was now camped. She described how she’d made friends with a gentle translucent flying creature in the tunnel under the mountain, and there were long rambling pages written to her husband whom she must have known was dead. More details on how she had found William of Flamewall’s remains on something she called Bloodglass Island, and then burnt the priest’s papers and notes so no one else could get them; her description of how the third part of the god-formula had not been among William’s possessions – the one thing she could have used to rise above her mortally fatal affliction. After that, the diary was filled with pages and pages of mathematics. Mad mathematics, symbols that Hannah didn’t recognize blended with formulae that seemed to run contrary to any of the accepted rules she had been taught. At first Hannah thought her mother must have been trying to recreate the third section of the god-formula herself, but as bizarre as the formulae in her mother’s diary were, their structure didn’t seem to match either of the first two parts of the god-formula she had seen. Had the fever sent her mother insane? Later, the lines of mathematics were interspersed with descriptions of songs of siren beauty, her mother’s hand getting scratchier and scratchier. They seemed to make a sense – but only in the way that you could gaze at abstract patterns on wallpapers and start to see meaningful pictures as you let your mind wonder.
Nandi came around the corner, the glow of her lantern announcing her presence long before she appeared. ‘It is done. Do you want to see where we buried her?’
‘That wasn’t my mother,’ said Hannah. ‘They were just the clothes she wore, is all.’ Hannah realized that the young academic had probably interpreted what she just said as a Circlist homily. ‘No, I mean this is her.’ Hannah raised the diary. ‘What she believed in. What she thought. Not the dust that’s left behind.’
Nandi lifted the satchel she had found. ‘I’ve been looking through your mother’s other notebooks. There are more complete descriptions of what she and your father discovered in the guild’s transaction-engine rooms – material she chose not to compress into the Joshua’s Egg she hid for us. Your mother believed that William of Flamewall came here to destroy something.’
‘Not the missing section of the god-formula,’ said Hannah. ‘William was a priest of the rational orders; the ritual of coming all the way out here to where his lover had preceded him to burn the last piece of Bel’s work wouldn’t have appealed to him.’
‘Well, Bel Bessant retrieved her fragments of Pericurian scripture from here, but the Circle knows where or how. I’ve just returned from climbing up to the buildings on the slopes above us – this place is an archaeologist’s worst nightmare. Just empty rooms, thousands of them, twisted out of shape. Whatever was hot enough to melt stone turned everything to ashes here. No furniture, no bones, no pottery, no doors or windows. Certainly no manuscripts.’
‘The city beyond the glass plain might be in better condition.’
‘No,’ said Nandi. ‘I’ve studied it through my telescope; if anything, it’s in a far worse state. It was closer to whatever killed this civilization and there’s a whole new ecos clinging to the steam fissures across there. Nothing destroys a good dig site like weeds and creepers.’
There was a distant ringing from camp, a dinner call being sounded.
‘Do you want to eat?’
Hannah shook her head in answer.
‘Finding your mother’s bones makes it real, doesn’t it? The fact that she’s dead.’
‘I don’t want to talk about her.’
‘When my mother told me my father was dead, I never believed it. It never felt real to me – I would always catch myself expecting him to come through the door to our home.’
‘How did your father die?’ asked Hannah.
‘Much as your mother did,’ said Nandi. ‘About the business of St. Vines’ college. He was on an unauthorized dig in Cassarabia, and when the caliph’s soldiers found him there, they shot him as a grave robber.’
‘Did you ever stop thinking about him?’
‘Never,’ said Nandi. ‘But when I was older, the head of the school of archaeology took me down into the southern desert to show me where she had buried his body. I still think about him, but now I know he won’t be coming through the door.’
‘If we find the last piece of the god-formula here we could use it to bring him back…’
‘What would such a