"The... New Moon? We still don't --Sir Blackwood have you by any chance heard about an upcoming ritual or event of any kind, might be Maw or Moon related."

"Think about how to kidnap some eight year olds, or approach one of their mothers? Reporter was going to try to get more out of Donovan, and some of us were going to attempt to spot him while he did it? Guess wildly about how much explosive power it might take to blow up the supermouth, hypothetically?"

"I haven't."

"Could we start by just translating the titles and prioritizing from that."

"We could, but it's still going to take a couple days to translate everything."

Six days pass.

Lev does not do nearly as good a job as he would prefer at failing to process the books, and has to leave early two days to go curl up on Oswald and cry.

Araari -- who is not learning any spells -- learns that the occult understanding of the Knights of Malta is muddled and confused through a hazy lens of Christian faith and ignorance. It is apparent that a wide variety of Mythos entities, creatures, and occult forces are being grouped together and collectively referred to as “Nyarlathotep” (which also appears to be a name they apply to Satan or the Great Adversary of God).

Mordred, Oswald, and Zoe spend most of their days in the dusty catacombs, reading books in Latin and trying to wrap their brains around the impossible syllables of the names of the Outer Gods. Zoe and Oswald take shifts at the warehouse; Anita does not return to the factory.

Malta is almost peaceful.

Martin fusses around making tea. By the second day, he has all of their orders down.

Mordred writes to Gale and to his brother, letters intended to be read both before his death and after it. He doesn't leave the hotel room much -- Anita wasn't wrong, the longer he can keep Lukas assuming he's dead the better. He copies out his notes from the last six months, because death has impressed upon him the importance of backups; he updates his indexes while he's at it.

And, when he's invited to spend time with Inaaya, he goes.

The hiking in Malta is beautiful. (Especially if you have just been in the desert of Ethiopia, and spend most of your time in New York City where wilderness is largely non-existent and the weather is, well.) Right now in early April it's pleasantly warm and impossibly green.

"I think," Lev says, "mankind invented cities specifically so we would not have to go walking in nature." He slaps a bug on his arm.

"Is this your friend? I'm Inaaya."

"Yes, he is. Hi, Inaaya, this is Lev, he's an anthropologist. Lev, I've told you about Inaaya, she likes archaeology and math."

(Mordred debated for a while whether to give a false name for Lev, and decided eventually that the risk of being in the same room as both Inaaya and someone who would actually recognize Lev from before would be both likely enough and bad enough that he didn't want to.)

"Oh, neat. I haven't had time to catch up on the past, uh, decade of math. I used to like it a lot though. I'd sit in on classes I wasn't taking at UCLA."

"Oh, I wish I could do that, but we've never stuck around in one place for long enough. Everything I know I've learned from books and Louise-- and Milo, back before he. Well."

"I imagine that would make it hard! --I'm terrible at learning things from books, Lev can back me up here, he's been teaching me Yiddish."

"I think you do fine. It's just that you can't learn languages from books."

Lev looks at Inaaya speculatively wondering if she can be taught something.

"Half the Esperanto speakers in the world would disagree strenuously!"

"You know Esperanto?"

"Better receptive than expressive but yes."

Radiant smile. "I like it when people learn totally useless things."

oh no she's so good. "I used to get obsessed with random subjects and not be able to put them down -- I say used to like I don't still -- the obsession with auxiliary languages has lasted, uh, about ten years. My roommates were sick of me."

"What else were you obsessed with?"