Worse, I had begun to believe that Gabriella examined my papers in my absence, reading my
notebooks and checking my place in various books we’d been assigned, as if gauging my
advancement and measuring it against her own. She was too cunning to leave evidence of her
intrusions, and I had never found proof of her presence in my room, so I took extra care of what I left
lying about my desk. I had no doubt that she would steal anything she found useful, even as she
maintained her disposition of blithe apathy toward our shared work at the Athenaeum.
As the days went by, I began to lose myself in daily routine. Our tasks were tedious in the
beginning, consisting of little more than reading notebooks and making reports of potentially useful
information. Gabriella had been given work that suited her interest in the mythological and historical
aspects of angelology, while I had been assigned the more mathematical task of categorizing caves
and gorges, working to isolate the location of the lyre.
One afternoon in October, as Gabriella sat across from me, her black hair curling at her chin, I
drew a notebook from one of the many boxes before us and examined it with care. It was an unusual
notebook, short and rather thick, with a hard, scuffed binding. A leather strap—fastened by a golden
clasp—bound the covers together. Examining the clasp more closely, I saw that it had been fashioned
into the likeness of a golden angel no bigger in size than my smallest finger. It was long and narrow,
with a stylized face containing two inlaid blue sapphire eyes, a flowing tunic, and a pair of sickle-
shaped wings. I ran my fingers over the cold metal. Pressing the wings between my fingers, I felt
resistance and then a satisfying pop as the mechanism gave. The notebook fell open, and I placed it
flat upon my lap, straightening the pages under my fingers. I glanced at Gabriella to see if she had
noticed my discovery, but she was engrossed in her reading and did not, to my relief, see the beautiful
notebook in my hands.
I understood at once that this was one of the journals Seraphina had mentioned having kept in her
later years of study, her observations consolidated and distilled into a succinct primer. Indeed, the
journal contained much more than simple lecture notes. Flipping to the beginning of the book, I found
the word ANGELOLOGY stamped into the first page in golden ink. The pages had been cluttered
with consolidated notes, speculations, questions jotted down during lectures or in preparation for an
exam. As I read, I detected Dr. Seraphina’s burgeoning love for antediluvian geology: Maps of
Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Turkey had been drawn meticulously over the pages, as if she had
traced the exact contours of each country’s border, sketching every mountain range and lake. The
names of caves and mountain passes and gorges appeared in Greek, Latin, or Cyrillic, depending
upon the alphabet native to the region. Tiny notations appeared in the margins, and it soon became
apparent that these drawings had been created in preparation for an expedition. Dr. Seraphina had had
her heart set on a second expedition since she was a student. I realize that by resuming Dr.
Seraphina’s work with these maps, there was a chance that I myself could uncover the geographical
mystery of Clematis’s expedition.
Reading further, I found Dr. Seraphina’s sketches scattered like treasures among the narrow
columns of words. There were halos, trumpets, wings, harps, and lyres—the thirty-year-old
doodlings of a dreamy student distracted during lectures. There were pages filled with drawings and
quotations excerpted from early works of angelology. At the center of the notebook, I came across
some pages of numerical squares, or magic squares as they were commonly known. The squares
consisted of a series of numbers that equaled a constant sum in each row, diagonal, and column: a
magic constant. Of course, I knew the history of magic squares—their presence in Persia, India, and
China and their earliest advent in Europe in the engravings of Albrecht Dürer, an artist whose work I
admired—but I had never had the opportunity to examine one.
Dr. Seraphina’s words were written across the page in faded red ink:
One of the most famous squares—and the most commonly used for our purposes—is the Sator-Rotas
Square, the oldest example of which was discovered in Herculaneum, or Ercolano as it is called
today, an Italian city partially destroyed by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in year 79 of the present
era. The Sator-Rotas is a Latin palindrome, an acrostic that can be read in a number of ways.
Traditionally, the square has been used in angelology to signify that a pattern is present. The square is
not a code, as it is often mistaken to be, but a symbol to alert the angelologist that a larger schematic