Blameless - By Gail Carriger Page 0,43
Alexia.
The clockmaker stepped back, looking pleased with himself.
“Are you not coming with us?” Alexia felt a strange kind of panic.
Gustave Trouvé shook his head. “Glide as much as you can, Genevieve, and you should be able to make it to Nice.” He had to yell in order to be heard over the grumbling engine. He passed Madame Lefoux a pair of magnification goggles and a long scarf, which she used to wrap about her face, neck, and top hat.
Alexia, clutching parasol and dispatch case firmly to her ample chest, prepared for the worst.
“That far?” Madame Lefoux did not raise her head, busy checking on an array of dials and bobbing valves. “You have made modifications, Gustave.”
The clockmaker winked.
Madame Lefoux looked at him suspiciously and then gave a curt nod.
Monsieur Trouvé marched back around to the rear of the ornithopter and spun up a guidance propeller attached to the steam engine.
Madame Lefoux pressed some kind of button and, with a massive whoosh, the wings of the craft began flapping up and down with amazing strength. “You have made modifications!”
The ornithopter jerked into the air with a burst of power.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Monsieur Trouvé was grinning like a little boy. He had a good pair of lungs in that wide chest of his, so he continued to yell after them. “I replaced our original model with one of Eugène’s bourdon tubes, activated by gunpowder charges. I did say I had taken a keen interest recently.”
“What? Gunpowder!”
The clockmaker waved at them cheerfully as they flapped upward and forward, now a good few yards above the rooftop. Alexia could see much of Paris laid out below her wildly waving kid-boots.
Monsieur Trouvé bracketed his mouth with his hands. “I’ll send your things on to the Florence dirigible station.”
A great crash sounded, and two of the vampires burst out onto the roof.
Monsieur Trouvé’s grin vanished into the depths of his impressive beard, and he turned to face the supernatural threat.
One of the vampires leapt up after them, hands stretched to grab. He got close enough for Alexia to see that he had an impressive collection of jagged bite marks now about his head and neck. His hand just missed Alexia’s ankle. A huge white beast appeared behind him. Limping and bleeding, the creature charged the airborne vampire, hamstringing him and bringing him back to the rooftop with a crash.
The clockmaker yelled in fear.
Madame Lefoux did something to the controls, and the ornithopter flapped two mighty strokes and surged up. Then it shifted suddenly sideways in a gust of wind, tilting precariously. Alexia lost sight of the action on the rooftop behind one massive wing. It was presently to become irrelevant, for the ornithopter reached ever-greater heights, and Paris became lost under a layer of cloud.
“Magnifique!” yelled Madame Lefoux into the wind.
Sooner than Alexia would have believed possible, they attained the first of the aether atmospheres, the breezes there cool and slightly tingly against Alexia’s inexcusably indecent legs. The ornithopter caught one of the southeasterly currents and began to ride it with, blessedly, a long smooth glide and much less flapping.
Professor Lyall had plenty he ought to be doing that night: BUR investigations, pack business, and Madame Lefoux’s contrivance chamber to check up on. Naturally, he ended up doing none of those things. Because what he really wanted to find out was the current location of one Lord Akeldama—vampire, fashion icon, and very stylish thorn in everyone’s side.
The thing about Lord Akeldama was—and in Lyall’s experience, there was always a thing—that where he himself was not a fixture, his drones were. Despite supernatural speed and flawless taste in neckwear, Lord Akeldama could not, in fact, attend every social event of note every single evening. But he did seem to have a collection of drones and associates of drones who could and did. The thing that was bothering Lyall at the moment was that they weren’t. Not only was the vampire himself missing, but so were all of his drones, assorted sycophants, and poodle-fakers. Usually, any major social event in London could be relied upon to temporarily house some young dandy whose collar points were too high, mannerisms too elegant, and interest too keen to adequately complement his otherwise frivolous appearance. These ubiquitous young men, regardless of how silly they might act, how much gambling they might engage in, and how much fine champagne they might swill, reported back to their master with such an immense amount of information as to put any of Her Majesty’s espionage