Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (15 page)

    “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.

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.

    “Charbroiled,” said Eastwoodho with a sick grin. They crunched on over plaster fragments. In the next silo, a foppish gent executed another plaster dummy with a crossbow that had, until moments before, been his codpiece.

    “Just a little prick with a poisoned quarrel. That’s all it takes.”

    “So I noticed,” said Triumff, uncomfortably.

    Next door to the codpiece surprise, four men in plate armour and houndskull helmets were rappelling down from the roof.

    “In case we ever have to mount a raid into the cone of a volcano,” Eastwoodho explained helpfully.

    “Does that happen much?” asked Triumff.

    “Not yet,” smiled the CIA agent.

    “Gosh,” said Triumff. “It’s exciting being you.”

    Eastwoodho looked at him dubiously with his papercut eyes.

    They moved on. Triumff looked in awe at the machines of destruction being employed all around him. The seat of a sedan chair suddenly rocketed skywards on the end of a belling steel spring, and after a short round of congratulatory applause, the agents set about recovering the plaster passenger that was jammed head-first into the ceiling. A debonair gent unfixed his ruff and sent it skimming through the air, whereupon it decapitated yet another dummy at the end of the next stall. The whirring disc of razored lace returned to his hand neatly.

    “This is the dirty tricks department,” remarked Eastwoodho with some glee.

    “You don’t say.”

    They turned the end of the stall rows into what had once been the tack room. Eastwoodho held up a restraining hand, bringing Triumff to a halt. Before them, between two deep trestle tables lined with gadgets and machine parts, an elderly man with a stooped frame was priming the pan of an ivoryhandled baltic-lock fowling piece that had been set on a tripod stand. He stood back and squeezed the trigger via a length of silk cord. There was a loud retort, and the gorget of a plate-armour suit thirty feet away was thoroughly perforated.

    “Armour-piercing balls,” said Eastwoodho.

    “Really?” asked Triumff. “What’s his name?”

    Eastwoodho turned to him with an unfriendly grin.

    “No names, no pack drill. Careless talk,” he said, looking at Triumff significantly. “He’s Kew. That’s his cipher-name. We all have cipher-names. This week, they’re based on English horticultural gardens. Mine’s Winkworth.”

    “What does that make me?” asked Triumff.

    “Agent Borde Hill,” said Eastwoodho. “That’s all you need to know on a need-to-know basis.”

    “What about, let’s say, introducing a want-to-know basis here?” suggested Triumff.

    “No need,” smiled Eastwoodho, “you know?”

    “Not entirely.”

    By then, the stooped man had wandered across to them. He was carefully wiping his hands on a silk kerchief.

    “This the dupe?” he asked Eastwoodho, as if Triumff was made of plaster.

    “Tri-” Triumff began.

    “Agent Borde Hill,” cut in Eastwoodho firmly. “Agent Borde Hill, Kew. Kew, Agent Borde Hill.”

    Triumff shook hands with the stooped man, who promptly wiped his palm again.

    “Cold-smelted carbonide spheroid. Ten by twenty-six hundred muzzle velocity, but the trick is in the rifling.” he said, gesturing towards the fowling piece. “Impressive, what? It’ll shear through a gorget, a spaulder or a breath at up to sixty yards. Knock through two inches of plate at twenty. And you might as well wrap your privates in tissue-paper for all the stopping a mail fauld will afford.”

    “Ouch,” muttered Triumff, with compassion.

    “Would you like to see the stealth plate-mail?” asked Kew keenly.

    Eastwoodho leaned forward. “Operation Original Sin is a go as of fifteen-thirty, Kew. We’d better get on with the show. Tri-Agent Borde Hill hasn’t got time to waste.”

    “Pity,” mused Kew, moving across to the trestle tables. “Now pay attention, Borde. This is a rum do, and no mistake. Item one.”

    He held up a stubby-looking clay pipe. “A stubby-looking clay pipe? Yes, and no. Depress the underside of the bowl, and you reveal a lodestone and miniature windvane.”

    He demonstrated. Triumff frowned. He was still frowning at the stubby looking pipe when Kew moved on to the next item.

    “Item two: a conventional buckler of the ecu target variety. Pull out the bevel here and the rim circumrotates. Look here.”

    He held it up for inspection. Triumff wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to be looking at.

    “Adjustable codex,” Kew explained, “suitable for all Agency ciphers. State of the Arte. Eastwoodho will provide you with the logs. Read them. Then eat them.”

    “What is this?” asked Triumff.

    “Poniard/flintlock combination piece,” replied Kew, assuming Triumff had meant item three and not the situation in general. “Single shot, and the blade is edged with diamonds. It’ll cut through most anything. Item four.”

    He held up a mandillion doublet, “Lined with sprung wire, it’ll stop a sword edge or a musket ball. Item five: your false papers and letters patent. Louis Manticore Cedarn, actor/wassailer/troubadour. You speak French? Of course you do. Try and live the part if you can. We’ve written up an accompanying biography. Your cover will be an appointment as a lutenist with the Curtain Company at the Swan. Research says you can play a lute. You can pick up a standard-issue lute from the quartermaster. Don’t forget to sign for it. If you lose anything, there’ll be a slew of re-requisition orders to fill out.”

    “Louis come again?”

    Kew didn’t.

    “Your contact’s name is Wisley,” he said. “He’ll be your only link to the Service. You can pass intelligence reports back through him. Item six: a signet ring full of arsenic tincture for tight spots.”

    “Suicide?” breathed Triumff reluctantly. He was still staring at the Hilliard of the clean-shaven, blond young man that featured prominently in his “papers”. “This doesn’t look a bit like-“

    “And item seven: a razor and a jar of peroxide bleach.”

    Triumff suddenly felt very attached to his beard.

“Oh no you don’t” he began.

They did.

    At four minutes past six, the man who would, reluctantly, be Louis Cedarn, actor/wassailer/troubadour, descended unceremoniously from a passing unmarked phaidon outside the porch of the Swan Theatre in Southwark.

    Cedarn picked himself up, and gathered his scattered belongings up out of the gutter.

    “Thanks, guys,” he yelled at the disappearing phaidon.

    Cedarn ran his hand through his newly blond locks. His scalp stung, and the cold Thames wind bit into his raw chin. His clothes felt unsuitable and didn’t fit very well. He hobbled up the steps to the Swan in shoes that sported frilled rosettes on the toes and were a size too small, and knocked.

    “Here we go,” he whispered to reassure himself.

    There was a rattle of chains and dead-bolts, and the door opened a crack. A long nose poked around the jamb like a surfacing periscope.

    “Theatre’s closed,” it told him.

    “I’m expected,” Cedarn began as the nose showed signs of withdrawing. “I’m Louis Cedarn. Lutenist. Er Bon soir.”

    The nose looked him up and down.

    “You’re the Frenchie lutenist, then?” it asked.

    “It would seem so. Monsieur,” Cedarn said, smiling what he hoped was a winning smile. It didn’t necessarily win, but it got him a place in the quarter-finals.

    “You’d better come in while I find someone who knows about you,” the nose said, withdrawing and opening the door a little wider. Squinting, Cedarn ducked inside, following the nose. He banged the bowl of his lute against the door frame, and cursed. The instrument had turned him into a wooden hunchback, and he’d clouted it into just about everything between Richmond and Southwark. He’d given up checking it for damage, as most of the bumps and scrapes he’d caused were invisible amid the scar tissue of a long Service career. It was an eight-course Tavistock Lute-O-caster in sunburst peach, with a Service serial number stencilled on the fretboard. It had seen active duty on nine prior missions, including a stake-out at the College of Minstralcy during the notorious Quadrillegate affair, where it had been instrumental in depriving the spy, Guido Resticulati, of consciousness. It was nominally kept in an open “D” tuning, but this was subject to humidity and dry rot, and it looked more like a long-necked tortoise that had been through the Peninsular War than a vessel of St Cecilia’s Art.