Meanwhile, the clock had run out on Magdalen Tower. At nine on the dot, a rumbling began at its base and spread through the entire city. At Babel, their teacups began clattering at breakfast. They thought they were experiencing an earthquake, until they rushed to the windows and saw that nothing was noticeably shaking except a single building in the distance.
Then they rushed to the rooftop and crowded around Professor Craft, who narrated what she saw from the telescope. ‘It’s – it’s breaking apart.’
By now the changes were so great they could be seen with the naked eye. Tiles dripped off the roof like raindrops. Huge chunks of turrets peeled away and crashed to the ground.
Victoire asked what no one else dared. ‘Do you think anyone’s inside?’
If they were, at least they had ample time to get out. The building had been shaking for a good fifteen minutes now. This was their ethical defence; they did not let themselves consider the alternatives.
At twenty past nine, all ten of the tower’s bells began to ring at once, without rhythm or harmony. They seemed to grow louder, building up to a terrible level; they reached a crescendo with an urgency that made Robin himself want to scream.
Then the tower collapsed, as simply and cleanly as a sandcastle kicked at the base. It took less than ten seconds for the building to fall, but nearly a minute for the rumbling to settle. Then, where Magdalen Tower had once stood was a great mound of brick, dust, and stone. And it was somehow lovely, unnervingly lovely because it was so awful, because it violated the rules of how things were supposed to move. That the city’s horizon could, in an instant, be changed this dramatically was both breathtaking and awesome.
Robin and Victoire watched, hands clasped tight.
‘We did that,’ Robin murmured.
‘That’s not even the worst of it,’ said Victoire, and he could not tell if she was delighted or scared. ‘That’s only the beginning.’
So Griffin was right. This was what it took: a show of force. If the people could not be won over by words, they would be persuaded by destruction.
Parliament’s capitulation, they reasoned, was only hours away now. For wasn’t this proof that the strike was intolerable? That the city could not ride out the tower’s refusal of service?
The professors were not so optimistic.
‘It won’t speed things along,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘If anything, it’ll slow the destruction down – they know they have to be vigilant now.’
‘But it’s a harbinger of things to come,’ said Ibrahim. ‘Right? What falls next? The Radcliffe Library? The Sheldonian?’
‘Magdalen Tower was an accident,’ said Professor Craft. ‘But Professor Chakravarti is right. It’ll put the rest of them on guard, covering for the effects that we’ve halted. It’s a race against time now – they’ll have regrouped somewhere else, surely, and they’ll be trying to construct a new translation centre as we speak—’
‘Can they do that?’ asked Victoire. ‘We’ve taken the tower. We have all the maintenance records, the tools—’
‘And the silver,’ said Robin. ‘We have all the silver.’
‘That will hurt, in time, but in the short term they will manage to plug the worst of the gaps,’ said Professor Craft. ‘They’ll wait us out – we have porridge for a week at most, Swift, and what then? We starve?’
‘Then we speed things up,’ said Robin.
‘How do you propose to do that?’ asked Victoire.
‘Resonance.’
Professor Chakravarti and Professor Craft exchanged a glance.
‘How does he know about that?’ asked Professor Craft.
Professor Chakravarti gave a guilty shrug. ‘Might have shown him.’
‘Anand!’
‘Oh, what was the harm?’
‘Well, this, clearly—’
‘What is resonance?’ Victoire demanded.
‘Up on the eighth floor,’ said Robin. ‘Let’s go, I’ll show you. It’s how the distant bars are maintained, the ones that aren’t made for endurance. The centre to the periphery. If we remove the centre, then surely they’ll begin to fail, won’t they?’
‘Well, there’s a moral line,’ said Professor Craft. ‘Withholding services, resources – that’s one thing. But deliberate sabotage—’
Robin scoffed. ‘We’re splitting ethical hairs over this? This?’
‘The city would stop running,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘The country. It would be Armageddon.’
‘But that’s what we want—’
‘You want enough damage to make the threat credible,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘And no more.’
‘Then we’ll remove just a few at once.’ Robin stood up. His mind was made up. He did not want to debate this further, and he could see none of them did either; they were too anxious, and too afraid. They only wanted someone to tell them what to do. ‘One by one, until they get the general idea. Would you like to pick which ones?’
The professors declined. Robin suspected it was too much for them to deconstruct the resonance rods by themselves, for they knew too well the consequences of what they did. They needed to preserve the illusion of innocence, or at least of ignorance. But they expressed no further opposition, and so that evening Robin and Victoire went together up to the eighth floor.
‘A dozen or so, do you think?’ Victoire suggested. ‘A dozen every day, and we’ll see if we need to scale up?’
‘Perhaps two dozen to start,’ said Robin. There must have been hundreds of rods in the room. He had the impulse to kick them all down, to just grab one and use it to bat down the others. ‘Don’t we want to be dramatic?’
Victoire shot him a droll look. ‘There’s dramatic, and then there’s reckless.’
‘This whole endeavour is reckless.’
‘But we don’t even know what one would do—’
‘I only mean, we need to get their attention.’ Robin pressed a fist into a palm. ‘I want a spectacle. I want Armageddon. I want them to think that a dozen Magdalen Towers will fall every day until they listen to us.’
Victoire folded her arms. Robin didn’t like the way her eyes were searching him, as though she’d seized on some truth that he didn’t want to admit out loud.
‘It’s not revenge, what we’re doing here.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Just so we’re clear.’
He chose not to mention Professor Playfair then. ‘I know that, Victoire.’
‘Fine, then.’ She nodded curtly. ‘Two dozen.’
‘Two dozen to start.’ Robin reached down and pulled the nearest resonance rod from its fixture. It slid out with surprising ease. He’d expected some resistance, some noise or transformation symbolizing the break. ‘Is it that simple?’
How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots.
Victoire reached out at random and pulled out a second rod, and then a third. ‘I suppose we’ll see.’
And then, like a house of cards, Oxford began to crumble.
The rapidity of its deterioration was stunning. The next day, all the bell-tower clocks stopped running, all frozen at precisely 6.37 in the morning. Later that afternoon, a great stink wafted over the city. It turned out silver had been used to facilitate the flow of sewage, which was now stuck in place, an unmoving mass of sludge. That evening, Oxford went dark. First one lamp-post started flickering, then another, and then another, until all of the lights on High Street went out. For the first time in the two decades since gas lamps were installed on its streets, Oxford passed the night shrouded in black.