “I dislike putting an old lady to the kind of effort you describe, John,” he said. “However, I can see no practical alternative that does not involve the use of djinn power.”

“She does seem to be very fit,” added Philippa, by way of an excuse for what they were contemplating.

“I suppose it had better be me that makes the call,” said Nimrod, “since I speak Italian.”

Sister Cristina finished her call. “Now then,” she said. “Where was I?”

Nimrod smiled at her politely. “Would you excuse me for one minute?”

He left the room and a minute later the telephone rang in the reliquary. Sister Cristina answered it, listened, made a loud tutting noise, spoke crossly in Italian, and then put the phone down. Nimrod came back into the room looking more than a little guilty, but Sister Cristina did not suspect that he was behind the telephone call; and, having excused herself “for as long as it takes me to go all the way down there and come back up again,” she went out of the room, leaving Nimrod, Philippa, and Finlay/John alone with the brass chest of bones.

“Anyone got a stick of chalk?” asked Nimrod.

No one did, and so Nimrod used djinn power to make a piece appear in his hand. With this, he got down on his hands and knees and set about drawing the magic square of China on the stone floor of St. Mark’s reliquary.

First, Nimrod drew a grid of thirty-six squares, which left Philippa feeling very impressed that her uncle was so good at drawing perfect straight lines. “Actually, it’s a gift that all djinn are born with,” murmured Nimrod. “The ability to draw perfectly straight lines and perfect circles. Much more difficult than you’d think. It’s something humans can’t do at all.”

“Very useful, I imagine,” said Finlay, and made a face.

“I suppose I had better make this quite a large square,” said Nimrod, “given that each square is going to have five or six bones in it.”

When the grid was completed, he started to fill in the numbers, from one to thirty-six, starting with twenty-seven in the bottom left-hand corner, and ending with ten in the top right-hand corner. “Of course, from a mathematical point of view, the interesting thing about the magic square,” said Nimrod, “is that no matter what direction you go in — horizontal, vertical, diagonal — each line of numbers adds up to exactly one hundred and eleven.” He stood up, wiped the chalk dust from his hands, and stood back to admire his handiwork. “There, I’ve finished.”

“It doesn’t look very magical to me,” observed John.

“That’s because you look but you don’t you see,” said Nimrod.

“I’ve noticed something,” said Philippa. “With each line equalling exactly one hundred and eleven, that means all of the numbers in the square add up to six hundred and sixty-six.”

“That’s right,” said Nimrod. “Well done, Philippa.”

“Whoaa,” said Finlay. “Isn’t that the number of the beast? Something evil, anyway?”

“True, but there’s nothing necessarily evil about a number, Finlay,” said Nimrod. “Or good, for that matter. The Chinese consider the number six-six-six to be one of the luckiest of all numbers. It’s how you use the number that matters. Six-six-six is what mathematicians call an abundant number. It’s a triangular number. It’s also a cardinal number. And an ordinal number. Six hundred and sixty-six is also the sum of the squares of the first seven prime numbers.”

“Fascinating,” said Finlay. He wasn’t sure exactly what a prime number was, only that they had studied it at school.

“A prime number is a number that’s only divisible by itself and one,” John told him.

“I know what a prime number is,” insisted Finlay.

“No, you didn’t,” said John. “Not until I told you just now.”

“Listen,” said Finlay, “if you’re going to remain as a guest in my body, I think you ought to stop reading my mind, don’t you?”

“I’d like to,” said John. “Only it’s not so easy, as you know only too well.”

“Yeah, all right,” admitted Finlay. “Sorry.”

Nimrod was still talking about the number 666 and how if you wrote it out as the Roman numeral DCLXVI, it would use all of the Roman numeral symbols under one thousand and in reverse order of their respective values: D = 500, C = 100, L=50, X=10, V=5, and I=1.

“There’s something else I’ve noticed,” said Philippa. “There are exactly eighteen pairs of numbers that add up to the number thirty-seven.”