‘None that we use. A name would mark its importance, and we want it unnoticed and forgotten – something you skim over when you see it in the records, something easily confused for something else.’ Anthony spread his palm against the rusted door, murmured something under his breath, and then pushed. The door screeched open. ‘Come on in.’
Like Babel, the Old Library was much larger on the inside than its exterior suggested. From the outside, it looked as if it could contain a single lecture hall at most. Its interior, meanwhile, could have been the ground floor of the Radcliffe Library. Wooden bookshelves radiated from the centre, and more lined walls which looked, magically and contradictorily, circular. All the shelves were meticulously labelled, and a long yellowed parchment listing the classification system hung from the opposite wall. Near the front was a shelf boasting new arrivals, on which Robin recognized a few of the titles he’d snuck out for Griffin over the past few years. They’d all had their Babel serial numbers scratched out.
‘We don’t like their categorization system,’ explained Anthony. ‘It only makes sense in Roman characters, but not every language is so easily Romanized, is it?’ He pointed to a mat near the door. ‘Wipe your shoes off, we don’t like tracking mud between the shelves. And there’s a stand over there for your coats.’
A rusted iron kettle hung inexplicably from the top rung of the coat stand. Robin reached towards it, curious, but Anthony said sharply, ‘Leave that alone.’
‘Sorry – what’s it for?’
‘Not tea, clearly.’ Anthony swung the kettle towards them to reveal the bottom, which displayed a familiar glint of silver. ‘It’s a security system. It whistles when someone we don’t know gets near the library.’
‘With what match-pair?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ Anthony winked. ‘We do security like Babel does. Everyone devises their own traps, and we don’t tell the others how it’s done. The best thing we have set up is the glamour – it keeps sound from escaping the building, which means no passerby can eavesdrop on our conversations.’
‘But this place is massive,’ said Ramy. ‘I mean, you’re not invisible – how on earth do you stay hidden?’
‘Oldest trick in the world. We’re hidden in plain sight.’ Anthony led them further into the library. ‘When Durham went extinct in the mid-sixteenth century and Trinity took over its property, they overlooked the supplemental library in the deed transfer. The only things listed in that library on the catalogue were materials no one had used for decades, and which have more accessible duplicates in the Bodleian. So now we live on the edge of bureaucracy – everyone who walks past knows this is a storage library, but everyone assumes it belongs to some other, poorer college. These colleges are all too rich, you see. It makes them lose track of their holdings.’
‘Ah, you found the undergraduates!’
Figures emerged from within the shelves. Robin recognized them all – they were all former students or current graduate fellows he’d seen lurking around the tower. He supposed this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. There were Vimal Srinivasan, Cathy O’Nell, and Ilse Dejima, who gave them a small wave as she approached.
‘Heard you’d had a bad week.’ She was much friendlier now than she’d ever been at the tower. ‘Welcome to Chez Hermes. You’re just in time for dinner.’
‘I didn’t realize there were so many of you,’ said Ramy. ‘Who else here has faked their death?’
Anthony chuckled. ‘I’m the only ghost in residence at Oxford. We have a few others overseas – Vaibhav and Frédérique, you might have heard of them – they faked drowning on a clipper back from Bombay and they’ve been operating from India since. Lisette simply announced she was leaving for home to get married, and all the Babel faculty were too disappointed in her to follow up on her story. Obviously, Vimal, Cathy, and Ilse are still at Babel. Easier for them to siphon out resources.’
‘Then why’d you leave?’ asked Robin.
‘Someone needs to be in the Old Library full time. In any case, I’d got tired of the campus life, so I faked my death in Barbados, bought a passage on the next packet home, and made my way back to Oxford unnoticed.’ Anthony winked at Robin. ‘I thought you had me that day at the bookshop. I didn’t dare leave the Old Library for a week. Come on, let me show you the rest.’
A quick tour of the workspaces past the shelves revealed a number of ongoing projects, which Anthony introduced with pride. These included the compilation of dictionaries between regional languages (‘We lose a lot by assuming everything must first come through English’), non-English silver match-pairs (‘Same principle – Babel won’t fund match-pairs that don’t translate into English since all of its bars are for use by the British. But that’s like painting with only one colour, or playing only one note on a piano.’), and critiques of existing English translations of religious texts and literary classics (‘Well – you know my opinion on literature in general, but something has to keep Vimal occupied.’) The Hermes Society was not only a hotbed of Robin Hoods, as Griffin had led Robin to believe; it was also a research centre in its own right, though its projects had to be done in secret, with scant and stolen resources.*
‘What are you going to do with all this?’ asked Victoire. ‘You can’t publish, surely.’
‘We’ve got partners at a few other translation centres,’ said Vimal. ‘We ship them work for review, sometimes.’
‘There are other translation centres?’ asked Robin.
‘Of course,’ said Anthony. ‘It’s only recently that Babel achieved pre-eminence in linguistics and philology. It was the French who ran the show for most of the eighteenth century, and then the German Romanticists had their heyday for a bit. The difference now is that we have silver to spare, and they don’t.’*
‘They’re fickle allies, though,’ said Vimal. ‘They’re helpful insofar as they, too, hate the British, but they’ve no real commitment towards global liberation. Really, all this research is just gambling on the future. We can’t make good use of it yet. We haven’t got the reach or the resources. So it’s all we can do to produce the knowledge, write it down, and hope one day there exists a state that can put all this to proper, altruistic use.’
At the other end of the library, the back wall resembled the aftermath of several mortar explosions, charred and cratered across the centre. Underneath, two equally charred tables stood side by side, both somehow upright despite their blackened, shrivelled legs.
‘Right,’ said Anthony. ‘So that’s our silver-work and, er, munitions workshop.’
‘Did that happen over time, or all at once?’ Victoire asked drily.
‘That’s entirely Griffin’s fault,’ said Vimal. ‘Doesn’t seem to think gunpowder is an outdoor activity.’
The intact portion of the back wall was covered with a massive map of the world, dotted with differently coloured pins attached by strings to notes covered in dense, tiny handwriting. Robin wandered closer, curious.
‘That’s a group project.’ Cathy joined him before the map. ‘We add to it little by little when we get back from overseas.’
‘Do all of these pins represent languages?’