There was something terrifying about a mechanical construct that did not need a track. Sophronia had not realized that until she saw them all assembled before her. With the most prevalent mechanimal in her life being Bumbersnoot, she hadn’t thought the law making them illegal at all sensible. Now she understood. In that hold squatted a small but mighty army.
Shaken, Sophronia closed the door and continued with her assessment of the school.
She moved toward engineering, which, combined with the boiler room, took up the two lower levels of the front of the airship. She couldn’t easily sneak in there, because the main entrance was at the top, and no doubt the Picklemen would station themselves there to oversee operations. With a resigned sigh, she made her way out onto a balcony and began climbing down and around the outside of the airship toward her standard entrance—the sooties’ hatch.
There were no sooties waiting to help her inside this time. The massive room was suffused with the flickering orange of flames and a general smoky cloudiness Sophronia had grown to expect and find rather comforting. She made for her favorite coal pile, the one upon which she and Soap had spent many happy hours practicing reading and occasionally practicing smooching. Ordinarily, this part of the boiler room was humming, off-duty sooties mingled with those sent to tap the coal reserves. With only a kidnapped skeleton crew, there were no breaks, and the area was abandoned. Occasionally, Sophronia could pick out a strange new sound—a loud crack.
She peeked out from behind the coal pile to where the sooties were working the fireboxes. Or, to be more precise, where the sooties were slaving. They were running their normal patterns—feeding, stoking, checking the smooth motions of the main boilers—but they were doing so under ready punishment. The speaking-tube Pickleman was not on the supervisor’s platform, but down among the workers. He stood armed with a bullwhip in one hand and his gun in the other. If any sootie slackened his pace or did anything the Pickleman considered amiss, the whip flashed out, striking the unfortunate boy across the back.
The sooties were grim-faced and sweating, working as hard as they could. When the whip flashed, the poor unfortunate would wince and grit his teeth but not cry out. They were tough boys who’d started on docks or up chimneys. Sootie to a floating school was a cushy job by comparison, but that didn’t mean the lads had never before felt the kiss of a whip. They simply hadn’t expected to do so again.
Sophronia, on the other hand, had never witnessed such a thing. Her parents weren’t ones for harsh punishment, and she’d never visited the plantations of the West Indies, where, rumor had it, caning was commonplace. Every time the bullwhip struck, she winced and swallowed down a cry of sympathetic distress.
She watched as one small sootie got a second lick, right near the first. His shirt went ragged under the blows. He stumbled forward, and Handle jumped to his aid. She caught Handle’s expression. It wasn’t one of meek servitude. He was absolutely livid.
Whatever else her plans entailed, she had to determine a way to get them out.
Sophronia assessed the security. Apart from the Pickleman with the whip, she counted two others overseeing the carnage from above. Without a projectile weapon, she couldn’t do anything right away—plus, she had to obey her training and assess the shipwide situation first. But she made the sooties a silent promise to return and free them as soon as possible.
She wondered if she could find a gun in one of the teachers’ rooms. The school had an armory, of course, and Sophronia even knew where it was, but she couldn’t get into it. There was no entrance without activating a special drawbridge, and only Professor Lefoux and Lady Linette knew how to do that.
She withdrew, unhappy, from the boiler room. She stuffed a few pieces of coal down her cleavage for Bumbersnoot. The stupid ball gown had no pockets, and she was running out of means to attach stuff to herself. The little mechanimal was fine at the moment, but she wanted to make certain he stayed running. Back out the hatch, she skirted up past the second level so she could continue her sweep of the ship, starting with the teachers’ rooms in the red-tassel section.
It was easier to get inside the teachers’ private chambers via their balconies, so she stuck to the outside of the ship. At the very front, in the best suite, Mademoiselle Geraldine’s display of fake tea cakes stood solitary vigil. The headmistress was not there. Sophronia didn’t bother breaking in, as Mademoiselle Geraldine would have nothing of use.
Sister Mattie’s balcony was crowded with vegetation, and her door was unlocked. The most easygoing of their teachers, Sister Mattie always felt that if she had done her job properly the students should have access to any poison they wished, not to mention good nutrition. She was also quite absentminded. Professor Lefoux’s balcony was full of gadgetry, with her door triple-locked and booby-trapped. Fortunately, both locks and trap were ones Sophronia had dealt with before. She picked and disabled them. She filched a few smaller deadlier items from each teacher, poison from the one, hooks and a timepiece from the other, ribbons from both. She upended both bedrooms searching for a gun or a crossbow. No luck.
Professor Braithwope’s rooms were empty of both the vampire and useful items. She searched thoroughly, but the tiny special crossbow was nowhere to be found. Probably everything else had been removed after his tether snap, to keep him from injuring himself.
Lady Linette’s rooms were bolted with a Devugge system so sophisticated it presented a real challenge. Sophronia spent a futile few minutes trying to pick the lock, only to have the mechanism slide out of her way every time she felt she was getting somewhere. Excellent design, she thought. She might have kept at it longer, except she realized her normal training—to get in and out without being seen—was irrelevant under these particular circumstances. She used her hearing trumpet to determine that there was no one inside, and then used Bumbersnoot’s bottom to shatter the stained glass of the balcony door. She then upended the chamber. No guns at all? What kind of spymasters are these? The best kind, she supposed, to leave no evidence of their true nature in their private quarters.
In one corner of Lady Linette’s room, in pride of place and quite incongruously surrounded by boudoir-style velvets, sat a large wicker chicken. It was heavy, and something inside was mechanized. It smelled faintly of brimstone and chalk. Sophronia remembered a conversation her debut year about Monique being gifted with an exploding wicker chicken from a Bunson’s admirer. It would appear that Lady Linette had confiscated it—young ladies weren’t allowed gifts of such magnitude. The chicken was bulky, but it was also a kind of projectile, and Sophronia was getting desperate. So, shifting Bumbersnoot around to a better angle, she used several lengths of curtain cord to strap the deadly bird to her back.
Of course, she was now nowhere near as sneaky looking. Nor, for that matter, as dignified. Here I am, infiltrating a stolen dirigible, wearing a wicker chicken. But she moved on, climbing to the scaffolding that supported the pilot’s bubble. She knew from personal experience that it could only fit two men. So she simply took it as fact that there were two Picklemen inside and added them to her mental tally.
She moved back through the ship. The classrooms were all empty. She did find a water-projecting device filled with acid in Professor Lefoux’s laboratory, which she liberated. She also put on the leather pinafore Professor Lefoux used when she was mixing chemicals. It was durable and protective, and, most important, it had pockets and a high neckline.