Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero

by Dan Abnett

  "The stones, William. The stones in your dear mother's pictures. Could they not have been the mark on the gentleman's ring?"

  "Why, yeth, they could have bin," he answered.

  Enoch nodded.

  "Would you tell Thir Wupert, I meant him no 'arm? Pleath, thir? Would you? I don' mean to be a burden It were jutht a job good pay"

  "I'll tell him, son," said the praetor heavily.

  Pennyman's body began to shudder and shake. Enoch stepped back. He hated this bit.

  "What'th happening, thir? It'th gone all cold I don' want to go, thir thir? Pleath?"

  "It is the final stage, William. I am losing touch with you. They're calling you back." Enoch closed his eyes.

  "I don' want to go" said the voice, before grinding into silence. Enoch realised he was breathing hard. He stepped forward and closed the dead man's re-dead eyes.

  "Rest in peace, my son," he said, gently.

  The Privy Council and Gull's cussed Militia will be bloody grateful for this, thought Enoch as he stood back sadly. When they ask me to dabble so, they have no idea what it takes.

  "Learn much, Praetor Enoch?" asked a voice. Enoch jumped, despite himself. Jaspers stood in the chamber doorway, flushed as if from exertion.

  "Divine? This is unexpected, and unconventional. You know the college is closed during this type of audience," said the praetor.

  Jaspers stepped into the room, swivelling his ebony cane, and asked again, "But did you learn much, praetor? This is the first time in thirty years the Privy Council has allowed a revivication in the name of the law. I'm fascinated. I'm also deeply disturbed that you carried on without informing me or inviting me to be present. You know how serious this affair is."

  Praetor Enoch was a strong, courageous man. He looked Jaspers in the eye and said flatly, "The work was initiated and ordered by the Militia. These cadavers are their property. I was obeying the letter of the law. There was no need to inform you."

  "But what did you learn, old man?" asked Jaspers.

  Enoch looked around. He was in a lead-lined chamber of solid granite. The nearest human being was over a hundred yards away. That had been his instruction when the order arrived. He hadn't wanted to spook the young initiates.

  "Don't threaten me, divine," he said, bunching his knuckles.

  "I'm sorry, Praetor. I don't know what came over me. You must understand, I am just so anxious to fathom out this treason so that the Queen may sleep safely in her bed."

  Enoch looked at him cautiously.

  "I I understand, Divine," he said. "It is a heavy burden. I will inform the Militia representative in an hour when he returns. In the meantime, you may as well know, it was Lord Salisbury who fashioned the attempt on Triumff's life last evening."

  "Hockrake? Are you sure?" asked Jaspers.

  "The man Pennyman recognised his signet ring. The dolmen sigil of the Duchy of Wiltshire. Our plot, as they say, thickens"

  Enoch's voice trailed off. There was a taste like bile in his mouth. More than anything, he was surprised.

  "How did you Why did I tell you that?" he asked.

  "A jinx of truth. I conjured it as I came in, old man. I could have made you tell me anything," said Jaspers. "Which initiates you'd interfered with, for instance."

  Enoch started forward, breathing hard. He was weak and drained from the exertions of the revivication Cantrip.

  "Damn you, Jaspers, you'll never get away with this infringement of-"

  "Infringement?" Jaspers interrupted. "That's the least of my concerns. You know of that fool Hockrake's involvement. I can't let you live."

  Enoch tried to duck past him, but Jaspers rose to block him and threw him back. Then the smiling Divine struck one of the corpses soundly with the end of his cane.

  There was a kaleidoscopic flare of bubbling light, and a smell of ground pumice. Peter Petre lolled up on his slab, and stumbled to his feet. Blood, diluted pink by medicinal alcohol, spooled from his smashed lips. One of his eyeballs

  rotated in its socket like a compass hunting for true north.

  "That Arte it is black," said Enoch in horror.

  "Indeed. Not white, nor grey," Jaspers smiled. "I have made a very close study of all the mantic arts, praetor the pyromanti, geomanti and idromanti we all study in the guild, and also the negromanti we do not. It is a shame, for that is the most delicious sort."

  Peter Petre staggered towards the shrinking praetor.

  "How do you like my Goety, praetor?" asked Jaspers.

  "It is you!" howled Enoch, as Peter Petre killed him. It was a long, slow, drawn-out killing, and involved nothing more than frenzied tearing by a hideous strength not sired on Earth. Jetting arterial sprays spattered the ceiling and far corners of the room. Enoch could not scream. He was enveloped in a cone of silence that Jaspers had manufactured with a twitch of his cane.

  When he was sure Enoch was dead, Jaspers strolled from the room. At the door, he gestured with his cane again. Everything organic in the lead-lined chamber combusted in a ravenous blaze of lambent flame.

  Jaspers shut the door on the inferno.

  "I will keep my secrets," he mused.

  Some minutes later, initiates from the college dorms ran across to the chamber-hall, roused by the sight of blue flames licking the tiled roof.

  They found Jaspers, sobbing, at the steps of the hall. Horrified, several ran off to raise the Brigade.

  "It was terrible," Jaspers told the others tearfully. "I warned the praetor, but he would not listen. I told him that the devil Triumff would have inlaid black Cantrips of destruction into the bodies of those he had slain, but he insisted on his ability. When he cast his jinx upon them The fire I tried to save him It was too much."

  Someone put a blanket around the divine's wracking shoulders. The Brigade bells jangled through the darkness. All agreed it was the second great disaster in as many nights.

  The flames leapt up to the heavens. For a while, the safety of the City around was in doubt, but the Brigade trained two Worm's Drive Fire Squirts at the combustion, and by eleven, only the white-hot core of the seminary chamber still broiled in its lead-lined casket.

  As he was led away by sympathetic hands in search of brandy and a soft seat, Jaspers took one last look at the hundred yard flames, and smiled, an expression that his dutiful companions were all too shaken to notice.

  De Quincey saw it.

  He was quaffing a second welcome cognac in the Shades when he heard the rattling bells. Racing outside, he was greeted by an angry, amber glow against the sooty night, rising from behind the Parliament House. He swore, and broke into a run towards the college.

  It was chaos, and the frantic initiates at the gatehouse would not let him pass. But from the shadows of the gate, he saw Jaspers. He saw the smile and shivered. He saw it all too clearly.

  Triumff woke up with his face pressed to cold glass. Beyond the distorting pane, London lay asleep, except for the churning gout of flame over to the east.

  He scrambled up, his head spinning. The cupola on the top of the Swan Theatre, which was used to store the pennants and banners, had ended up serving him as a place of rest. It wasn't ideal, as he had to sleep semi-vertically in the confined area, but it was better than sleeping below in the cramped tiring room. Mary Mercer was two sheets to the wind and after his body, and, after his success with the lute playing, he was convinced that most of the Company wanted to have congratulatory sex with him. The rope, canvas and moths of the cupola would do.

  He looked out at the torching blaze. Westminster, he guessed. Glory, what now?

  There was a tap at the door.

  He breathed in, remembered his name was Louis, and opened the clasp.

  Gaumont looked in at him, tired but alert. He was dressed in longjohns and a nightshirt, and he held a glowing lamp.

  "You've seen it, then?"

  "Y-yes," said Cedarn.

  "Don't worry, Borde," said Gaumont, climbing up into the cupola alongside him and shutting the
hatch, "I'm Wisley." He reached into the pocket of his nightshirt and pulled out a silver cruciform on a purple rosette. Across the rood was the inscribed eldritch logo of the Curial Inquisitorial Agency. "Agent Wisley, CIA deep cover."

  "Agent Borde," said Cedarn, wishing he had a glitzy badge to flash around.

  "Good to be working with you on this one. It's a bad show all round. I have to say, Operation Original Sin is the toughest number the Spymasters have set me on yet. The place is going to hell in a hand-basket, and we don't even know where to begin to look."

  Cedarn nodded.

  "I'm lost," he admitted. "I have no idea what's expected of me. I'm hard up in a cinch and no knife to cut the seizing."

  "Sorry?" queried Wisley.

  "It's a nautical expression. I, er, heard it on the boat coming over. From La France." Cedarn covered himself hastily.

  "Right," nodded Wisley. He peered out of the cupola windows. "It's the Church-Guild School, all right. That's a fine mess. If the Arte's gone bad, what hope is there for the likes of you and me?"

  Triumff didn't much like contemplating such subjects in quite such a cramped space, quite so far off the ground, quite so late at night with a complete stranger.

  "Bastard all," he reasoned. "What a night."

  Salisbury awoke, alone and cold, in some small hour of the morning. The Palace of Windsor was silent all around.

  Salisbury turned over with a grumble. He was cold and asweat with bad dreams. He snuggled down belligerently into the pillow, but something made him open his eyes and look up.

  The knife was an inch from his eyeball. It glinted in the grey darkness.

  Salisbury froze, terror icing its way across his bulky extent. Jaspers was standing over him. Then, with yet greater shock, Salisbury saw that the blade was actually grown from Jaspers's outstretched fingers.

  "You're a stupid, lardy moron," Jaspers told him.

  "W-what?"

  "Tonight, your foolish nonsense nearly cost us all. This is the very last time I'll warn you, Hockrake. Next time I'll send something in my stead, something from the furthest necromantic reaches of the cosmos, something that will eat you, soul first."

  "I-I understand," said the Duke of Salisbury, gagging on his fear.

  Jaspers's strangely sharpened fingers cut a slit through his pillow, and downy feathers puffed out. Then he disappeared, just like that, as if he had never been.

  Salisbury lay very still for a very long time, staring up at the indistinct paintings on the ceiling of the chamber. Slowly, he began to see more and more of them, as their details became plain. Then he realised it was because the sun was coming up outside.

  THE FOURTEENTH CHAPTER.

  What happened on Friday.

  There are few things more likely to get you out of bed of a Friday morning than the sound of someone nailing a dead cat to your front door, except, perhaps, the sound of someone nailing a live cat to your front door.

  The intermittent thumping that accompanied the former endeavour echoed up through the boards of number seventeen, Amen Street, Soho, and jabbed rudely between Uptil's consciousness and a rather good dream about a motor launch, the Barrier Reef and a girl called Ruuti.

  His sleep-dilated mind constricted tightly as he snapped awake, and he groaned. The boat, the reef and Ruuti waved goodbye from the receding edge of Dreamtime, and left him, alone and annoyed, in a grimy, uncivilised foreign land that he was really beginning to loathe, though his entire capacity for loathing was temporarily directed towards the steady thump-thump from below.

  Shoulders slumped reluctantly, Uptil slapped flat-footedly down the staircase, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Yawning, he threw open the vibrating front door.

  The man outside with the hammer pulled up mid-swing, and caught the head of his tool in a protective, cupping hand inches from Uptil's face.

  "Od's bollocks!" he exclaimed, and then jerked backwards involuntarily as he realised how muscular, alien, naked and angry-looking Uptil was. Then he swore loudly, and shook his hand as the momentum from the hammer belatedly travelled up his arm and arrived in his brain.

  There were three men on the doorstep, common mongers or journeymen by their clothes, and a stiffened English Domestic Shorthair crucified under the knocker. Two of the men looked at Uptil apprehensively, while the man with the hammer did a little jig with his hand in his armpit, and muttered a few words that were low on letters and high on dudgeon. Uptil slid his just-awake stare around until he was nose to nose with the feline door-hanging. He blinked. The cat didn't. It seemed likely that it had fallen foul of a stagecoach some considerable time before its crucifixion, and its grimace was just the sort of expression Uptil assumed cats made when their alley-singing was interrupted by three tons of horse-drawn criticism.

  It looked as if it was even less happy about the whole affair than Uptil.

  "What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?" Uptil wanted to say, but realised he couldn't. Habit had conditioned the Ploy into him to an almost Pavlovian degree. He settled for giving the men, and the cat, his most unforgiving glare.

  "Let that be a warnin' to yer!" said the man with the hammer as he regained his composure.

  Uptil considered this and looked at the crucified cat again. He'd never even considered keeping a cat as a pet. He had no idea that such an activity was so frowned on by Londoners. He'd certainly take their advice and never do it now.

  Uptil nodded, smiled and went to shut the door. The trio peered at him warily through the closing gap.

  "D'ye unnerstand, savage man?" snarled the man with the hammer, with mounting confidence, before the door could entirely shut.

  "Course he don't," put in one of his colleagues. "He's a savage man and therefore born without much mind for reasonin'."

  The other two agreed keenly.

  Uptil re-opened the door and the exchange. If he'd had sleeves, they would have been rolled up by now. Banging their heads repeatedly against each other, or the footscraper, surely wouldn't constitute an infringement of the Ploy, he decided. Rupert could always write it off against ignorant native confusion, and besides, it would improve the way Friday had started.

  "Would you gentlemen be so good as to appraise me of your business here?" asked Agnew, appearing suddenly. He was wrapping tight the cord of his dressing gown. He looked even less amused than Uptil or the cat.

  "Tis a warnin'!" repeated the man with the hammer, waving said item threateningly in the direction of the gaunt manservant.

  "I don't think so," replied Agnew, studying the new decoration on the door. "I'm rather inclined to suppose it is an abuse of a poor, dumb animal and an act of vandalism to private property. Do you know how long it will take to repair iron-tack holes in finished oak of this quality?"

  There was a pause. One of the men, who happened to be employed as a joiner when he wasn't involved in cat-hammering expeditions, looked up helpfully and began to say, "About a seven-night, with good grout an' a willing hand," until the others shushed him.

  "We knows who's owse this is, mister, and we knows wot he's done," said the man with the hammer, through clenched teeth. His teeth were as white and regular as a fire-damaged portcullis, so the words experienced no difficulty getting out.

  Agnew folded his arms patiently.