“But she didn’t?” Dhatt said.

“I think people decided she was young. But someone must have given her a talking-to, because she simmered down. I remember thinking the Ul Qoman opposite numbers, some of whom had also turned up, must be pretty sympathetic to the Besź reps who were so put out. When I found out she was coming back for a PhD with us I was surprised she’d been allowed in, with dubious opinions like that, but she’d grown out of it. I’ve already made a statement about all this. But tell me, do you have any idea what’s happened to Yolanda?”

Dhatt and I looked at each other. “We’re not even sure anything’s happened to her at all,” Dhatt said. “We’re checking into it.”

“It’s probably nothing,” she said again and again. “But I normally see her around, and it’s a good few days now, I think. That’s what makes me … I think I mentioned that Mahalia disappeared a bit before she was … found.”

“She and Mahalia knew each other?” I said.

“They were best friends.”

“Anyone who might know anything?”

“She’s seeing a local boy. Yolanda, I mean. That’s the rumour. But who it was I couldn’t tell you.”

“Is that allowed?” I asked.

“These are adults, Inspector, SD Dhatt. Young adults, yes, but we can’t stop them. We, ah, make them aware of the dangers and difficulties of life, let alone love, in Ul Qoma, but what they do while they’re here …” She shrugged.

Dhatt tapped a foot when I spoke to her. “I’d like to speak to them,” he said.

Some were reading articles in the tiny make-do library. Several, when finally Nancy escorted us to the site of the main dig itself, stood, sat and worked in that deep, straight-edged hole. They looked up from below striae discernable in shades of earth. That line of dark—the residue of an ancient fire? What was that white?

At the edges of the big marquee was wild-looking scrubland, thistled and weedy between a litter of broken-off architecture. The dig was almost the size of a soccer pitch, subdivided by its matrix of string. Its base was variously depthed, flat-bottomed. Its floor of compacted earth was broken by inorganic shapes, strange breaching fish: shattered jars, crude and uncrude statuettes, verdigris-clogged machines. The students looked up from the section they were in, each at various careful depths, through various cord borders, clutching pointed trowels and soft brushes. A couple of the boys and one girl were Goths, much rarer in Ul Qoma than in Besźel or in their own homes. They must have got a lot of attention. They smiled at Dhatt and me sweetly from beneath eyeliner and the muck of centuries.

“Here you see,” Nancy said. We stood a way from the excavations. I looked down at the many markers in the layered dirt. “You understand how it is here?” It might be anything that we could see beneath the soil.

She spoke quietly enough that her students, though they must have realised that we were talking, could probably not make out about what. “We’ve never found written records from Precursor Age except a few poem fragments to make sense of any of it. Have you heard of the Gallimaufrians? For a long time when the pre-Cleavage stuff was first unearthed, after archaeologist-error was grudgingly ruled out,” she laughed, “people made them up as an explanation for what was being fished up. A hypothetical civilisation before Ul Qoma and Besźel that systematically dug up all artefacts in the region, from millennia ago to their own grandmother’s bric-a-brac, mixed them all up and buried them again or chucked them away.”

Nancy saw me looking at her. “They didn’t exist,” she reassured me. “That’s agreed now. By most of us, anyway. This”—she gestured at the hole—“is not  a mix. It is the remnants of a material culture. Just one we’re still not very clear on. We had to learn to stop trying to find and follow a sequence and just look.”

Items that should have spanned epochs, contemporaneous. No other culture in the region made any but the scantest, seductively vague references to the pre-Cleavage locals, these peculiar men and women, witch-citizens by fairy tale with spells that tainted their discards, who used astrolabes that would not have shamed Arzachel or the Middle Ages, dried-mud pots, stone axes that my flat-browed many-greats grandfather might have made, gears, intricately cast insect toys, and whose ruins underlay and dotted Ul Qoma and, occasionally, Besźel.

“This is Senior Detective Dhatt of the militsya  and Inspector Borlú of the policzai,”  Nancy was telling the students in the hole. “Inspector Borlú’s here as part of the investigation into the … into what happened to Mahalia.”

Several of them gasped. Dhatt crossed off names, and I copied him, as one by one the students came to talk to us in the common room. They had all been interviewed before but came docile as lambs, and answered questions they must have been sick of.

“I was relieved when I realised you were here for Mahalia,” the Goth woman said. “That sounds awful. But I thought you’d found Yolanda and something’d happened.” Her name was Rebecca Smith-Davis, she was a first year, working on pot reconstruction. She got teary when she spoke about her dead friend and her missing friend. “I thought you’d found her and it was … you know, she’d been …”

“We’re not even sure Rodriguez is missing,” Dhatt said.

“You say. But you know. With Mahalia, and everything.” Shook her head. “Them both being into strange stuff.”

“Orciny?” I said.

“Yeah. And other stuff. But yeah, Orciny. Yolanda’s more into that stuff than Mahalia was, though. People said Mahalia used to be way into it when she first started, but not so much now, I guess.”

Because they were younger and partied later, several of the students, unlike their teachers, had alibis for the night of Mahalia’s death. At some unspoken point Dhatt deemed Yolanda an official missing person, and his questions grew more precise, the notes he took longer. It did not do us much good. No one was sure of the last time they had seen her, only that they hadn’t seen her for days.

“Do you have any idea what might have happened to Mahalia?” Dhatt asked all the students. We got no after no.

“I’m not into conspiracies,” one boy said. “What happened was … unbelievably horrible. But, you know, the idea that there’s some big secret …” He shook his head. He sighed. “Mahalia was … she could piss people off, and what happened happened because she went to the wrong part of Ul Qoma, with the wrong person.” Dhatt made notes.

“No,” said a girl. “No one knew her. You maybe thought you did, but then you realise she was doing all kinds of secret stuff you didn’t know anything about. I think I was a bit scared of her. I liked her, I did, but she was kind of intense. And smart. Maybe she was seeing someone. Some local crazy. That’s the kind of thing she’d have … She was into weird stuff. I’d always see her in the library—we’ve got like reading cards for the university library here?—and she’d be making all those little notes in her books.” She made cramped writing motions and shook her head, inviting us to agree on how strange that was.

“Weird stuff?” Dhatt said.

“Oh, you know, you hear stuff.”

“She pissed someone off, yo.” This young woman spoke loud and quickly. “One of the crazies. You heard about her first time to the cities? Over in Besźel? She nearly got into a fight. With like academics and like politicians . At an archaeology  conference. That’s hard to do. It’s amazing she ever got let back in anywhere.”

“Orciny.”

“Orciny?” Dhatt said.

“Yeah.”

This last speaker was a thin and straightlaced boy wearing a grubby T-shirt featuring what must have been the character from a children’s television show. His name was Robert. He looked mournfully at us. He blinked desperately. His Illitan was not good.

“Do you mind if I speak to him in English?” I said to Dhatt.