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

said Triumff. “I’ve half a mind to-“
     
     
        “You’ve half a mind, let’s leave it there,” said Doll. “And for God’s sake, leave the jinxy conjuration stuff and nonsense to the cardinals and the Union.”
     
     
        “Oh, like they’re the experts,” said Triumff. “Come on, Doll. Everyone knows the Arte only lets the Church play with it. I just wish the country could forget about Magick and try and do things for itself. Machines, now-“
     
     
        “You’ve been thinking about Beach again, haven’t you?” asked Doll, cutting him off.
     
     
        “What if I have? Uptil’s people have got it all worked out. I have this horrible feeling I’m going to let them down badly,” said Triumff.
     
     
        Doll leaned across and kissed his mouth. It was one of the better things that had happened to him that day.
     
     
        Doll smiled, and then blotted out her smile with a frown.
     
     
        “What was that?” she asked.
     
     
        An animal squalled somewhere under the window.
     
     
        “Cats,” said Triumff. “Cats fighting. That’s all.”
     
     
        It wasn’t. In the coal-blackness of the alley next to number five, Paternoster Lane, stood a bruiser of a ginger tom called Rusty, who owned Mistress Mary (this is perfectly correct usage. Humans, in their arrogance and lack of insight, believe they own cats, like they do dogs. The reverse is so utterly true that they entirely fail to see it). Rusty, who was ordinarily pretty confident that he was chief kahuna thereabouts in the spranting, siring, hackle-raising and territorialising departments, howled again and fled like a furry cannonball.
     
     
        Under normal circumstances of alarm and agitation, Rusty would inflate himself to three times his normal size, and pull the sort of face usually only found on outraged racoons that have been mistaken for novelty pencil sharpeners. Right now, he was so scared, he clean forgot, and exited, thin and lank and jittery, into the lane.
     
     
        The cause of his concern stood in the alley, pulled its cloak around its shoulders, and stamped its booted feet to keep warm. A gutter-drip spattered across its ear. It took off its glove, licked the back of its paw, and washed the droplets from its furry, whiskered cheek.
     
     
        Meanwhile, in a garret in the attic spaces of a house on Fleet Street, a garret which was all he could afford unless his fortunes changed, as it is nigh on impossible to rent a decent place on the sort of page-rate the tabloids offer, not that there was much of that around, even, and lord knows he looked, sniffing out a story here and there, always coming home to this stinking garret that perpetually smelled of fried garlic and rancid poultry thanks to the tandoori three doors down, and there was no bath to speak of, and a cooked meal would be a luxury, and even the cockroaches had taken to looking in the property section of the Standard each Thursday
     
     
        In a garret on Fleet Street, your humble servant, the author, Master Wllm Beaver, sat, scribbling away by the light of the single overhead lamp. It was a piece on “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Hose”, as I recall. It was destined never to be finished. My HB pencil had just broken, and a rummaging search was underway in the drawers of the desk for a clasp knife with which to re-point it before item four (“You can wear it upon thine head if you seek to obtain money with menaces from a Banking House, Real Estate Society or Postal Depot”) slipped from my mind.
     
     
        Whereupon, everything went black.
     
     
        I, Wllm Beaver, discounted a sudden, crippling stroke, mainly because I believe it pays to be optimistic. I straightened up slowly in my chair, my eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom. The only light was the faintest outside sheen of the far-away lightning. The City, from the window, was black as pitch. There was