Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (37 page)

    Jaspers raised his hand and crushed the talisman into dust. The remnants sifted out of his fingers like sand, wafting away on the night breeze.

    He stood and turned to face Triumff.

    “All done,” he said, through a leer, but his face was pallid and damp, as if he had run a marathon in a fur coat.

    “What’s all done?” Triumff asked.

    “Look at Cato,” Jaspers told him, “the plump fool. There’s a venomed arrow in his quiver. In a few moments, he will use it.”

    “Cato is party to your plot, then?” asked Triumff.

    Jaspers laughed at him.

    “Him? Not willingly,” he said, “but I have just sent an arch demon of hell into his unsuspecting soul. It will tell him what to do.”

    Triumff looked through the flaps at Cato. He looked hot and uncomfortable, distracted and bothered. His hand on the bow was trembling, and he was reaching towards the quiver slung over his pudgy buttocks. Triumff realised that no one in the audience would notice. They were too busy clamouring for Doll.

    Cato drew an arrow from his pouch.

    Triumff gently reached down with his left hand, and took hold of the pommel of the Couteau Swiss that was hanging from his belt. He pressed the trigger.

    The weapon did not develop a rapier blade as he had hoped. It seemed incapable of doing that to order, or at the right moment.

    It did, however, produce a ten-inch straight knife for carving roast meat. Four inches of it went into de Tongfort’s thigh.

    As the man howled, Triumff threw himself back against de Tongfort as hard as he could. De Tongfort’s blade sliced a line over Triumff’s ear, but he was too slow to stop the full force of the sea captain’s assault.

    The pair of them crashed to the ground. Ignoring the blood that was streaming down the side of his head, Triumff pounded his fist repeatedly into de Tongfort’s face and stomach. Once de Tongfort was winded and gasping helplessly, Triumff leapt off him and snatched up the traitor’s rapier. He turned. Jaspers was gone.

    “Doll! Doll!” he screamed through the tent flap at the stage.

    The crowd drowned him out.

    Artemis, Diana and Orion had all nocked their arrows, ready to fire them into the air, symbolically, as soon as Doll came out with the “Let us signify our love / And mark like cupid our desire / That Gloriana is most loved of all / Our Queen, our thirtieth Elizabeth” speech. But the crowd was roaring too much. She had to wait.

    She smiled at Alice and Mary, ready with their up-pointing bows.

    Horace Cato was ignoring her, nocking the barb that de Tongfort had given him. He was aiming up into the sky.

    Maybe she had misread his odd behaviour

    She thought she heard someone calling her name over the din. It was her imagination, surely.

    Then she heard something else, someone whistling the first few bars of the song about the Guinea Coast. Piercing, it cut through the noise of the crowd.

    Doll went cold. Her pounding heart felt like it was hesitating.

    It was the signal they had agreed. Doll looked around.

    Horace Cato was lowering his aim.

Never mind the bal-rogs.

Doll balled her fist, swung hard, and mashed Cato’s nose. He flew backwards onto the stage.

    His arrow sailed through the air in the opposite direction, and punctured the back of the scrolled throne, six inches above the Queen’s head.

    There was a sudden, complete silence.

    It was followed by absolute pandemonium.

    It seemed like everybody, every one of those thirty-seven thousand one hundred and sixty-three people in Richmond was either screaming and yelling, or running about, or both.

    Doll backed away, her mouth wide.

    Alice Munton was bawling like a baby.

    Mary Mercer had fainted.

    Horace Cato was writhing on the stage, nose a bloody pulp.

    The musicians and the players had spilled out of their tents onto the stage, babbling and shouting as Militia men tried to push through them.

    Rupert Triumff, sword in hand, leapt the colourfully decorated troyes and pushed his way through the mobbing crowd onto the apron. He grabbed Doll and hugged her.

“Well done, my love,” he said into her hair.

“Oh God” she began, pointing.

    The players, the musicians, the Militia and the screaming women backed away.

    Horace Cato wasn’t himself. Whatever the Divine Jaspers had put into him to pollute his mind was trying to get out, or at least make itself more comfortable. Things bulged beneath his skin, and there was, in the horrified silence, a sound of bones grinding and moving. Cato got up. He swayed. He swelled. He stretched and contorted from unholy internal pressures.

    Everyone, except Doll and Rupert, and a few members of the Militia, screamed and ran.

    What had once been Horace Cato became an eight foot thing of gristle and breathing flesh. Air sucked into and out of it through a multitude of skinny flaps. Its arms were mostly bone and reached to the floor. Its legs had splayed like a tortoise’s. Its head had extended, as if a horse’s skull had pushed up through its neck to stretch and fill the skin of its head.

    Suddenly it had jaws like a water-horse. It opened them, and Triumff and Doll watched as fangs erupted into place from the gums. They distinctly heard each one spring out like a nail hammered through a plank. It roared, and windows in the Palace shattered.

    Triumff pushed Doll aside, and thrust de Tongfort’s rapier at the creature.

    The sword blade struck the beast. It melted.

    Blobs of molten steel dripped onto the stage and burned through it. The creature shambled forward. It was bigger now, growing steadily. It was becoming a serpentine thing, with the tail of a crocodile. Horns sprouted from its brow.

    Two members of the huscarl militia charged in downstage, and rammed their pikes into the monster. It swung around, opened its long jaws, and incinerated them with an exhalation of flames.

    Triumff backed away. “Oh bother,” he murmured.

“Give me that,” snapped Mother Grundy, snatching the arrow from de Quincey.

    “Give that back! I must do something!” de Quincey wailed.

    Mother Grundy took the quarrel, kissed the barb and muttered at it. Then she took the charm from around her neck, and began to tie it fast to the arrowhead.

    “What is it?” de Quincey asked, gazing down at the stage below in horror.

    “A draconian fiend,” she replied.

    “A dragon? A sodding
dragon
?”

    “A fire-drake,” she said. “It has been conjured here, and put in that poor devil’s flesh. Such a thing hasn’t walked in God’s air in many an age. I only know its like from books. It is one of the pit fiends, perhaps a bale-rogue, or bal-rog as the Babylonians called it.”

    “It will burn our souls away!” de Quincey announced, unable to tear his gaze from the rapidly growing reptilian beast.

    “It will most likely try,” Mother Grundy agreed.

    She passed the arrow back to de Quincey.

    “I hope you’re a good shot,” she commented.

    De Quincey had never fired a crossbow before in his life.

    “Of course I am,” he decided.

Triumff backed away across the stage as the blasphemous monstrosity advanced. He had thrown the hilt of his melted sword at it, and then snatched up a taper-brand from the footlights. He swung it at the creature, trying to drive it back. He thought about the Couteau Suisse banging against his hip, but it was evident that even the finest metal blades were as useful as sugar-glass.

    An atrocious, rattling hiss issued from the creature’s deformed maw. Triumff felt it shake the organs in his chest. He glanced to each side, yelling to those miltia and noblemen who had been brave, or foolish, enough to stand with him.

    “Get back! Get back! Get Her Majesty to safety!” he shouted.

    He caught sight of Doll, a little way behind him.

    “Doll! Get out of here, I beg you! Run!” he insisted.

    The creature swung its bulk around on its elongated, scrawny limbs. A roaring cone of flame belched from its jaws, and Triumff threw himself flat to evade it. The taper bounced from his hand.

    The monster was right over him. He scrambled and slithered, but it was futile. Foetid breath, rank with the smell of bitumen and burnt sugar, stung his eyes.

    Triumff tried to think of something philosophical and uplifting, but his mind had seized up like a rusted lock, and refused to turn. Eyes wide, he scrambled backwards, looking at the vision of hell as it swept its jaws down at him.

    The impact was sudden, and made a very distinct, pop.

    The creature convulsed.

    The head of a crossbow quarrel poked out of the centre of its throat, sticky with lime-green ichor.

    Triumff stared at it in fascination, noticing the tiny charm wound tightly around its point.

    The creature fell to its knees so hard that the stage shuddered and cracked. Triumff threw himself out from under it, and almost off the side of the apron. The creature sank backwards, and thrashed its tail, ripping down scenery flats and strung lanterns. It threw up its huge skull. Its mouth opened wide to the night sky, and screamed in Horace Cato’s voice.

    Triumff felt hands grab at him and drag him back off the sill of the stage. He couldn’t take his eyes off the screaming beast.

    The scream continued, and rose in pitch, powered by a lung capacity far greater than any human’s. Tongues of blue flame licked around the creature’s open mouth, and its wound. It raised its swaying arms, and held them aloft like the twisted ribs of a great fish.

    Then it imploded.

    Triumff’s ears rang with the sound. It was as if nature had opened up to consume the creature. Every taper, every lamp, every candle in the arena went out, their flames sucked into the implosion. Then the awning collapsed across the stage, mercifully covering the rotten, liquescent remains left in the wake of the detonation.

    It was, thereafter, abruptly very cold, and very quiet.

    Triumff looked up, and saw it was Doll who had dragged him off the stage. She was pale and shocked, gazing at the destruction before them. He pulled her to him, and held her tight as she started to shake.

    Cardinal Woolly began to bellow at the shocked crowd of nobles and guards that stood around in the ruins of the Pavilion. Lord Crowsley, Lord Greff and Admiral Poley sprang into action, formed up an honour-guard of gawping huscarls, and escorted the Queen to the safety of the Cairngorm Tower. The Queen said nothing, but as she hurried away, Triumff caught her gaze. She looked back through the thicket of Militia around her.

    Sir Rupert Triumff nodded a head-bow to her, but she was gone a moment later.

    Woolly stepped down into the centre of the torn-up auditorium.

    “Lights! Get some lights here!” he said. “Find me the guard captain! I want this area secure now!”

    They could all hear the rumbling confusion in the distance as panic cleared the Shene and Richmond. Most of the Masque guests had fled, taking their chances with the milling crowds beyond the walls.

    The Palace grounds were a tattered wasteland of overthrown seats, torn decorations, spilt food and discarded programmes. Those that remained stood in quiet, astonished huddles, unable to take in the events that had unfolded around them.

    Triumff looked around as Woolly clasped his shoulder. The cardinal was shaken, and clearly torn between fear and anger, but there was a bright, grateful look in his eyes too.

    “Not quite as good as last year, your worship,” Triumff murmured. Huscarls hurried around lighting tapers.

    “When I learn who is responsible for this-” Woolly began.