Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero

DAN ABNETT

H
ER MAJESTY
’
S HERO

from
Certain Fine Gentlemen

“
Triumff
is a witch’s brew of alternate history, hocus pocus, cracking action and cheesy gags. Reads like
Blackadder
crossed with Neal Stephenson. It’s a Kind of Magick - don’t miss it.”

- Stephen Baxter

“Endlessly inventive, joyously irreverent, drenched with adrenaline and wicked humour, Dan Abnett’s
Triumff
is a brilliant occult-comedy-historical adventure that’s true to the best traditions of the genres it so eagerly devours.”

- Mike Carey

“This is what it would be like if William Shakespeare and Rowan Atkinson got together to write a novel, after a night on the town with Terry Pratchett. This is a delightful, often original and hugely entertaining read.”

- Unbound

“
Triumff
is a swashbuckling adventure in an alter-native universe, which will entertain, amuse and engage the reader. Highly recommended.”

- Civilian Reader

“Dan Abnett is
brilliant
.”

- SFX

Primeval: Extinction Event

Warhammer 40,000 Novels

ANGRY ROBOT

A member of the Osprey Group

Lace Market House,

54-56 High Pavement,

Nottingham

NG1 1HW, UK

www.angryrobotbooks.com

00VII

Originally published in the UK by Angry Robot 2009 

Copyright Š 2009 by Dan Abnett

Cover art by Larry Rostant

Cover design by Argh! Nottingham

ePub created by ePub Services dot Net

All rights reserved.

Angry Robot is a registered trademark and the Angry Robot icon a trademark of Angry Robot Ltd.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 978-0-85766-023-7

For Nik,
first and only
(again)

TRIUMFF
Her Majesty’s Hero

*

Being the true and
AUTHENTICK
account of the expl’ts
and
incid’nts following the
RETURN
to London
of

Sir Rupert Triumff, adventurer,

from his 
CELEBRATED
Voyage of Discovery

to the Meridional Climes.

Never before made publick.

*

Given in this, my hand, this XXIIIrd day of A
PRILE
,

XX hundred and X Anno Domini,

in the splendid reign of the thirtieth Gloriana.

VIVAT REGINA!

Wum Beaver, esq.

 To the Great Variety of Readers.

FOR THOSE READERS unfamiliar with the affairs and nature of the Anglo-Hispanic Unity, care has been taken to furnish Master Beaver’s manuscript with footnotes and commentary to make all such matters comprehensible.

  However, this editor has been charged with making the following basic facts known from the outset. The AngloHispanic Unity, the longest-lasting and most powerful Empire ever to arise upon this terrestrial stage, was founded in the year Fifteen Hundred and Seventy-Five, following the marriage of Queen Elizabeth the First of England to King Philip the Second of Spain. Said union of power and lands, including as it did the virginal tracts of the New World, soon eclipsed all other nations of the globe, and has persisted since, through a worthy line of potent female monarchs, all styled “Elizabeth Gloriana”.

  The other matter that helped to preserve the preeminence of the Unity was, of course, the Renaissance, which thoroughly reawakened the Sublime Lore of Magick, dormant since Antiquity. The schools and employment of the Esoteric Arte of Magick were monopolised by the Church and Church-Guilds of England, and ensured the Unity’s absolute command and superiority over all the World, especially the British bits of the Unity.

  This didn’t please the Spanish bits very much at all. But that’s another story.

  Part of this one, in fact.

SIR RUPERT TRIUMFF, gentleman adventurer and lately come discoverer of The Vast Southerly Continent

AGNEW, his man

LORD CALLUM GULL, Laird of Ben Phie, Captain of the Royal Guard

CARDINAL THOMAS WOOLLY, first minister of Her Majesty’s United Church

SIR JOHN HOCKRAKE, Duke of Salisbury, a scoundrel

ROUSTAM ALLASANDRO DE LA VEGA, Regent of Castile, Governor of Toledo, and victor of Lille

ROBERT SLEE, of the Queen’s Privy Council

THE DIVINE ALEISTER JASPERS, a junior officer of the United Church

UPTIL, a noble autochthon from foreign climes

DOLL TARESHEET, a notable actress of the Wooden Oh and these parts

NEVILLE DE QUINCEY, a police surgeon and examiner

MOTHER GRUNDY, of the countryside

GIUSEPPE GIUSEPPO, an Italian gentleman of ingenuity

TANTAMOUNT O’BOW, a villain

CATHEAD

& in addition ~

Divers servants, ladies and lords, as well as some personages I might have forgotten in this compilation, along with copious hautboys and tapers, and fanfares on all entrances and exits.

The setting is the present day.

Staged in the modern style.

Vivat Regina!

Which is set upon St Dunstan’s Day.

It had rained, furiously, for all of the six days leading up to St Dunstan’s Day.

    Water rattled off slopes of broken slates, streamed like horse-piss from split gutters, cascaded from the points of eaves, boiled like oxtail soup in leaf-choked drains, coursed in foamy breakers across flagged walks, and thumped down drainpipes in biblical quantities. For the same measure of time that it had taken the Good Lord God to manufacture Everything In Creation, the entire city was comprehensively rinsed. There was water, as the Poet had it (the Poet, admittedly, was wont to have it mixed with brandy), everywhere, and every drop of it was obeying Newton’s First Law of Apples.

    In the rents of Beehive Lane, near Boddy’s Bridge, unpotted chimneys guzzled in the rain and doused more than a score of ailing grates. The steep cobbled rise of Garlick Hill became a new tributary to the Thames, and the run-off that washed down it from the foundations of the spice importers’ hilltop barns had loose cloves floating in it and tasted like consomme. At Leadenhalle, the rapping of the rain upon the metal roof drove several market traders temporarily psychotic, and deprived many more of their usual cheery dispositions, and so the cheap was suspended until the inclement weather subsided (“if sodden London don’t subside first” remarked more than one tired and emotional stall-holder). Many worried that, if the fantastically grim weather persisted, the Great Masque that coming Saturday might itself have to be abandoned. And that didn’t bear thinking about.

    The Fleet, the Tyburn and the Westbourne all spilled beyond their courses, and enjoyed wild excursions through the streets of the ditch-quarters and the wharfs. More refuse was then moved by force of flood than is in a month by the municipal collectors, though, to be fair, the Noble Guild of Refuse and Shite Handlers had been on a go-slow since 1734, following a dispute over the scale of Yuletide gratuities.

    The city’s watergates were all choked to drowning point, each gagging like an over-eager sot on an upturned bottle of musket. Conduits thundered with the passing pressure, their stonework trembling, and voided themselves with huge tumult into the Thames, casting up mists of rainbow spray from their cataracts. Men from the Guild of Cisterns and Ducts visited each city conduit daily in turn and stood, dour and drenched by the spray, shaking their heads and tutting.

    The Cockpit on Birdcage Walk became so full that the stewards had to open all the public doors to vent the water before gladiation could begin that night. Small boys had been found sailing rival armadas of paper man-o-wars from the pit rails. Even after the stewards’ action, some said the only birds worth betting on that night were ducks. When it did eventually occur, the cockfight proved to be a notable and famous bout, featuring a title fight for the Bantam Weight Champion of All London. The contenders were Cocky Joe, a six-pound, experienced fighter trained by John Lyon of Poplar, and Bigge Ben, a twelve-pound newcomer presented by one Thomas Arnes of Peckham. The eventual victor, Bigge Ben, was later disqualified when it was discovered he was a cunningly disguised buzzard, and Cocky Joe reinstated, though by this time he was full of onion and three-quarters roasted.

    The rain fell on all. It made no distinctions for rank, and offered no exceptions for situation. It hammered on the unprotected heads of the impoverished and loose of bowel in the jakes of Shite-berne. It drizzled off the leaded glass of the Palace Mews. It fell with a continuance and persistence that was nothing short of impertinent.