She ducked under the piano and checked on the Spice Administrator. He was awake and his pupils looked fine. He lay perfectly still as she loomed over him.
She grinned, unaware of the maniacal expression in her green eyes. “Love of music—it can drive a girl to distraction. Or do I mean destruction?”
She patted his cheek in what she hoped was a reassuring way and left him. Poor thing hadn’t even squirmed or groaned around the gag. She was certain he thought her quite mad. And should he somehow get free—and he would have to be a circus contortionist with supernatural strength to do so—he would have such a strange story to tell, it would make the other Picklemen think him drunk at best. “A girl wearing a wicker chicken and playing the harp bopped me with a book about buns and then stuffed me under a piano.” It sounded like a funny dream.
Sophronia chuckled to herself but quickly sobered. Professor Braithwope and Mademoiselle Geraldine needed rescuing, and she still had sooties to save. She headed back up the stairs for her next victim. Deep Voice, she felt, was going to be much harder to disable.
This time Sophronia did not wear the chicken. She took it off and left it in the hallway outside the administrative room with the crossbow and Bumbersnoot and orders to guard. She armed herself with the water-projecting device filled with acid from Professor Lefoux’s laboratory. Then she took out her small hoard of nibbles from the kitchen and knocked on the door.
“Come!” called Deep Voice.
Sophronia entered, eyes down, looking at the Pickleman through her lashes, pleased to find he had not been joined by any others.
“Who the devil are you?” He was a rough-looking fellow, his jaw dark with a nascent beard.
Sophronia had never seen such a thing as a seedling beard before, no gardener having tended it to greatness nor pruned it into submission. It was positively oafish in its incivility. She actually felt unwell at the sight.
“Only the maid, sir. I’ve brought you food.” She proffered her own cheese, bread, and apple.
The man looked suspicious but also off balance—unable to decide whether to leave off what he was doing and approach or allow her to enter farther into the room.
Sophronia took his hesitation as an opportunity to assess the situation.
Mademoiselle Geraldine was sitting in a big chair in the far left corner, near the forward window, several large storage baskets pushed aside to make room. Before her was a low table set for tea. There was an empty seat across from her, shoved out of the way as if in haste. The headmistress looked so relaxed, Sophronia had the horrified thought that she was working with the Picklemen.
I have two enemies to disable, and only one ally to rescue, when I was prepared for the other way around! Sophronia cursed herself. It was a debut’s mistake.
Deep Voice was in the other corner of the room next to a cage shaped like a bird’s, only bigger. It hung from a hook in the ceiling and looked to be steel, woven through with a glass tubing filled with gas. This heated the metal red hot at multiple contact points.
Professor Braithwope was locked inside this cage, naked.
Sophronia quickly slid her eyes away, but not before she noticed welts on the vampire’s arms, burns on his hands, and open cuts across his face. His mustache looked to have fainted. He was silent, half curled, half crouched—trying to make himself as small as possible so as not to touch the burning bars. Vampires, of course, could survive most things, but they still felt pain. The cuts, no doubt, were made with sharpened wooden blades and would be slower to heal as a result.
Deep Voice, orchestrator of this torture, left off prodding the professor and walked over to Mademoiselle Geraldine and the tea table.
When Sophronia moved to take the food to that table, he snapped, “Halt! You stay there.”
Sophronia froze.
With a studied casualness, the Pickleman poured tea. Which made Sophronia realize that everything wasn’t right with the headmistress. Mademoiselle Geraldine would never let a visitor pour, even if that man was her superior. It was always the hostess’s responsibility to serve tea, evacuations and hijackings notwithstanding.
Sophronia lifted her lashes slightly to take in details she had missed earlier.
Mademoiselle Geraldine was strapped into her chair at the elbows and legs. She could raise up her hands to feed herself from a plate in her lap but was otherwise immobilized. The headmistress was behaving in a civilized manner, but she was not assisting the invaders. She was a hostage.
The headmistress looked at Sophronia with an expression of sublime indifference, showing absolutely no indication that they had ever met before.
Bravo, thought Sophronia.
All this time the students thought Mademoiselle Geraldine ignorant of the fact that her own school was an espionage academy. They had always acted to keep her immersed in that ignorance. In fact, it was a vital part of their training. Sophronia had wondered… but now she outright knew that Mademoiselle Geraldine had been in on it all along. She was too calm to be an ordinary headmistress tied to a chair. By rights, she ought to be in hysterics.
The Pickleman finished pouring the tea and handed a cup to Mademoiselle Geraldine, taking away her empty plate. Then he served himself and sat down, turning to face Sophronia. “I do not recall any maids being brought aboard, except mechanical ones. Who are you really, girl?”
“A forgotten student.” Sophronia dropped the act and pocketed the food. She was grateful that she didn’t have to use it. It was all she had to eat. At the same time, she palmed the acid emitter and let her other hand rest on her bladed fan, ready with either. She minimized any appearance of threat by hunching and keeping her eyes down timidly.
“Come in then, and have some tea. Pull up a stool. You realize, of course, that I must take you prisoner.” The Pickleman was confident in his own superiority.
Sophronia could hardly believe it. Surely he knew what this school did? Surely he didn’t see her as weak? But, then again, this was part of her education, to play on the perceptions, particularly of men. Girls were not dangerous.
She grabbed a pouf from a pile of rejected furniture and pulled up between him and Mademoiselle Geraldine at the table.
“You’re a pretty little thing, aren’t you?” He extracted an extra cup and saucer from a nearby tea trolley.
Sophronia considered herself only passing fair, but if he liked his ladies lean and muddy of hair and eyes, she wasn’t going to gainsay him. “Very kind of you to say so, sir.”
The man picked up the teapot, and Sophronia, with an apology to the tea gods for the waste, sprang at the man, animal-like. She had the acid spray pointed at him in one hand, and her trusty fan was open, leather guard flicked off, in the other.
The acid hit him first. It took the Pickleman a split second to react to her attack. That was often the problem with big thuggish men—they were slow.
Then he yelled, both hands flying to scrape at his face, dropping the teapot in his distress. This spilled hot liquid in his lap, which caused him to scream again. He fell backward in the chair, getting tangled up in its arms and legs. By which time Sophronia was on top of him. This was not a womanly maneuver, and he was certainly strong enough to toss her off, except that she had her fan pressed to his jugular. She made certain to prick his skin so there was no doubt as to the danger.
He was crying openly and wiping his eyes, but he stopped the moment he felt the sharp metal against his throat.