The Diamond of Darkhold - 4 (24 page)

People wanted to touch the diamond and examine it. Hands reached out, shoulders bumped. Ben pushed through, saying, “Make way, please, I need to see this,” and Wilmer Dent edged in sideways, and Lizzie said, “We had electricity in Ember;
everybody
had it.”

But Doon backed away. “Wait!” he cried. “We have to get started! We don’t have much time.” From his bulging pack, he extracted the box of light bulbs that he’d “borrowed” from Torren.

Torren shrieked. “Those are mine!”

“Yes,” said Doon, “and you’ll be proud to know they’re going to be used for something so important.”

Lina and Doon climbed up onto one of the trucks. Raising their voices so everyone could hear, they took turns explaining what the scavengers should expect when they went down into Ember—the narrow path that led along the cave wall, the Unknown Regions, and the chasm. (They’d be laying a sturdier bridge across it with planks and pipes brought from Sparks.) “We’ll know right away if people are still there,” Doon said, “because we’ll see their fire. But I think they’ve probably gone already.” He explained that there would be search teams, each one led by former citizens of Ember. The teams would go to all the different neighborhoods, collect anything useful, and pile it in certain spots. The team led by Doon and his father would go down into the Pipeworks. Lina and Lizzie would lead a team to the storerooms. Clary Laine would lead a team to Ember’s greenhouses, where she had been the manager, and Edward’s team would check the library and the school. Other teams would cover the rest of the city.

The search would go on for about eight hours. Doon chose Martha Parton to keep track of the time by burning eight candles, one after another, in Harken Square. (Privately, he hoped that the Troggs might have left their hourglass behind, but he couldn’t count on that.) At the end of eight hours, Martha would blow three blasts on a loud whistle. Then the teams would carry all they’d collected back through the Unknown Regions, put things into packs, carry them up to the top, and load them into the trucks to be taken back to Sparks.

It took nearly an hour to make the preparations. Doon gave each of the team leaders a diamond and a light bulb, and each person stood his or her diamond in the sun and waited while it soaked up light. (Doon had tested this, back in Sparks: in about fifteen minutes, a diamond could take in a charge that would last at least eight hours.) Meanwhile, Lina, who had brought along a ball of string, cut short lengths of it and passed them out to all those who would be leading the search teams. She also gave each person several sacks, which they’d use for collecting, as well as a few candles, just in case any of the light bulbs failed. (She and Doon had brought with them all the matches they’d saved from their trip.)

When enough time had gone by, people screwed in their light bulbs, flicked their switches, and jumped and yelped and laughed gleefully as the bulbs lit up. Maddy, who wasn’t one for jumping and laughing, gave one of her rare smiles. “So,” she said, “Caspar’s ridiculous quest had one good result after all.”

“Now tie one end of the string around the ring,” Lina said, “and the other to your belt. That way you can carry the light and leave your hands free.”

It worked pretty well, for a plan made up on the basis of so little knowledge. Doon and Lina led people the short distance up the slope to the crack in the mountainside. The two of them went in first, carrying only Doon’s small generator. Once they were standing on the ledge, Doon stopped cranking, and they looked down. No light. Not even the faintest glow. “They’ve left,” said Doon, and Lina said, “Good.”

Then began the process of leading nearly a hundred people down the long, narrow path along the cave wall. Their diamond lights lit the way far better than candles, but still the going was hard, and many people were terrified. There were shrieks from those who tripped on a rock or stumbled too close to the path’s edge and wails from those overcome by fear of the long descent into darkness. But at last the whole troop trudged out across the Unknown Regions, crept and tottered and screamed their way across the bridge over the chasm, and entered the city.

The stink of old smoke filled the air. The teams took a few minutes to organize themselves and recover from the ordeal of the descent, and then they spread out, moving through the streets to their assigned neighborhoods. For hour after hour, they poked into every room, hall, and stairway, every cupboard and cabinet, every nook and cranny, collecting what was useful and leaving what was not. It was a thorough search, but not a quick one. The former citizens of Ember were constantly seized by memories and often insisted on going blocks out of their way to visit the house they’d lived in or the place where they’d worked to pick up some small treasure they’d left behind; and the people of Sparks were so astonished by the city that they asked a million questions and sometimes just came to a halt and stared.

But as the hours went by, the search grew more businesslike. The conversations dwindled and the side trips ceased. At various corners throughout the city, piles of useful things grew higher and higher. Clary’s team, out in the greenhouses, gathered seeds of several kinds of beets and greens and squashes unknown to the farmers of Sparks. Edward’s team found, to his great distress, that the Ember library had been emptied out; but the three books in Miss Thorn’s old schoolroom remained: the
Book of Letters,
the
Book of Numbers,
and the great
Book of the City of Ember.
No one could say that these were really
useful,
but they took them anyhow to remember the city by.

Doon’s team, down in the Pipeworks, wound through the tunnels to the mayor’s secret room, from which—as Doon had discovered—the mayor and his cronies had had no time to remove very much on that last, frantic day. Stacks of cans, boxes of light bulbs, and cartons of supplies still stood there, surrounding the mayor’s armchair, his table, and his plate spotted with moldy bits of food. Doon remembered what Mrs. Murdo had said about seeing bulging bags on the walkway beside the river as the mayor was trying to escape. His team retrieved those, too. Just carrying all these things back through the tunnels and up the long, long Pipeworks stairway took that team all the hours of the search. Doon had thought there might be time for him to go back to his old home and look for his book of insect drawings; but at the end, he decided against it. The world above was so full of wonderful insects that he could simply start a new book. It would be far better than the old one.

Lina’s team found very little in the storerooms. As the Emberites had known, the city’s supplies had been nearly gone. A few rooms held forgotten boxes of safety pins and rolls of crusty string and tins of salt, and there were some cans of food—mostly spinach—and some boxes of electrical cords and plugs. Lizzie found a stray pair of pink socks that she claimed for herself. Most of the other stuff was broken or spoiled and not worth taking.

But Doon had told Lina what Yorick said about the back room of the shop where someone had been hoarding. Lina was sure she knew which shop it was—she’d bought her colored pencils there. It was the shop run by the young man named Looper, who had been the mayor’s crony in the theft from the storerooms. He’d also been Lizzie’s boyfriend, and when she saw the piles of things he’d collected, she sputtered with indignation. “He told me he was taking just a
little
!” she said. “What a liar! How could I ever have liked him?” There were cans of food, boxes of paper and pencils (even colored pencils, Lina saw with delight), packets of soap, and still more light bulbs.

About halfway through the search, it was decided that some of the teams should stop searching and start toting things up to the surface. Doon’s father, who wasn’t able to carry things because of his hand, supervised this, sending some people to collect things from the various piles and bring them to the edge of the Unknown Regions, and other people to fill their packs and start up the path.

It was a very long day. Legs and backs grew weary; people had to take rests, sitting on the benches in Harken Square. Lina began checking back more and more often with Martha Parton, who was sitting on the steps of the Gathering Hall, keeping track of the time by burning candles. When only a few minutes remained before the search had to end, Lina left Lizzie in charge of her team and slipped away. First she ran across Harken Square, skirting the black rubble that was the remains of the Troggs’ bonfire, to the house in Quillium Square where she and Poppy had lived with their grandmother, to see if she could find the drawings she had done then of the bright city of her imagination. She shone her light on the walls where she’d pinned them up—but they weren’t there. In the bathroom cabinet, though, she found the almost-empty tube of the medicine called Anti-B. She put that in her pocket. Then she ran back to Harken Square and climbed the steps of the Gathering Hall. She went along the corridor, into the mayor’s office, through the door that led to the stairs, and up the stairs to the roof. Once more, for the last time, she looked out.

The city looked as she had never seen it before, dotted with bright, moving lights, one here, one there, wherever the search teams were at work. Lights never used to move in Ember; the only light came from the giant floodlights fixed to buildings and the lamps in people’s houses. Now all those were dark, and instead the lights of the searchers flitted like luminous insects along the streets and within the windows.

Martha’s whistle blew—three long blasts. As Lina watched, more and more bright dots emerged from buildings, moved along streets toward the collection piles, swarmed about for a bit, and then joined a stream of lights all moving in the same direction as people headed with their bounty out toward the meeting place at the edge of the Unknown Regions.

“Goodbye, Ember,” Lina said. She said it out loud, as if the city could hear her. “Goodbye forever this time, my city.”

Then she went down the stairs and out into the streets again to rejoin the expedition.

She found Doon standing beside the white rocking chair, guiding people into the line that led out toward the cliff. “We won’t see Ember again,” said Doon.

“No,” Lina said. “But it’s all right. I said goodbye.”

CHAPTER 26
_________________

An Interesting Arrival

The food from Ember was enough to get the people of Sparks through the last hard weeks of the winter. It made for a rather odd diet sometimes. No one in Sparks had ever eaten canned spinach or powdered milk or vitamin pills, but they were glad to have them, and glad to have the other things that had been scarce, like rubber boots and seeds for the spring. Everyone spent those weeks being a little bit hungry most of the time. But there were no conflicts, and no one starved.

Later on, when the ground had dried, several trucks went up again to bring the rest of the diamonds back to Sparks. It turned out that there were a thousand of them in the windowless room, stacked on long shelves in alcoves that stretched back into the mountain. Each household was given two, and the rest were carefully stored in the Ark, which now had a rebuilt roof. These would belong not to any one person but to the town, and the town as a whole would decide how to use them. Their very first decision was to use some of them for trade. A team went to the nearby settlement of Stonefield with three diamonds, and they returned with an entire truckload of corn flour, dried beans, slightly sprouted potatoes, and almond butter, which happened to be Stonefield’s specialty.

The diamonds caused other changes in Sparks as well. They gave rise to a new routine, for one thing: every morning, even when the weather was cloudy, people put their diamonds outside to soak up sun; for an hour or so every day, the glitter of blue glass adorned gardens and fence rails and front steps. The candlemaker’s business declined quite a bit; he had to branch out into making floor wax and wagon grease. Fewer fires started as a result of toppled candles, and people lit their way through the town easily at night, even in windy weather. The diamonds allowed people to work on tasks like knitting and sewing in the evenings—and to read.

Only a few weeks after the expedition to Ember, they had a real library to read in. Several people helped Edward build an extension onto the back of the Ark and line it with bookshelves, and Edward set up five tables in there, each one with a diamond in the middle providing light. Quite a number of people came in the evenings to browse among the books; even Kenny, who’d thought he didn’t care for reading, found that he liked looking at one book in which there were pictures of astonishing animals—striped horses, spotted things with stretched necks, a giant piglike creature with a horn on its nose. Edward became known to the roamers in the area as someone who would buy books of almost any kind. After a roamer’s visit, the library was sometimes actually crowded with people stopping in to see what was new.

Loris Harrow’s injured hand continued to bother him for weeks. Finally, Doctor Hester decided there must still be bits of glass in the wound. She gave Loris some of her best pain medicine (which wasn’t very good), and he clenched his teeth as she opened the wound again, this time under the bright light provided by two diamonds, and cleaned out the splinters once and for all.

One warm afternoon, when the last of winter had gone, a whole family of roamers came into town from the south. They were a wreck. Their truck was a rusty heap, with a filthy flapping canvas covering the back. They had one scrawny ox, one scrawny horse, and a flock of sheep that looked as if they’d been rolling around in the dirt. The roamers themselves looked as mangy as their sheep—matted hair, ragged dirty clothes.