Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

‘I’m trying—’

‘No, Robin, listen.’ Griffin spasmed in pain; Robin held him tight, unable to do anything more. ‘There’s more than you think. Hermes – the safe room, Victoire knows where, she knows what to do – and in my satchel, wúxíng, there’s—’

‘They’re coming,’ Victoire urged. ‘Robin, the constables, they’ll see us—’

Griffin pushed him away. ‘Go, run—’

‘No.’ Robin slid his arms under Griffin’s torso. But Griffin was so heavy, and his own arms so weak. Blood spilled all over his hands. The smell of it, salty; his vision went fuzzy. He tried pulling his brother upright. They lurched to the side.

Griffin moaned. ‘Stop . . .’

‘Robin.’ Victoire grasped his arm. ‘Please, we have to hide—’

Robin reached into the satchel, dug around until he felt the cold burn of silver. ‘Wúxíng,’ he whispered. ‘Invisible.’

Robin and Victoire flickered, then disappeared just as three constables came running down the square.

‘Christ,’ someone said. ‘It’s Sterling Jones.’

‘Dead?’

‘He’s not moving.’

‘This one’s still alive.’ Someone bent over Griffin’s body. A rustle of fabric – a gun drawn. A sharp, surprised laugh; a half-hearted utterance, ‘Don’t – he’s—’

The click of a trigger.

‘No,’ Robin almost shouted, but Victoire clamped a hand over his mouth.

The shot boomed like a cannon. Griffin convulsed and lay still. Robin doubled over, screaming, but there was no sound to his anguish, no shape to his pain; he was incorporeal, voiceless, and though he suffered the kind of shattering grief that demanded shrieking, beating, a ripping of the world – and if not the world, then himself – he could not move; until the square was clear, all he could do was wait, and watch.

When at last the guards had gone, Griffin’s body had turned a ghastly white. His eyes were open, glassy. Robin pressed his fingers against his neck, looking for a pulse and knowing he’d find none; the blast had been so direct, from such a short range.

Victoire stood over him. ‘Is he—’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we have to go,’ she said, fingers closing around his wrist. ‘Robin, we don’t know when they’ll be back.’

He stood. What an awful tableau, he thought. Griffin’s and Sterling’s bodies lay adjacent on the ground, blood pooling beneath each one, running together under the rain. Some kind of love story had concluded on this square – some vicious triangle of desire, resentment, jealousy, and hatred had opened with Evie’s death and closed with Griffin’s. Its details were murky, would never be known to Robin in full;^* all he knew, with certainty, was that this was not the first time Griffin and Sterling had tried to kill each other, only the first time one of them had succeeded. But all the principal characters were dead now, and the circle was closed.

‘Let’s go,’ Victoire urged again. ‘Robin, there’s not much time.’

It felt so wrong to leave them like this. Robin wanted at least to pull his brother’s body away, to lay it somewhere quiet and private, to close his eyes and place his hands over his chest. But there was only time now to run, to put the scene of the massacre behind.

Chapter Twenty-Five

And I alone am left of all that lived,

Pent in this narrow, horrible conviction.

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES, Death’s Jest-Book

Robin did not remember how they escaped unnoticed from Oxford Castle. His mind had fled with Griffin’s death; he could not make decisions; he could hardly register where he was. The most he could do was to put one foot in front of the other, blindly following Victoire wherever she led them: into forests, through bushes and brambles, down a riverbank where they waited, huddled together in the mud, as dogs raced past, barking; then up onto a winding back road into the centre of town. Only when they were back among familiar surroundings, nearly in the shadows of Babel and the Radcliffe Library, did he find the self-possession to take stock of where they were going.

‘Isn’t this a bit close?’ he asked. ‘Shouldn’t we try the canal . . . ?’

‘Not the canal,’ whispered Victoire. ‘It’ll take us right to the police station.’

‘But why aren’t we heading to the Cotswolds?’ He didn’t know why his mind had seized upon the Cotswold Hills, northwest of Oxford, filled with rolling empty plains and forests. They just seemed like the natural place to flee to. Perhaps he’d read it in a penny dreadful once, and had assumed the Cotswolds were a place for fugitives ever since. Certainly they seemed better than the heart of Oxford.

‘They’ll be looking for us in the Cotswolds,’ said Victoire. ‘They’ll be expecting us to run, they’ll have dogs combing the woods. But there’s a safe house near the city centre—’

‘No, we can’t – I gave that one up; Lovell knew, and so Playfair must too—’

‘There’s another. Anthony showed me – right near the Radcliffe Library, there’s a tunnel entrance at the back of Vaults. Just follow me.’