Free Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero by Dan Abnett Page A

and all that other nonsense.”
     
     
        “I try my very best!” he shouted up after her. “Take me to your Leda!”
     
     
        Doll went into her lodgings, and closed the door behind her, shutting off Luigi’s heartfelt pleas. Every night they were the same, and every night they were just as earnest, but Doll was reasonably sure they had less to do with the painting of pictures and more to do with the removal of clothing.
     
     
        Her room was dark and cool, resounding with the pelt of rain outside. She breathed a deep sigh, threw aside her fan, and began to struggle with the savagely tight laces of her bodice, aching to be free of the drenched, festooning folds of the gown.
     
     
        Doll was a striking woman in her late twenties, blessed with the sort of slender yet double-D cupped figure that made men swallow hard and behave attentively. Her face had been variously described as “well proportioned”, “pleasing” and “finely featured”. What it came down to, in simple terms, was that she was heart-stoppingly lovely. And she was an actress, but don’t hold that against her just yet.
     
     
        Doll crashed down on her bedspread and wriggled off her sopping slippers, pantofles and netherstocks, which she hurled at the drapes.
     
     
        “Ow,” said the drapes as a slipper bounced off them.
     
     
        Cat-like, Doll got up on her bare feet and tip-toed towards the window, hefting up her right fist into a stiff cudgel, which she swung at the bulging curtains at nose-height.
     
     
        There was a loud crack of displaced cartilage, and a faint whiff of the great smell of A Scent of Man.
     
     
        “What was that for?” asked Rupert Triumff.
     
     
    Triumff attempted to staunch the blood issuing from his nose with the corner of a lace kerchief.
     
     
    “Nice punch really nice punch,” he moaned.
     
        “Oh, shut up,” said Doll, pouring two glasses of musket. “I’ve said I was sorry. It’s your own bloody fault for hiding in the first place.”
     
     
        Triumff shook his head. “No, no. The first place would have been the closet. I was hiding in the second place.”
     
     
        “Shut up,” she repeated, proffering him a glass of the famous Old Skinner’s.
     
     
        “I’ve had a bad day,” muttered Triumff, nasally.
     
     
        “Really?”
     
     
        “Gull wants to kill me, the Queen wants to see me, and two knife-boys tried to stitch me up a treat in the baths. Plus, if I don’t come up with something, sharpish, Uptil’s homeland is going to get chewed into little bits by the reaver-fleet. And there’s something going on at Court.”
     
     
        “Like what?”
     
     
        Triumff got to his feet, felt faint, and sat down again. “Rumours,” he said. “Everybody’s so tense. They say there’s something not right with the Cantrips.”
     
     
        “Define ‘not right’?” she asked.
     
     
        He shrugged, and said, “Last night, before I got a little overenthusiastic and challenged Gull to a duel-“
     
     
        “You did what?”
     
     
        “Forget that part,” Triumff said with a testy wave of his hand. “Anyway, before that, I was in The World Turn’d Upside Your Head with Johnny Hacklyutt and the boys, and he said he’d heard that something was not right with the Cantrips.”
     
     
        “Wow, talk about your authentic and unimpeachable source.”
     
     
        “I’m just repeating what he said,” Triumff shrugged.
     
     
        “Actually, I’ve heard things too,” said Doll. She sipped her drink. “All these rumours are going around. Everyone backstage was gossiping.”
     
     
    “Rumours?”
     
        “Rumours of bad omens. Portents. People on the ouija hearing sinister voices on crossed lines. There’s talk of stuff. There’s talk of Goety, and worse.”
     
     
        “This is exactly my point,”