Sophie clasped her mother’s bell around her neck. The appearance of a little girl and a caged cat-man-horse in their midst had excited the creatures to distraction. They snarled and barked and slavered, rattling the bars of their cages. Sophie leapt back as a hinter-boar rammed its tusks against its cage, trying to bite her.
“I guess we know why he calls it the menagerie,” Sir Tode said.
Sophie peered down the hall, which was dark but for the light of a crackling hearth at the far end. A rather rotund man was seated before the fire in a large chair. “Baron Magpie?” she called.
The man, who was facing away from them, did not answer.
Sophie adjusted her grip on Sir Tode’s cage and approached. “Baron, we thank you for graciously allowing us to enter your fine menagerie. I have come with a business proposition that I think might intrigue you.” She reached the baron, who had still made no move to greet or even acknowledge them. “I trust we have not offended you by calling . . . ?”
Still the man made no response.
Sophie felt a prickle of dread in her breast. She swallowed. “Baron Magpie?” She stepped around in front of the chair, and her voice failed her. Sir Tode’s cage slipped from her hand and crashed to the floor.
Baron Magpie sat before the hearth, his eyes wide with fear. His face was deathly pale but for a sickening purple around his nose and mouth. A dribble of white foam ran from his dark lips.
“He’s dead!” Sir Tode exclaimed from his cage, which had toppled to one side.
Sophie righted the cage and studied the man. “I . . . I think he’s still breathing.” She stepped closer, observing the baron’s rattling breath. Tears welled in his unblinking eyes. “He can hear us!” She could sense his whole body quivering just beneath the skin, as if his every muscle was tensed. “He’s been paralyzed by some kind of poison.”
“Paralyzed?” Sir Tode said. “By whom?”
Sophie reached out and touched the man’s cheek, which was cold in spite of the fire. Four thin red cuts ran all the way from his temple to his jugular—trickling blood. Sophie pulled her hand back. “Someone with very sharp fingernails.”
Animals snarled and screamed all along the hall, beating against their cages, desperate to get free. Sophie took a step back. “We have to get out of here.” She picked up Sir Tode’s cage.
She heard a grinding sound in the floor and turned around just as the tall doors leading to the foyer clicked shut.
“We’re trapped,” she said.
Sophie felt Sir Tode shift his weight. “I’m curious,” he said. “If the baron’s right here, then who just closed the doors?”
“An excellent question,” said a voice in the darkness.
There was a cascading rush of light as torches all along the hall came alive, illuminating the space. Sophie blinked and peered up to a long balcony. “Eldritch!” she cried.
Indeed, it was Madame Eldritch, looking as pleased as a poacher. Clasped in her slender, red-tipped hand was a green book that looked sickeningly familiar.
“Hello, little bookmender,” she said warmly. “I was hoping you might stop by.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
TRAPPED in the MENAGERIE
Sophie stared up at Madame Eldritch. The woman’s face showed no hint of surprise or consternation. Taro stood beside her, looking placid as always. “I suspected you might not be so easily deterred in your search for the books,” the woman called down. “As you can see, neither am I.”
Sir Tode growled within his cage. “We have no quarrel with you, sorceress.”
“Sorceress?” Madame Eldritch gave a delighted laugh. “You do me honor. I am a simple shopkeeper, nothing more.”
Sophie fixed her eyes on the book in the woman’s hand. “You murdered him for the book,” she said.
“It was only a scratch.” Madame Eldritch walked the length of the balcony, her red-tipped fingers running along the rail. Taro remained close behind her, his eyes trained on Sophie. “The baron was becoming a bit”—she eyed Taro—“presumptuous.”
“Whatever could have given him the idea?” Sir Tode muttered.
The woman waved a hand dismissively. “He will live.” She nodded toward The Book of Who at Sophie’s side. “I see you have brought me my book.”
“It’s not your book.” Sophie narrowed her eyes at the green volume in the woman’s hand. “Neither is that one. I’ll thank you to give it to me.” She swallowed. “Please.”
The woman raised an amused eyebrow. “You came here to steal a book from the baron. My only crime was in stealing it first.” She lifted The Book of What and opened its pages. “I will admit, little bookmender, that I did not fully understand what you had brought me when you came to my shop. But now that I see what these books truly are”—she snapped the volume shut—“you will appreciate that I cannot part with it quite so easily as before.”
Sir Tode stood in his cage, growling. “Madame, I demand that you release that book to us this instant, or we shall be required to take it from you by force. We have bested you and your manservant once already.”
The woman’s face darkened. “You will find it a bad mistake to threaten a woman such as myself. That is a lesson most only have to learn once.” She walked her fingers to a polished golden lever that protruded from the balcony rail. Sophie saw more levers running along the length of the rail and deduced that these must have been what Madame Eldritch had used to operate the castle doors. “A frivolous man, the baron,” she said. “He possessed so many great wonders but knew so little of how best to employ them. Take this clockwork, for example. An intricate web of mechanical cunning. But, like any web, it is only as dangerous as the spider who controls it.” She wrapped her hand around the lever and pulled it.
Sophie heard a ratcheting sound from one of the cages beside her. Three of the polished golden bars were being lifted by a chain—releasing the creature inside. The beast, which looked like a small fur-covered octopus, spilled out onto the floor of the room. It righted itself, giving a horrible, birdlike squawk that echoed through the great hall.
“W-w-what is that thing?” Sophie said.
“I thought one so well-read as yourself would be familiar with the bush-squid,” Madame Eldritch answered. “In my youth, the Wassail was teeming with them.” Sophie had not heard of any such beast, and she wondered how long ago Madame Eldritch had been born to know such creatures. “We called them the Nine-Armed Death. They have a habit of snatching unsuspecting travelers from boats. After they blind you with their ink, they use their beaks to rip the spine from your body—quite painful, I’m told. This is a pup—newly born, at that,” she said, sounding a tad disappointed. “I wonder if its mother is about.”
Pup or not, the creature was terrifying. Sophie leapt backward to keep herself free of the squid’s grasping tentacles. She held Sir Tode’s cage tightly in her arms.
The bush-squid squawked at Sophie and started moving toward her. Black ink oozed from its furry appendages and spread across the slick marble floor. The beast was clearly unaccustomed to moving on polished stone and had to resort to a series of rolling lunges to reach its prey.
Sophie turned and ran as fast as she could toward the main doors. When she reached them, she pulled the handles, but they refused to move. “Peter!” she cried, pounding at the doors. “Help!”
“It seems your highwayman is nowhere to be found.” Up on the balcony, Madame Eldritch walked to another lever. “As you can see, I have no shortage of animals that would be more than happy to make a meal of you and your friend. However, I would prefer not to let such a skilled bookmender die at the hands of senseless beasts. The exchange is simple: Give me the book, and I will release you.”
“Never!” Sir Tode shouted from his cage.
“We need to find some other way out of here,” Sophie said, scrambling free of the approaching squid. “Or at least get off this floor. The baron wouldn’t make an enormous hall like this with only one door. There must be some other pas
sage . . .”
“What about those?” Sir Tode pointed a hoof toward a row of gleaming golden levers directly beneath the balcony.
“It’s worth a try,” Sophie said. She had no idea what the levers might control, but it was their best chance. She clutched Sir Tode’s cage and ran toward them.
Animals growled and snarled as she passed. Claws and talons and tusks rammed against the bars, trying to grab hold of her tender limbs. Sophie reached the row of levers and pulled the one nearest to her. She heard a ratcheting sound beneath her as a tile from the floor slid away to reveal a trapdoor. A rank odor of rotting flesh wafted up from the dark hole.
“I’m not sure I want to go down there,” Sir Tode said.
“Me, neither.” Sophie tried another lever farther down the line. This one controlled a small dumbwaiter beside the hearth where the baron still sat, paralyzed. The dumbwaiter slid open to reveal light from a room on the other side—a way out!
Madame Eldritch apparently saw the dumbwaiter as well, because her next action was to hastily pull her own lever. “I warned you, bookmender!” she called.
There was a ratcheting sound, and another cage opened before her. Inside the cage was an enormous creature that looked like a tusked ape. It had matted red fur and three-inch claws. The beast leapt from the cage, landing squarely on top of the approaching bush-squid. With a snarling roar, it ripped the bush-squid clean in half, then flung its twitching remains to the floor. The ape creature turned toward Sophie, a hungry look in its beady eyes.
“That one, I recognize,” Sir Tode said, his voice quavering. “RUN!”
Sophie grabbed Sir Tode and sprinted toward the dumbwaiter. She heard a bloodthirsty howl as the ape charged after them on all fours, its fists cracking the marble as it thundered across the room.
She pushed Sir Tode through the opening, then clambered after him. The entire wall shuddered as the ape creature tried to tear its way through.
Sophie touched down on the other side to find a long, twisting hallway. She raced down the hall and up a narrow staircase, which led to two heavy wooden doors. The doors looked as if they might be able to lock from the other side. She heard an earth-shaking roar, which she assumed was the ape breaching the menagerie wall. She pulled one of the doors open and closed it behind her, latching it with a heavy metal bolt that she hoped would at least slow the ape.
Sophie dropped Sir Tode’s cage. She was gasping for breath, her knees were weak, and she was having trouble focusing her eyes. Her hope of getting The Book of What had completely given way to the hope of mere survival. She knelt and tried to loosen the latch on Sir Tode’s cage door, but her hands were shaking too much to be of any use. “The lock is jammed,” she said. “It must have bent when I dropped the cage.”
“Don’t waste your time,” Sir Tode said. “That ape’s coming after us—not to mention Eldritch. We have to find a way out of here.”
Sophie gave up on the cage door and forced herself to take a slow breath. She could still hear animals screaming and shrieking in the menagerie. She thought of Peter. He would certainly have heard the ruckus inside the great hall, but she had no way of letting him know where she had run to. She looked around the room. Rows and rows of books lined the walls, all of them in carved wooden cases that went right to the ceiling. “It’s a library,” she said.
There was a roar in the hallway and then a thunderous crash as the heavy wooden doors heaved and burst apart in an explosion of splinters. “So much for knocking,” Sir Tode said. The ape stomped into the room, its nostrils flared. It grinned at Sophie, drool running down its matted beard. It licked its lips, revealing a row of jagged yellow fangs.
Sophie inched back from the creature, which towered over her. “Peter! Help!” she cried.
What occurred next was hard at first for Sophie to process—the events happened so fast that they came to her in a flash of disconnected sensations. She felt something soft brush against her arm and then heard a piercing snarl. The ape, which had moments before been bearing down on her, tumbled backward and crashed into the wall. There was a flurry of roars and grunts. Tufts of fur and what was very possibly blood filled the air. At last, the ape released a horrible, gargling howl and then slumped to the floor, dead.
Sophie stared at the wreckage, breathless. Standing atop the ape was a magnificent silver tigress, her white mouth ringed with blood. The creature regarded Sophie with narrow yellow eyes.
Sophie swallowed, unsure whether the animal was sizing her up for dessert or awaiting some other response. “Thank you . . .” she gasped. “We owe you our lives.” She wondered if such an animal could understand her words.
The tigress slinked down from the corpse of the ape and bowed her silver head. “You are most welcome, my cub,” she said. Her voice was creaky, as if she had not spoken for a very long time. “And now that I have secured your gratitude, perhaps you would be so kind as to answer the following questions. Who are you? And what are you doing in my library?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THIEVING WAYS
Peter had counted only to ninety-six when he heard Sophie’s first scream from inside the menagerie. The sound had been faint; he had barely heard it through the windows along the north-facing turrets. He spun around, his weapon raised. “Did you hear that?”
“What’s the matter?” said Knucklemeat, who was lying in the mud, his hands shackled to the front wheel of his wagon. “Afraid your little ruse didn’t quite go off as planned?”
Peter ignored the man, focusing his senses on the castle. He heard gears grinding deep within the walls and what sounded like doors swinging shut. “She’s fine,” he said, though he feared the opposite. “And if things get bad, she’s got Sir Tode to protect her.”
Knucklemeat gave a hearty laugh. “That little kitty—protect her? Why, he can’t even scratch with those clumsy old hooves.”
“Sir Tode’s saved my life more times than I can count. And he’s incredibly durable.” This was true: More than once during their travels, Peter had seen his friend shake off what would have been killing blows to almost any other creature. Small though he might be, the knight had a talent for not dying.
Peter paced in front of the castle steps, his ears and nose alert for any signs of trouble within. He detected a foul bouquet of musk and dung wafting from the windows—the smell of wild animals. And below that—rising up from the ground, it seemed—was the rancid tang of rotting flesh. He turned back to Knucklemeat, who was humming to himself. There was something the man wasn’t telling them about this place. “Just how much do you know about the baron?”
A high-pitched squawk rang out from the castle—it sounded to Peter like some sort of very large bird.
“That one I heard,” Knucklemeat said. “I’d say either a pygmy roc or a bush-squid. If memory serves, the baron’s got both in his collection.”
Peter did not bother asking the man what either of those creatures was. Nor did he bother finishing his count to two hundred. In an instant, he had bounded up the castle steps and was standing at the front doors. But they were tightly secured, and he could find neither handle nor lock. He suspected rightly that the doors must be controlled by some mechanical system within the walls. With no lock to pick, he would have to find another way inside. He felt along the edges of the doorway until his hand took hold of some thick ivy that had grown up the wall. He grabbed it and started working his way up to a window on the second floor.
From inside the castle, he could hear new noises—animals roaring and screaming. He didn’t know what was happening, but it didn’t sound good. “Hurry up, you clod,” he muttered as he pulled himself slowly upward. In his younger thieving days, he would have been able to scale the wall at twice the speed—but, having no right hand, the work was now considerably slower. By the time he reached the windowsill, his whole body ached terribly from the strain.
The window was secured with golden bars, which Peter was able to pry apart and slip through easily. He dropped
to the floor and tried to gain his bearings. He was standing in a torchlit corridor. The noises he heard were all coming from beyond a door just across the way—a cacophony of angry animals all screaming for blood. He sniffed the air, trying to pick out the individual odors of different creatures. One familiar stench rose above the others. “Ape,” he said.
Peter hesitated, unsure what to do: He had promised Sophie that he would find The Book of What, but what good was the book if she was dead by the time he brought it to her? The thought of Sophie and Sir Tode encountering a wild ape made his stomach clench up—he himself had very nearly died at the hands of such creatures many times. And then he heard it, one small voice ringing out over the chaos—
“Peter! Help!”
Peter’s hesitation vanished. If Sophie was calling for him, then any hope of tricking the baron was lost.
Peter sprinted down the hallway in the direction of her voice. He soon found a narrow door. Like the front doors of the castle, it had no lock, but Peter was able to run his hand along the seam and find the small spring mechanism that released the latch. The moment the door opened, his ears were assaulted with the sound of dozens of wild animals. The cacophony was very nearly more than he could stand.
Amidst the chaos, he heard one shrill cry: “Taro! Stay with the book!”
It was Madame Eldritch. Peter ducked behind a polished suit of armor and hoped she had not seen him. He had been lucky enough to survive one encounter with the woman’s mandrake servant, but he didn’t relish the idea of a second round. He heard what he thought might be Taro leaping over a railing to the floor below. By now, Peter had deduced that he and Madame Eldritch were standing at opposite ends of a long balcony that overlooked some sort of cavernous hall. From the sound of it, the chamber below was filled to capacity with dozens of animals, all of them beating against the bars of cages. He tried to listen for Sophie or Sir Tode but could no longer hear them.
Sophie Quire and the Last Storyguard Page 15