bag and held it aloft, marveling at how it seemed to project its carved message into the room. The aura it cast reminded him of countless visions he had had just upon falling asleep. The sight surprised him, for he had begun to form the view that the Headstones’ illumination may have been some kind of trick that McGitney had devised to wow his followers—although he could not account for it, or explain the surges in brightness that he seemed to stimulate.
Nevertheless, without having been able to examine the tablets himself, Lloyd had remained skeptical of any magical power. Now, with his own familiar box in hand and the same phenomenon manifest, he had to concede that there was indeed some force at work, a kind of energy he had never encountered before—save perhaps that night when he met Mother Tongue. It was the one thing he could liken this demonstration to—and it turned his mind back to his bag, where the other eye, the mate of the gift he had given Hattie, nestled in its protective rags. To his even greater astonishment, he now found that the eye had changed, too. Where before it had always felt cool if not cold to the touch, and was always dark unless he held it up to the light (which he had stopped doing because of the unsettling memories it provoked), it was this time quite definitely warm to the touch and lit from within, as if answering some call from the markings on the box.
Lloyd felt a deep, inner need to take the eye in hand. To fondle it. When he did, he found that it had gained in weight and was growing warmer. He wondered how it would react in the immediate presence of the Headstones. For the first time since he had given the other one to Hattie, he stared at it, as if he had never seen it before. Embedded deep inside the iris now, there appeared to be depth upon depth of shimmering layers, like a small golden-green tornado or some almost living mechanism—a minuscule self-illuminating creature, or a captured strand of lightning. Lloyd could not be sure what it looked like, only that it seemed to look back at him, filling his head with a sublime radiance. He was suddenly intensely glad that he had given the mate to Hattie. His mate.
He might have stood there staring at the eye for quite a while longer, but Hephaestus gave out a grunt in his sleep and then there came a furtive tap on the glass of the window. The Quists were summoning him.
He slipped the eye into his pocket, feeling its cold-hot heat against his leg. For some reason, he felt he must keep it with him—that he needed it. Hattie’s skull fetish he tucked back into its protective rags with the precious communication from his uncle, which had set them out on their perilous flight in the first place. The box he wrapped in a piece of cloth from his bag and then he slipped out the door, restoring the darkness to his sleeping parents in their coffins.
He found that the men called Drucker and Soames were both wound very tight. They interrogated him by gesture when he emerged, and when he assented that he had what he had gone to get they set out again at a nervous pace. As silent as the two had been before, they were even more so now, listening with their whole bodies, as if something sinister had transpired while he was inside. He would have asked them what had happened to put them so on edge, but he felt certain they would just shush him up and hurry him along. Maybe there really were people out to get them, he thought, as they pigeon-stepped through the mud past the wagon lying on its hitch. It reminded him again that there may have been people out to get him, too. He did not know what to believe on that score, but the possibility niggled at him. The one called Soames appeared to flinch. Then Lloyd felt it, too. A sudden twinge of emergency. Footsteps—and some other sound. Then, from behind one of the buildings they had to walk between, a sharp bolt of lantern light stabbed out at them, creating a sudden infestation of shadows.
“Allo there, fine citizens!” a muffled man’s voice accosted them, and before they knew it as many as eight other men had stepped out from behind