Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero Read online

  "I thought not," reflected the master. A cloud passed across the Mediterranean sun, and the wind got up a little. Canvas banged and flapped above. The sea spray divested itself of its salt, and plugged their nostrils with it. "Master Verrochio, set course for La Spezia. On the double."

  The mate trudged off to the wheelhouse.

  Giuseppe leaned close to the ship's master.

  "Do you," he asked, "know anything about familial homunculi, the binding of elemental servitors or astral provenance?"

  "No," replied the master frankly.

  "Of course you don't. They are known only from the pages of Leonardo's original Principia. Knowledge of them is beyond even the Church. Be so good as to have my green sea-chest brought up on deck, the large one with the brass clasps. We'll get to England, Master Luccio, and I'll pay you double into the bargain."

  There was something about Giuseppe's eyes that robbed Master Luccio of any argument.

  "Who'd be a sailor?" he mumbled to himself.

  Giuseppe overheard.

  "I would," he replied.

  Triumff woke up slowly, rolled over, and fell out of bed. His head ached terribly, and his nose had all but lost feeling. Twice in twelve hours it had received a blow heavy enough to stun an ox, and he hadn't even begun to list the other parts of his frame that smarted, throbbed, pulsated or just plain hurt.

  He made use of his time on the floor to assay his surroundings. Oak-panelled walls, plastered ceiling, a cot bed draped in what looked like horse blankets - used horse blankets - a heavy-looking closed door and a pair of barred windows.

  He clambered to his feet, but only because the stone floor was cold and unyielding. Eighty-five per cent of his body voted against being vertical, but his goose-pimples vetoed the motion and sent an order to his legs.

  He swayed towards the windows and looked out. It was early afternoon by his estimation, but of what day, he didn't care to hazard. Two floors below him was a shady courtyard, dark stone pathways snaking between shrubberies and welltended borders. Globes of stone punctuated the ends of low walls. A statue of Eros doing something erotic by himself stood in the centre. Around the sides of the courtyard, anonymous windows looked out from indeterminate wings of the building. A figure stood on the pathway below his window. It was Eastwoodho. He looked up, somehow aware of the gaze on the back of his head. He smiled up at Triumff, winked one papercut eye, made a finger-flintlock and shot it - pow! - up at the prisoner with a laugh that the windowpanes silenced.

  Triumff turned away. Where was he? He felt he should know. At one time or another, he'd woken up in most of the royal and semi-royal Palaces in the Home Counties, and had managed to work out where he was. He fumbled his way towards the identity of his surroundings. Hampton? Penshurst? Brayfield Wilmscott? Buddleyby Castle? Tavingham? His fastest ever recognition had been Luckhouse Place (four minutes seventeen seconds) after a telltale glimpse of the snorting basilisk weather-vane on the morning after the Treaty of Sidmouth celebratory revels in 1999.

  Triumff sat on the cot and rubbed his forehead.

  A key clacked in the lock and the door opened. A mousey little man in the blue robes of a curial divine stepped inside, and looked Triumff up and down. Triumff returned the upand-down look as coldly as he could.

  "Good afternoon, Sir Rupert," said the divine. "Cardinal Woolly will see you now."

  Triumff got to his uncertain feet. Richmond, he realised.

  Cardinal Woolly was a dark bulk against the ogee windows of the Great Library. The perspective of the book-shelves on either side swept down to pin-point him. The windows framed him and cast a long, portly shadow backwards across the room. For sheer compositional drama, Woolly couldn't have chosen a better place to stand. The divine closed the door, and Triumff was alone with the Church elder.

  There was a painfully long pause.

  "Sir Rupert?" asked the dark shape.

  "Yes, indeed," Triumff replied nasally, wishing there was somewhere he could sit down before his legs gave way.

  There was another eon-long pause.

  A reading chair on castors trundled across to him, by itself.

  "Sit down, please, before your legs give way," said the cardinal.

  "Okay," Triumff reasoned, sitting. The chair trundled him closer to Cardinal Woolly's shadow. He slid helplessly across to the edge of the desk. Triumff didn't like that much. He didn't like any fancy showing off with the Arte.

  "Neither do I," commented the cardinal.

  "I'm sorry?" asked Triumff with a frown.

  "I don't like any fancy showing off with the Arte either," explained the cardinal.

  Triumff was on his feet again.

  "You're reading my bastard mind!" he exclaimed. "I won't have that I won't have your prying-"

  "Please be seated, Sir Rupert. I meant no disrespect," Woolly interrupted. Triumff found that the chair was nudging against the backs of his knees like an eager, friendly bow-hound. He sat again.

  "Thank you," said the cardinal. "Certain simple jinx enable us to skim the surface thoughts of our fellow man, Sir Rupert. We cannot detect the mind's deeper secrets. Rest assured, I am not picking your brain."

  "Good," said Triumff firmly, gripping the arms of the chair hard, and glancing around the Library nervously.

  "Much as I'd like to," added the cardinal. He stepped nearer, still eclipsing the luminosity of the windows. He held something out in front of Triumff's nose. It was a ragged foolscap sheet of parchment.

  "What's this?" asked Triumff.

  "You tell me."

  The sheet filled Triumff's field of vision. Reluctantly, he looked at it. He saw spidery script, executed, it seemed, by a hand twice damned by palsy and a rotten dip-pen. He tried to make sense of the language, but recognised only a few of the characters. Then a drum-like pulse began beating in his temple, and he was swept up by a giddying rush of nausea. He looked away, his head swimming.

  When he looked back, the cardinal was folding the parchment away and tucking it out of sight in a folder on the desk.

  "Ugh" began Triumff, but didn't really know what else to add. The cardinal handed him a goblet of water, and he sipped it gratefully. The nausea retreated.

  "I'm sorry about that. Are you feeling better now?" asked the cardinal.

  Triumff nodded. He felt that if he opened his mouth, he'd reunite his morning's fritters with the open air.

  "The feeling concerning the fritters will soon pass," said the cardinal. You experienced a condition known as Thaumaturgic Reaction. It is a little like an allergy. In simple terms, it is the instinctive physical revulsion of the non-initiated to pure Lore."

  "What was that?" asked Triumff, daring at last to speak.

  "A page from the Unaussprechlichen Kulten," said Woolly. "You don't want to know what it concerned. Consider it a test, Sir Rupert. If you had displayed anything except genuine revulsion, I would have known in an instant that you have dabbled in Goety." The cardinal sat at the desk, and Triumff saw his face for the first time, illuminated by the light of the desk lamp.

  "I haven't felt that crook since a night last year in the Mermaid. The eight bottles of musket were a personal best, but, on reflection, the rogan josh might have been a tad foolish, followed, as it was, by a nasty bout of a condition known, in the vernacular, as Bombay Doors. Are you familiar?"

  The cardinal smiled, but Triumff could see how pale and drawn he looked. Dark circles of insomnia ringed his eyes. His flesh looked pallid and damp.

  "So," said Triumff, getting back to the point, "you get the CIA to pick me up, and then you test me for Goety. May I ask why?"

  The cardinal clasped his podgy hands together and steepled his fingers.

  "Last night, the City went dark," he began.

  "I noticed," interrupted Triumff.

  "Someone employed the vilest Goety to desecrate the Cantrip Chamber at the Powerdrome. Some Guild men were slain in the incident."

  There was something about the cardinal's lack of specifics th
at made Triumff shudder.

  "But why?" he began.

  "Your name was implicated in the affair, erroneously, I was quite sure. You understand, I had to be certain."

  "Thank goodness," breathed Triumff. "The last thing I want is to go ten rounds with some cheery Infernal Affairs inquisitors."

  Woolly raised one large hand to his head, and gently stroked his silky coif.

  "You are innocent," he said, "but it's not as simple as that. The event is the most significant symptom of the greatest crisis that has stricken the Unity since it began. Intrigues are afoot to undermine the sanctity of the Throne and the Church. The Cantrips are threatened."

  "You're talking conspiracy," said Triumff.

  "Indeed I am. These are lean and dangerous times, Sir Rupert. One may not trust even his closest brethren and friends. You are, I'm afraid, caught up in this dangerous web most entirely. Your position at Court is fragile to say the least. Someone has seen fit to single you out as a scapegoat, and few would be prepared to listen for long enough to hear your side of the story."

  "Except you?"

  "Had I not instructed the agents of the CIA to collect you without delay this morning, you would now be in the hands of an unsympathetic government department or dead or both."

  "I was nearly dead anyway, Your Grace," said Triumff. "Eastwoodho and his boys don't know the meaning of 'care' and 'gentle restraint'. I'd bet they're not too hot on 'fragile' or 'this way up' either."

  Woolly nodded.

  "Thankfully, they are agents of the Curial Bureau, and not employees of Her Majesty's Postal Office," he said. "However, I apologise for any trauma they might have caused. Believe me, it is preferable to the alternatives. On the City streets this afternoon, agents of the Diocesan Office are falling over investigators from the Church-Guild, Infernal Affairs inquisitors are bumping into Militia officers, and civil servants from Whitehall are colliding with aldermen from the Mayoral Chambers. Every authority in London is sniffing around for clues, and one whose scent is as strong as yours might find it hard going on the streets."

  Triumff raised his eyebrows, and said, "I can handle such- "

  The cardinal cut him off. "Lord Gull, commanding the Militia inquiries, has already set a price of one thousand marks on your head, whether it is attached to your body or not. You are just as popular with the other agencies."

  "Oh Jesu" breathed Triumff. Then he looked again at the pasty cardinal. "But you're acting alone, aren't you? You and your CIA? Even the other Church agencies don't know you've got me?"

  "That is correct," said Woolly.

  "You don't even trust the other segments of the United Church!"

  "Until I am satisfied with the nature of things, I don't trust anything, except myself, a select core of the CIA, and Gloriana."

  "And me?" added Triumff, hopefully.

  "And you, Sir Rupert. Now I trust you too. Welcome to the most exclusive club in the Unity."

  Triumff stood and wandered across to the nearest book stack, running his fingers absently along the row of vellum spines.

  "So where does that leave me? Vis-ŕ-vis paddles and creeks located near to sewer outfalls, I mean?" he asked.

  "I am too well known to conduct an investigation, in person. The officers of the CIA are also well known to the other Church bodies. Besides, most of them are too stupid to be useful. I need a friend on the streets, one who knows London and how it works. Someone who might slip in and out unnoticed where even the best disguised officer of the Church would stand out and be noticed."

  "You want me to do your dirty work for you?" Triumff asked, uttering the words with slow incredulity. "Bollocks," he announced, and added for good measure, "and anyway, isn't the most wanted man in London a bad choice for an espial?"

  "If he was Sir Rupert Triumff, yes. But if he wasn't" The cardinal rose from his seat and crossed to the corner of the room. He tugged on the bell-pull. When he turned back, Triumff saw with no little shock that there was genuine pleading in his face, pleading mixed with fear.

  "Please help me, Rupert," he said, "I the Unity needs you."

  "Well" began Triumff.

  "In return, Sir Rupert, I could see that all your ambitions at Court and beyond were realised. I could protect any interest of yours at home and abroad," the cardinal interrupted.

  "Any interests?"

  "Any," the cardinal nodded.

  "Are you sure you can only read my surface thoughts?" asked Triumff.

  Woolly smiled.

  "Quite sure," he said.

  The door to the Library opened, and Eastwoodho stepped in. He came to attention with a smart clack of heels.

  "Sir!" he snapped.

  "Conduct Sir Rupert to the Mews, serjeant. Operation Original Sin commences as of this moment."

  "Sir!" exclaimed Eastwoodho again, like a flintlock going off. Triumff walked towards the door that Eastwoodho held open for him.

  "Don't foul it up, Triumff," added the cardinal darkly, "I'm counting on you. And rest assured that some Cantrip-gate scandal will bring the Unity crashing down as sure as an uprising."

  "One thing," said Triumff, from the doorway. "How do I know I can trust you?"

  "You don't," replied Woolly. "But consider this: if I was part of the conspiracy, you'd be dead already."

  Triumff followed Eastwoodho out of the Library. He didn't feel all that reassured.

  THE ELEVENTH CHAPTER.

  On cipher-names & sundry;

  also, a musical interlude.

  The Mews lay a short stroll from the Palace quad, across the greenery of the kitchen garden. It was a long, half-timbered bunker of converted stables. A light drizzle fell on the pair of them as they walked down the gravel path.

  "I guess this sort of thing is new to you, right?" asked Eastwoodho.

  "Delightfully so," replied Triumff grumpily.

  The Secret Service agent stopped in front of the hammered oak doors of the Mews, and rang the four wire bell-pulls in a special order.

  "Don't be rattled by this place. And don't wander off," he said.

  The doors opened.

  The well-lit interior smelled of cloves and gunpowder, and the floor, walls and ceiling had been whitewashed antiseptically. They entered, and Triumff followed the big man down the central aisle. On one side, two agents were testing matchlock carbines cunningly disguised as lutes in a sandbagged range that had once been a horse stall. Plaster dummies wearing ruffs exploded with serious completeness. To the left, brawny men in hose and little else threw each other around on straw mats and yelled monosyllabic oriental howls. Triumff winced.

  "Special Forces boys," muttered Eastwoodho proudly, "Green Garter. Toughest hombres in the Unity."

  A little further on, a party of plaster courtiers sat around a banqueting table on which lay a wax suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. The fuse on the apple was nearly burnt out.

  "Cover your ears," advised Eastwoodho. Triumff obeyed.

  There was a flash, and the banquet came to a sudden, outwardly expanding end. A singed ruff floated down in front of Triumff's nose.