The Slippery Slope

'No, no, no,' Esmй said quickly. 'These aren't the people we're expecting. These are some volunteers I found at headquarters.'

'Volunteers?' said the woman with hair but no beard, but her voice did not sound as deep as it usually did. The villains gave the children the same confused frown they had seen from Esmй, as if they were unsure whether to be scared or scornful, and the hook-handed man, the two white-faced women, and the three former carnival employees gathered around to see what had made their villainous boss fall silent. Although they were exhausted, the two Baudelaires hurriedly untied the straps of the toboggan from their waists and stood with Quigley to face their enemies. The orphans were very scared, of course, but they found that with their faces concealed they could speak their minds, a phrase which here means 'confront Count Olaf and his companions as if they weren't one bit frightened.'

'We built a trap to capture your girlfriend, Olaf,' Violet said, 'but we didn't want to become a monster like you.'

'They're idiotic liars!' Esmй cried. 'I found them hogging the cigarettes, so I captured them myself and made them drag me up the waterfall like sled dogs.'

The middle Baudelaire ignored the wicked girlfriend's nonsense. 'We're here for Sunny Baudelaire,' Klaus said, 'and we're not leaving without her.'

Count Olaf frowned, and peered at them with his shiny, shiny eyes as if he were trying to see through their masks. 'And what makes you so certain,' he said, 'that I'll give you my prisoner just because you say so?'

Violet thought furiously, looking around at her surroundings for anything that might give her an idea of what to do. Count Olaf clearly believed that the three masked people in front of him were members of V.F.D., and she felt that if she could just find the right words to say, she could defeat him without becoming as villainous as her enemies. But she could not find the words, and neither could her brother nor her friend, who stood beside her in silence. The winds of the Mortmain Mountains blew against them, and Violet stuck her hands in her pockets, bumping one finger against the long bread knife. She began to think that perhaps trapping Esmй had been the right thing to do after all. Count Olaf's frown began to fade, and his mouth started to curl upward in a triumphant smile, but just as he opened his mouth to speak, Violet saw two things that gave her hope once more. The first was the sight of two notebooks, one a deep shade of purple and the other dark blue, sticking out of the pockets of her companions — commonplace books, where Klaus and Quigley had written down all of the information they had found in the ruined library of V.F.D. headquarters. And the other was a collection of dishes spread out on the flat rock that Olaf's troupe had been using for a table. Sunny had been forced to wash these dishes, using handfuls of melted snow, and she had laid them out to dry in the sunshine of False Spring. Violet could see a stack of plates, each emblazoned with the familiar image of an eye, as well as a row of teacups and a small pitcher for cream. But there was something missing from the tea set, and it made Violet smile behind her mask as she turned to face Count Olaf again.

'You will give us Sunny,' she said, 'because we know where the sugar bowl is.'

Chapter Thirteen

Count Olaf gasped, and raised his one eyebrow very high as he gazed at the two Baudelaires and their companion, his eyes shinier than they had ever seen them. 'Where is it?' he said, in a terrible, wheezing whisper. 'Give it to me!'

Violet shook her head, grateful that her face was still hidden behind a mask. 'Not until you give us Sunny Baudelaire,' she said.

'Never!' the villain replied. 'Without that big-toothed brat, I'll never capture the Baudelaire fortune. You give me the sugar bowl this instant, or I'll throw all of you off this mountain!'

'If you throw us off the mountain,' Klaus said, 'you'll never know where the sugar bowl is.' He did not add, of course, that the Baudelaires had no idea where the sugar bowl was, or why in the world it was so important.

Esmй Squalor took a sinister step toward her boyfriend, her flame-imitating dress crackling against the cold ground. 'We must have that sugar bowl,' she snarled. 'Let the baby go. We'll cook up another scheme to steal the fortune.'

'But stealing the fortune is the greater good,' Count Olaf said. 'We can't let the baby go.'

'Getting the sugar bowl is the greater good,' Esmй said, with a frown.

'Stealing the fortune,' Olaf insisted.

'Getting the sugar bowl,' Esmй replied.

'Fortune!'

'Sugar bowl!'

'Fortune!'

'Sugar bowl!'

'That's enough!' ordered the man with a beard but no hair. 'Our recruitment scheme is about to be put into action. We can't have you arguing all day long.'

'We wouldn't have argued all day long,' Count Olaf said timidly. 'After a few hours — '

'We said that's enough!' ordered the woman with hair but no beard. 'Bring the baby over here!'

'Bring the baby at once!' Count Olaf ordered the two white-faced women. 'She's napping in her casserole dish.'

The two white-faced women sighed, but hurried over to the casserole dish and lifted it together, as if they were cooks removing something from the oven instead of villainous employees bringing over a prisoner, while the two sinister visitors reached down the necks of their shirts and retrieved something that was hanging around their necks. Violet and Klaus were surprised to see two shiny silver whistles, like the one Count Olaf had used as part of his disguise at Prufrock Preparatory School, when he was pretending to be a coach.

'Watch this, volunteers,' said the sinister man in his hoarse voice, and the two mysterious villains blew their whistles. Instantly, the children heard an enormous rustling sound over their heads, as if the Mortmain Mountain winds were as frightened as the youngsters, and it suddenly grew very dim, as if the morning sun had also put on a mask. But when they looked up, Violet, Klaus, and Quigley saw that the reason for the noisy sky and the fading light was perhaps more strange than frightened winds and a masked sun. The sky above Mount Fraught was swarming with eagles. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, flying in silent circles high above the two sinister villains. They must have been nesting nearby to have arrived so quickly, and they must have been very thoroughly trained to be so eerily silent. Some of them looked very old, old enough to have been in the skies when the Baudelaire parents were children themselves. Some of them looked quite young, as if they had only recently emerged from the egg and were already obeying the shrill sound of a whistle. But all of them looked exhausted, as if they would rather be anywhere else but the summit of the Mortmain Mountains, doing absolutely anything rather than following the orders of such wretched people.

'Look at these creatures!' cried the woman with hair but no beard. 'When the schism occurred, you may have won the carrier crows, volunteers, and you may have won the trained reptiles.'

'Not anymore,' Count Olaf said. 'All of the reptiles except one — '

'Don't interrupt,' the sinister woman interrupted. 'You may have the carrier crows, but we have the two most powerful mammals in the world to do our bidding — the lions and eagles!'

'Eagles aren't mammals' Klaus cried out in frustration. 'They're birds!'

'They're slaves,' said the man with a beard but no hair, and the two villains reached into the pockets of their suits and drew out two long, wicked-looking whips. Violet and Klaus could see at once that they were similar to the whip Olaf had used when bossing around the lions at Caligari Carnival. With matching, sinister sneers the two mysterious villains cracked their whips in the air, and four eagles swooped down from the sky, landing on the strange thick pads that the villains had on their shoulders.

'These beasts will do anything we tell them to do,' the woman said. 'And today they're going to help us with our greatest triumph.' She uncurled the whip and gestured to the ground around her, and the children noticed for