“Ah.” Floote put the bullets back in his jacket pocket. “Let us say I inherited them, madam.”
“Mr. Tarabotti?” Madame Lefoux nodded. “That explains the age of the guns. You want to get yourself one of those newfangled Colt revolvers, Mr. Floote, much more efficient.”
Floote looked with a certain degree of fondness down at the two tiny guns before tucking them back out of sight. “Perhaps.”
Alexia was intrigued. “Father was an official sundowner, was he?”
“Not as such, my lady.” Floote was always cagey, but he seemed to reach new heights of tight-lippedness whenever the subject of Alessandro Tarabotti came up. Half the time Alexia felt he did it out of obstinacy; the other half of the time she felt he might be trying to shield her from something. Although with vampire drones on their tail, she could hardly imagine what she might still need protection from.
Madame Lefoux pushed back the sleeve of her jacket and checked her own little wrist-emitter device. “I have only three shots left. Alexia?”
Alexia shook her head. “I used up all my darts in the clock shop, remember? And I haven’t anything else left in the parasol but the lapis lunearis mist for werewolves and the magnetic disruption emitter.”
Madam Lefoux sucked her teeth in frustration. “I knew I should have given it a greater carrying capacity.”
“You cannot very well have done much more,” consoled Alexia. “The darn thing already weighs twice as much as any ordinary parasol.”
Floote stood and checked behind them.
“Will they catch us before we cross the border?” Alexia had no clear grasp on the distance from Nice to the Italian frontier.
“Most likely.” Madame Lefoux, however, did.
Floote sat back down, looking quite worried.
They clattered through a small fishing town and out the other side, improved paving on the road allowing them a fresh burst of speed.
“We will have to try to lose them in Monaco.” Madame Lefoux stood, leaned across the roof, and engaged in a protracted conversation with the driver. Rapid-fire French scattered on the wind.
Guessing the gist of it, Alexia unclipped the ruby and gold brooch from the neck of her traveling gown and pressed it into the inventor’s small hand. “See if that will encourage him.”
The brooch vanished across the roof of the hansom. The whip flashed. The horse surged forward. Bribery, apparently, worked no matter what the language.
They kept a good pace and steady distance from their pursuers right up and into the town of Monaco, a decent-sized vacation destination of some questionable repute.
The driver undertook the most impressive series of twists and turns, breaking off from the main road and dodging through some truly tiny alleys. They ran pell-mell into a line of laundry stretched across the street, taking a pair of trousers and a gentleman’s shirtfront with them, in addition to a string of French curses. They ended their obstacle run, clattering out of an upper section of the town away from the ocean, heading toward the Alpine Mountains. The horse tossed off the pair of scarlet bloomers he had been wearing about his ears with a snort of disgust.
“Will we be able to cross through the mountains at this time of year?” Alexia was dubious. It was winter, and while the Italian Alps hadn’t the reputation of their larger, more inland brethren, they were still respectably mountainous, with white-capped peaks.
“I think so. Regardless, it is better to stay off the main road.”
The road narrowed as they began to climb upward. The horse slowed to a walk, his sides heaving. It was a good thing, too, for soon enough the track became lined with trees and a steep embankment to one side and a treacherous drop to the other. They clattered through a herd of unimpressed brown goats, complete with large bells and irate goat girl, and seemed to have shaken off pursuit.
Out the left side window of the hansom, Alexia caught sight of a peculiar-looking contraption above the embankment and trees. She tugged Madame Lefoux’s arm. “What’s that, Genevieve?”
The inventor cocked her head. “Ah, good. The sky-rail system. I had hoped it was operational.”
“Well?”
“Oh, yes. It is a novelty freight and passenger transport. I had a small hand in designing the control mechanisms. We should be able to see it in full presently, just there.”
They rounded a bend in the road and began climbing ever more steeply. Before and above them stood the contraption in all its glory. To Alexia it looked like two massive laundry lines strung parallel across the tops of pylons. It became clear, however, that the lines were more like sky-high train tracks. Straddled atop them, crawling along in a rhythmic, lurching, buglike manner on large wheels threaded with moving treads, marched a series of cabins, similar in size and shape to stagecoaches. Each cabin emitted billowing gouts of white steam from underneath. Hanging from the cabin, down below the cables, each supported a swaying metal net on long cords, loaded with lumber. Like a spider with an egg sac or a trapeze train trolley.
“Goodness!” Alexia was impressed. “Are they unidirectional?”
“Well, most are going downhill with freight, but they are designed to go up as well. Unlike trains, those cable rails require no switchbacks. One car can simply climb over the other, so long as it is not carrying a net, of course. See the way the cabling goes over each side of the cabin roof?”
Alexia was enough impressed by the invention to be distracted from her current predicament. She’d never seen or heard of anything like it—a railway in the sky!
Floote kept popping up and looking back over the cab roof like a jack-in-the-box. Alexia became quite sensitive to the pattern of his movements and so noticed when his legs became suddenly tense and he spent longer than usual standing. Madame Lefoux did as well and bounced up to lean next to him, much to the driver’s annoyance. Scared of further upsetting the fly’s center of balance, Alexia stayed seated, her view filled with trouser-clad legs.
She heard a faint yelling behind them and could only imagine that there were drones following. On the next switchback, she caught sight of their enemy. Out the right side window of the cab, she could see a four-in-hand coach loaded down with intense-looking young men in hot pursuit. There was some kind of firearm equipage mounted atop the carriage roof.
She heard the pop of Floote firing off one of the tiny derringers and the sharp hiss of Madame Lefoux doing the same with one of her darts.
Floote popped back down to change guns and reload. “Madam, I regret to inform you, they have a Nordenfelt.”
“A what?”
Madame Lefoux sat down to reload while Floote stood back up and fired again.
“I have no doubt we shall witness it in action shortly.”
They reached the snow line.
A whole fleet of bullets of ridiculously large size hissed by the cab and embedded themselves in an unsuspecting tree. A gun that could fire multiple bullets at once, imagine that!
Floote hurriedly sat back down.
“The Nordenfelt, madam.”
The horse squealed in fear, the driver swore, and they came to an abrupt halt.
Madame Lefoux didn’t even try to argue their case. She jumped down from the fly, followed by Floote and Alexia. Floote grabbed Alexia’s dispatch case. Alexia grabbed her parasol. Without waiting to see if they would follow, Alexia charged up the embankment, stabilizing herself with the parasol, and began slogging through the snow toward the cable lines.
Another burst of bullets churned up the snow just behind them. Alexia let out a most undignified squeak of alarm. What would Conall do? This kind of gunfire action was not exactly her cup of tea. Her husband was the trained soldier, not she. Nevertheless, she recovered enough to yell, “Perhaps we should spread out and make for that support pole.”
“Agreed,” said Madame Lefoux.
