Then, finally, inside the last building in the row, Alexia caught sight of a spark of light. Inside, Madame Lefoux, or the person she assumed must be Madame Lefoux, wore a glass and metal bucket over her head, like the offspring of a medieval knight’s helmet and a fishbowl. She was also wearing the most hideous pair of coveralls and was busy with a flaming torch, welding great slabs of metal together. Her giant mechanical construct had taken its final form, and Alexia could not help but emit a little gasp of amazement at the sight of the monstrous thing.
It was colossal, at least two stories high. The brimless bowler-hat portion now rested atop eight articulated metal tentacles that hung down like pillars, but if Lady Maccon knew Madame Lefoux, each would be able to move independently of the others. A remarkable creature, indeed. It looked like nothing so much as a massive upright octopus on tiptoe. Alexia wondered what it said about her current state that this comparison made her hungry. Ah, pregnancy.
She banged on the window to attract Madame Lefoux’s attention, but the French woman clearly could not hear, for she did not pause in her activities.
Lady Maccon circumnavigated the building, looking for an entrance. It had massive loading doors street-side, but these were bolted firmly shut. There must be a smaller, more convenient, one-person door somewhere about the place.
Finally, she found it. It, too, was locked. She whacked at it with her parasol in frustration, but brute force was also ineffectual. Not for the first time, Alexia wished she knew how to pick a lock. Conall had frowned most severely upon that particular request and on her proposed venture into Newgate Prison in order to hire the necessary criminally minded individual as instructor.
She went back round to the front and considered breaking one of the lower windows; while it was too small to climb through, even if she were not eight months pregnant, she could at least yell. A massive noise interrupted her right before she was about to swing the parasol.
The building began shaking slightly, the metal roof creaking most terribly, and the two great loading bay doors clattered against their hinges. Gouts of steam billowed from beneath the doors and around the edges. Metal screeched and the trundling thrumming sound of a steam engine in full operation emanated from within. Alexia backed away from the door. The sounds began to get louder and louder and the doors shook with more vigor. More steam puffed forth.
It was getting closer.
Lady Maccon waddled as fast as she could away from the doors, and just in the nick of time, too, for they burst open, crashing against the sides of the building in a great splintering of wood, left to hang askew on their hinges.
A gigantic tiptoeing octopus came through, looking almost as though it floated atop the cloud of steam that gushed forth from under its mantle to swirl about its tentacles. The doors were not quite tall enough to permit an easy exit, but this didn’t seem to trouble the creature. It simply took a chunk of the roof off with its head. Tiles fell and splintered, dust wafted up, and steam wafted down as the world’s biggest automated cephalopod tentacled its way into the London street.
“The octomaton, I presume. I see Genevieve didn’t quite get the size measurements right,” said Alexia to no one in particular.
The octomaton didn’t notice Lady Maccon, a rotund little being far below in the shadows, but it spotted her carriage. It raised up one tentacle and took careful aim. A burst of fire came pouring out the tip. The beautifully matched horses (chosen for appearance and docility around werewolves rather than for bravery) panicked, as did the stunned coachman (chosen for precisely the same reasons). All three took off at high speed. The carriage careened wildly around a street corner, ribbons trailing merrily behind it, and disappeared into the night.
“Wait!” cried Lady Maccon. “Come back!” But the conveyance was long gone. “Oh, bother. Now what?”
The octomaton, untroubled by Alexia’s cry or predicament, began to make its way up the street away from her, following the carriage. Lady Maccon raised her parasol and pulled at the special lotus leaf in the handle, activating the magnetic disruption emitter. Even aimed directly at the massive creature, it had absolutely no effect. Either Madame Lefoux also had access to the vampire’s porcupine technology, or she had installed some kind of defensive shield to protect her creation from Alexia’s armament. Alexia was not surprised; after all, the Frenchwoman was not so thickheaded as to build one weapon that could so easily be defeated by another of her own design. Especially if she knew Alexia was on the case and might very well find her out.
Alexia switched to Ethel, raising and firing the gun. The bullet bounced harmlessly off the octomaton’s metal exterior. It left behind a dent, but once again, the massive creature did not register her tiny efforts against it.
It proceeded down the street in a not-very-dignified manner. Madame Lefoux had not gotten the en pointe tentacle balance quite right. Windows rattled as it passed, and periodically it staggered slightly to one side, crashing into and partly destroying the sides of buildings. At last, rounding the corner away from the Pantechnicon, it lurched into one of the streetlamps, an old-fashioned brassier-style torch, tipping it onto the thatched roof of a storage shed. Almost immediately the shed caught fire, and the flames began to spread. Metal roof notwithstanding, it presently became apparent that even the Pantechnicon could not resist the blaze.
Alexia was at a loss. None of her parasol’s special abilities were designed to deal with fire. In her current state, she reckoned her best option was to beat an undignified retreat to safety. After all, she was practical enough to know when there was little even she could do to rectify such a situation. She turned south, toward the river.
As she limped along, Alexia’s mind whirled with confusion. Why would Madame Lefoux build such a creature? She was, by and large, a woman of subtlety in both life and art. Why was she heading north and not due east to Buckingham? Queen Victoria never left the safety of her palace on full moon—it was simply too wild a night for her staid sensibilities. If Madame Lefoux had designs on the queen, she was going in the wrong direction. Alexia frowned. I am clearly missing something. Either something Genevieve said, or did not say, or something Formerly Lefoux said or did not say. Or?.?.?.
Lady Alexia Maccon stopped in her very solid tracks and hit her forehead with the butt of her hand. Fortunately, it was the hand that held Ethel, not the hand that held her parasol, or she might have done herself damage.
“Of course! How could I be so silly? I have the wrong queen.”
Then she started walking again, her mind now calculating in a steel-traplike fashion—that is, if the trap were of the spring-loaded, not-very-sensitive variety. Lady Maccon was not one to do too many things at once, especially not right now, but she was tolerably convinced she could handle bipedal motion and thought at the same time.
The original ghostly messenger had never specified Queen Victoria, and neither had Formerly Lefoux. Genevieve Lefoux and her octomaton weren’t after the monarch of the empire; oh, no, they were after a hive queen. That made far more sense. Genevieve had never liked the vampires, not since they corrupted Angelique (although she was always content enough to take their money). Given their rocky history, again over that troublesome violet-eyed French maid, Alexia would wager good money Genevieve was after Countess Nadasdy. This made sense given the northward direction of her tentacleing, toward Mayfair. Somehow, Madame Lefoux had deduced the whereabouts of the Westminster Hive.
Another mystery. The location of a hive was a guarded secret. Lady Maccon herself knew of it, of course, but that was only because?.?.?.
“Oh, Alexia, you idiot!” The burglary at Woolsey! Madame Lefoux must have been the thief, stealing those old missives because among them was Alexia’s original invitation from Countess Nadasdy to visit the hive. It had been delivered to her by Mabel Dair in Hyde Park the afternoon after Alexia killed her first vampire. It contained the address of the hive house, and Alexia had foolishly never thought to destroy it. When did I tell Genevieve that story?
Lady Maccon cast desperately about the empty street. She had to reach the Westminster Hive, and fast. Never before had she resented the infant-inconvenience more than at this moment, not to mention her dependence on horse-drawn transport. She even had an invitation that would get her in the door, but no way to get there in time to warn them of imminent tentacled doom. She was stranded in the wilds of Belgravia!
She waddled faster.
The fire was spreading and whooshing behind her. The once-dim alley was alight with a flickering orange and yellow glow. The din of collapsing buildings and roaring flames was added to by the loud clanging bell of an approaching fire engine. One of the dirigibles must have spotted the blaze and drop-messaged the appropriate authorities. If anything, this made Alexia move faster. The last thing she needed was to be detained trying to explain her presence at the Pantechnicon. It also reminded her to look up to see if she could spot a dirigible.
Sure enough, there were several headed sedately in her direction, having caught sight of the fire and redirected their lazy circling toward an intriguing new attraction. They were safely above the conflagration, not yet in the aether but high enough to avoid any risk associated with even the most massive of ground fires.
Lady Maccon waved her parasol commandingly and yelled, but she was a mere speck far below, unless someone had a pair of Shersky and Droop’s latest long-distance binoculars. Since her marriage, Alexia had adopted a more respectable and somber color palette than that of the pastel-inclined unattached young lady. This made her even less visible in the flickering shadows of Motcomb Street.
It was then that Alexia noticed that the Giffard symbol (a shaping of the name that turned the G into a massive red and black balloon) on a nearby warehouse was modified with a kind of starburst pattern at its end and a phrase underneath that read PYROTECHNIC DIVISION LTD. She stopped, turned on her heel, and headed for a nearby lamppost. With barely a pause for consideration, she hauled off, took careful aim, and threw her parasol hard at the torch section. The parasol, spearlike, crashed into the lamp and brought both it and the hot coals inside down to the ground with a clang.
Lady Maccon huffed her way over to the coals, retrieved her now-slightly-scorched and sooty accessory by its tip, and, holding it like a mallet, used the chubby handle to hit one particularly nice-looking coal along the street toward the Giffard pyrotechnic warehouse. It was a excellent thing, reflected Alexia at that juncture, that she was good at croquet. At a nice distance, she took careful aim and, with a kind of scooping action, struck the wedge of coal hard. It arced splendidly upward, crashing through the window of the warehouse in a most satisfactory manner.
Then she waited, long, slow counts, hoping the coal had managed to hit upon something reliably explosive.
It had. A popping, cracking noise came first, then some whizzing and whirling sounds, and finally a series of loud gunshots. The doors and windows of the warehouse exploded outward, pushing Alexia backward. Instinctively, she popped open her parasol to shield herself as the world around her turned into a smoking cornucopia of brightly flashing lights and loud noises. The entire stockpile of what she imagined must be a very expensive collection of gunpowder display sparkles and sky-lighters exploded, shimmering and flashing in an ever-increasing series of flares.