The Diamond of Darkhold - 4 (8 page)

She let go of the generator’s crank long enough to stoop quickly and pick up the candle. Then she turned around and hurried through the passage to the outside, where Doon was starting along the mountainside. “There’s a path,” she said breathlessly. “Going down.”

It was a steep path, and rough, and narrow. They followed it with extreme caution, one slow step after another, keeping one hand on the wall beside them. They lit their way with candles; this was no place to have both hands occupied with the generator. At first, their idea had been to go just a little way, to see if the path continued. After they’d been walking for several minutes, it seemed that the path really might take them down to the level of the city.

“This is going to work,” said Doon. “I’m sure it is. We have to go back up and get our packs.”

They did so. They took out everything that wasn’t essential, leaving in mainly candles and matches. They’d each brought ten matches on the trip and had used two of Lina’s so far. Doon included his generator. Lina added some pieces of paper and a pencil stub that Doon’s father had found and given to her, because you never knew when you might have to draw something or write a note. Each of them took one of the clever leather water bottles made in Sparks, with a plug and a strap for hooking to a belt. They rolled the rest of their supplies into the blankets they’d brought and hid the blanket rolls between some rocks. Then once again, each of them holding a candle, they went through the narrow passage and started down the path.

It was far from easy. They couldn’t tell if the path had been constructed by people or if it was just a natural ledge along the wall of the cave. In some places it was partly crumbled away, and they had to step across gaps. Other places were blocked by rockslides that they had to scramble over. Always, though they couldn’t see it, they were aware of the long drop into darkness just inches from their feet. But frightening as it was, they weren’t willing to turn around, because the path led steadily down.

It went by way of switchbacks—they’d walk a long way in one direction, and then the path would make a tight turn and they’d find themselves walking the other way. Lina imagined how the path would look to someone gazing up at it from below—a great zigzag sweeping back and forth across the wall of the cave. Maybe someone was down there now, watching their two dots of light slowly descending.

Little by little, the smudge of light far below in the city grew closer. They stopped every now and then to check, shielding the candlelight with their hands so they could see into the depths. After about an hour, they had to stop to light new candles. They knew an hour had passed, because Doon had figured out, before they left, how long it took one candle to burn down to a stub so that they could use candles a bit like clocks—two inches gone, that meant the candle had been burning for about fifteen minutes. Each candle was about eight inches long and burned for about an hour. The candles they were carrying were now too short to hold. They stopped to get new ones from their packs and went on, step after cautious step, steadily downward.

Then Doon, who was ahead, gave a startled cry. “Here’s the end!” he said. “I’m at the bottom.”

Lina came up behind him, and they stood side by side with their candles showing them each other’s faces, shadowy and orange. When they looked down, they saw bare ground, uneven, strewn with small rocks and pebbles.

“Can you believe it?” said Doon. “We’re in the Unknown Regions.”

“And going to Ember,” said Lina. “There it is.”

Across the ocean of darkness, she could see a faint and wavering glow. They began making their way toward it.

CHAPTER 7
_________

Calamity

They walked slowly, keeping close together, looking carefully before each step in case the sudden deep pits or nightmarish beasts that people had always whispered about were really there. Doon was using the generator now, cranking it briskly. Lina, walking right beside him, held a candle. Their circle of light was bigger than with the candles alone. But all they saw in it was sandy-colored ground scattered with rocks and pebbles, with an occasional crack or ridge that they had to step over.

“There’s litter out here,” Lina said after a while. She pointed with her foot at an empty can. A few steps farther on, there was another empty can, and not far beyond that, a broken jar. “How did this stuff get here?”

“Rats, I guess,” said Doon. “They must have dragged it out from the Trash Heaps.”

Since they were now on the same level as the city instead of looking down into it from above, they didn’t see the light as a spot anymore but as a dim background glow that made a few edges and corners of buildings visible. And they could see this glow only when they paused now and then and Doon stopped cranking his generator, because the brightness of the generator’s light bulb blinded them to the fainter light beyond. It was lucky, Lina thought, that there was light in the city at all. If the darkness had been complete, they wouldn’t even have known where the city was; they could have wandered around in the Unknown Regions for a long time before heading in the right direction, and they wouldn’t have known it was the right direction until they’d practically bumped into a building.

Step by step, they moved on, lighting their way just a few feet ahead, and suddenly the lit ground in front of their feet disappeared into darkness.

Baffled at first, they came to a halt. Then Doon crept forward, inches at a time. Lina heard him gasp and say, “Oh, no.”

“What?”

“The ground ends,” Doon said. “It drops away here. We’re standing on the edge of . . . I don’t know, a hole or a chasm.”

Lina stepped forward and stood beside him and looked down. The toes of their shoes were right up against a black emptiness. She couldn’t tell how deep or wide it was; their light penetrated only a few feet down and forward, and beyond that all was dark.

“We’ll have to go around it,” Doon said. “We can’t go down in there.”

“Never,” said Lina with a shudder.

“Let’s try going to the left,” said Doon.

They backed away from the edge, turned, and with great caution headed along the rim of the hole. Minutes passed, and more minutes, and still they were walking beside the black emptiness, on and on.

“It isn’t a hole, then,” said Doon finally. “It’s a sort of ditch.” He pondered for a moment. “It might go all the way around the city.”

“A ring,” Lina said. “To keep people from leaving.”

This brought them to a stop. Lina recalled the whispered rumors she’d heard all her life—about people who had gone out into the Unknown Regions and never returned. They could be down there—what was left of them.

“We have to go back,” she said. “We can’t get across it.”

“I wish we could tell how wide it is,” said Doon. “If it’s deep but not very wide, then maybe we could.”

“How?” said Lina. “Jump?” She meant this as a joke, but Doon didn’t laugh.

He said, “Didn’t you bring some scraps of paper with you?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have a couple of them?” Doon asked. “I have an idea.”

Lina pulled two of her scraps of paper from her pack and handed them to him. Doon bent over and looked around until he found a small stone on the ground. He wrapped the stone in the paper and held the paper to Lina’s candle until it caught fire, and then quickly he threw the flaming packet out over the chasm. It flew up and then dropped, farther and farther, until it struck with a small tap far below their feet and went out.

“One more try,” said Doon. “I’ll throw harder.”

He lit the little packet and heaved it with all his strength. This time it flew out in a long arc and landed at the same level as the ground they were standing on. It looked to Lina to be maybe ten feet away. “So it’s a deep crevice,” Doon said. “But not all that wide.”

“Too wide to get across,” said Lina. “We have to turn around.”

So they retraced their steps. The chasm now yawned on their other side. Lina forced fearsome pictures from her mind: rats crawling up over the edge, other creatures even worse than rats. . . . “Let’s hurry,” she said.

They came to the place where they’d begun, recognizing it by the bits of litter that lay on the ground there. “This is where we go back to the path,” said Doon. “But I hate to give up, now that we’ve come all this way.”

“We have to,” Lina said. “Otherwise we’ll just walk around and around and never get to the city.”

“We don’t know that for sure. Let’s go a little farther, just in case.”

And after only a few steps, they saw the way. Two thick planks stretched across the chasm. “Someone made a bridge,” Doon said.

It was not a bridge that inspired confidence. Narrow, slightly sagging, with no rails to hold on to, it reached out into the darkness, and below waited the invisible depths. But beyond was the city.

“Shall we try?” asked Doon.

Lina just nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

Doon put his generator back in his pack and lit a candle from the flame of Lina’s. Then he started across. With each step, he paused, looking ahead and not down. The planks creaked beneath his feet. Lina held her breath, as if even breathing too hard might knock Doon off balance. His light drew farther away, but quite soon he turned to face her from the other side. “You can do it!” he cried. “It’s not hard!”

She stepped out. She looked only at her feet—one step, and then the next. The boards of the bridge shuddered a little beneath her. It was good, she thought, that she couldn’t see how deep the space below her was. She was almost there. Doon stood just ahead. She would have been fine if she had not let her eyes stray at the last moment and caught a glimpse of white. In spite of herself, she turned to see: a tumble of pale sticks on the slope of the pit, just below her. Bones.

She staggered and fell to her knees. Her candle dropped into the pit and went out. She clung there, gripping the boards with her hands.

“Don’t move!” cried Doon. “I’m coming!”

She waited, all her muscles clenched, and in a moment Doon was in front of her. She gripped his hand, stood up, and followed him on shaky legs to the bridge’s end.

“All right?” he said.

She nodded, but her mind was spinning. She knew people died. She knew that the dead of Ember were carried out past the Trash Heaps, that the Song of Goodbye was sung for them, and that their bodies were left for the rats and worms to deal with. Everyone in Ember knew this. But to think about those who had fallen to their deaths alone in the darkness, in terror—that was different. “Let’s go,” she said. “I want to get away from here.”

So they hurried on, lighting the way with just Doon’s candle, now that the haze of light from the city was so close.

“Do you smell something?” Lina asked.

Doon sniffed. “I do. Smells like smoke.”

“Could a building be on fire?” Lina wondered.

“I don’t know,” said Doon. “I hope not.”

They walked on. The orange light stayed more or less steady, though the smell of smoke grew stronger.

They realized they had reached the city when a wall suddenly appeared not five feet in front of them. The candlelight, instead of making a circle beneath their feet, seemed to fold upward at the farthest edge. A few steps closer, and they could put their hands out and feel the chilly stone of the building. Doon raised his candle higher to see if there were any clues about what building they had come to—but of course there weren’t. None of the buildings in Ember had windows or doors on the side that faced the Unknown Regions.

Keeping one hand on the wall, they made their way along until they came to a corner, and there Lina looked for a street sign. She found it easily—a pole with its small printed rectangle on top. “Deeple Street,” she said, and in her mind, the whole city and their position in it fell into place. “We’re on the north side—in Farwater Square. Look, here’s a light pole.” Doon’s candle lit up the base of the pole, but the top, where before a great lamp would have been shining, was lost in darkness. On the corner of Deeple and Blott streets, an old white rocking chair stood, for some reason. Maybe someone had put it out as trash, although to Lina it looked perfectly sturdy.

“All right, good,” said Doon. “So first let’s find where that light is coming from.” Lina took out a candle and lit it from Doon’s. She wanted to see everything as well as possible.

They started down Blott Street, Doon ahead and Lina close behind. It was strange and thrilling to be in her old city. Even though their candles lit only a very small area around them, her memory easily filled in the rest. Here was one of Ember’s many old-clothes shops, the one run by Sarmon Grole. Here was the market where she’d bought so many turnips and beets and jars of baby food. Here was the house where she’d once taken a message to an old man who collected string. It was all familiar, but so strange, too, because of the silence and emptiness. No people bustled past the stone buildings anymore; the great streetlamps fixed to the buildings’ eaves no longer sent out yellow pools of light. Lina’s candlelight glimmered on dark, cracked shop windows, fell into the gulf of open doors, and lit bottom steps of stairways, where sometimes there was a sock or a scarf, dropped by someone in a hurry to leave. Lina peered at everything she passed, identifying, remembering.

By the time they came to Cloving Square, she’d fallen quite a distance behind Doon. She saw that he, too, must be absorbed in remembering, because he didn’t seem to notice she was no longer near him. She hurried to catch up; they mustn’t get separated. But she couldn’t help pausing once again when she came to the messengers’ station.