the other building. Some of them wore gunnysacks with eye slits cut into them pulled over their heads, which made them look particularly menacing in the moonfall. Others had dirty hats tugged down low with bandannas to hide their faces.
The man with the lantern, who sported two large dueling pistols in his belt, had on the kind of netted hat Lloyd had seen on beekeepers, which seemed especially malignant. He was tall, and his clothes were cleaner and more expensive than the others’. All the other ruffians were armed in some way: hickory ax handles, fence pickets, crowbars. One very large man in the back stood poised with a hay tine. A short, stinking torch was lit from the lantern, the spookish light wavering over the timbers of the wall.
Drucker and Soames stepped forward, putting themselves between Lloyd and the men, but the tall one in the beekeeper’s hat just laughed. What would Hattie have said? What would she do now? Captain of dark crossroads. She might have fled—but, like St. Ives, she was a game one with a bluff, too. Despite the acid burning in his stomach and his heart thumping against his rib cage, he could feel Mother Tongue’s eye in his pocket becoming both hotter and colder all at once. He sneaked his hand into his britches, gripping the orb for comfort.
“Stand aside,” Soames instructed the assembled host.
“Peace, citizens!” the netted hat replied, in a voice that reminded Lloyd of a rat in a gutter full of leaves. “We mean no harm. I swear it! Unless, of course, by some chance you happen to be religious fanatics bent on preaching your degenerate ways … fouling the waters of our fair community and taking liberties with our laws that the one true God will not tolerate. You wouldn’t be such vermin as that, would you?”
“Let us pass,” Drucker demanded, balling up a butcher-size fist in spite of his common sense and the hopeless mismatch.
“Oh, yes, boys!” joked the man in the netted hat to his brethren. “We’ll let them pass, all right! Won’t we?”
Despicable hoots of amusement rose from the shadowed figures beside him. The torch swooshed in the air, leaving an angry tattoo in the dark for a second.
“We’ll let you pass from this point right here into the pit of hell, you swine. We know who you are. Meddling in matters that don’t concern you, infecting communities wherever you go!”
Drucker and Soames now both pulled cudgels from beneath their dust coats. Lloyd grew truly frightened. It made no difference that he was not a Quist—he was in their company, this was his fight, too. And they were faced with overwhelming odds, from the lanky sneering coward in the beekeeper’s hat to the giant in the rear with the long hayfork. For a moment, Lloyd considered making a run for it. Just leave the Quist men to their fate and flee back to the Clutters’. With any luck, he would not be pursued. Hopefully, no one would see through which door he vanished. He would make it hard for any of these villains to recognize him again. By morning the horror would be over—one way or another. But his blood boiled at the thought of what that might mean. Somehow they had to get word to the others. They had to warn the Quists of the impending assault. He could not be party to any more loss of life if he could help it.
“I’ll tell you what,” the beekeeper mused. “I see you have a boy with you. No doubt you don’t want him hurt. What say you give us McGitney—take us to the others and we’ll let you go. I swear on the real Bible. You will go free.”
Drucker spat in the mud. “You’ll need a lot more than this ragtag posse a yourn.”
“Oh, we have more coming,” the vigilante leader replied. “Rest assured. Give up the others and you can save yourselves—and the boy.”
“No!” Lloyd cried, and pushed forward holding the Ambassadors’ box before him like a charm, his other hand still plunged inside his pocket, grasping the artificial eye. These men confronting them now were not Vardogers or Spirosians. They were just brutal, and perhaps as stupid as they looked.
The sight of the box with the luminous engravings startled them, but not as much as Lloyd had hoped, even when the etched symbols seemed to project out across their bodies and covered faces. Deftly, he spun the box around, making the figures whirl about