From the river, thought Doon.
“It was a good thing we’d brought some bottles of water with us,” Trogg said, “because it took us a couple days of exploring to find it. But we did. You wouldn’t believe what we found.”
Doon waited.
“An underground river!” Trogg said. “Yes, it’s true. We had to go down about a hundred steps to get to it. Did quite a bit of unpleasant cleanup on the way.”
“Cleanup?” said Doon.
“Bodies,” said Trogg. “Must have been some sort of stampede there, maybe as people were leaving the city. Quite a few dead folks lying around. We dragged them down the steps and shoved them in the river, and it swept them away.” Trogg shook his head, wrinkling his nose in disgust.
Bodies, Doon thought. Trogg seemed to think of them as garbage. But they were citizens of Ember, people he’d probably known, caught in the panic of the last-minute exit. Inwardly, he winced in pain, thinking of it—but Trogg was going on. “So the river,” he said. “When this city was in working order, the water was pumped up into the pipes that led to the houses. Now, of course, the pump doesn’t work. No e-lec-tricity.” He divided up the syllables, in case Doon had trouble understanding the word. “Have you heard of e-lec-tricity? It’s a kind of magic. Very advanced. It’s what makes the stars shine.”
“I know about it,” said Doon. He bit his tongue to keep from saying more.
“So,” Trogg went on, “there was no way we could go down those steps every day and fetch up buckets of river water. I thought we were going to have to give up the whole project and leave. Then I remembered about the breathing.” He looked up smugly at one of the streetlamps, as if he himself were responsible for its occasional glow. “When the electricity comes on,” he said, “the pump comes on, too, right? Sometimes for just a few seconds, sometimes for minutes at a time. So in our apartment and a couple of the other ones on our street, we opened the taps and put the plugs in the sinks and the tubs, and whenever the city breathes, the water comes out. Not exactly a gusher, but a good enough trickle. In a few days, we have water to scoop up whenever we need it. What do you think of that, hah?”
“Clever,” said Doon. It was clever. Trogg had a knack for figuring things out, Doon had to admit it. And yet he did not see Trogg as a truly intelligent person. Trogg seemed to think that he knew everything, but strangely enough, it was exactly this that made him seem stupid to Doon. A person who thought he knew everything simply didn’t understand how much there was to know.
Doon took the bucket and trudged away toward the apartment Trogg had pointed out. Behind him, he heard Trogg’s voice again. “Hey, you useless flump! Get a bucket and show that Dood where to go!”
Doon looked back. The thin boy had picked up a bucket and was lurching after him. Doon waited for him to catch up and followed him through the door, up the stairs, and into the apartment that had been turned into the dwelling place of the Trogg family.
He knew this place—it had been the home of one of his classmates, Orly Gordon, and Doon had been in it a few times during his school years. The rooms had been tidy then, although shabby, like everything in Ember. Now they were almost unrecognizable.
The Troggs must have searched dozens of apartments and dragged everything they liked best into this one. In the orange candlelight, he saw that the main room was crammed with furniture—there were five beds, six fat armchairs, a brown and orange striped couch piled with cushions and quilts and blankets, and three tables piled with dishes. Coats and sweaters and scarves and other clothes hung from hooks and were draped over the furniture. Countless boxes full of canned food stood in teetering stacks—the loot from a great many apartments.
The boy was making his way through this maze of stuff toward the bathroom. Doon followed him in and saw that murky water stood in the sink and filled about half of the bathtub. They bent over the tub and scooped their buckets in. Doon took a chance. He knew that the boy might tell on him to Trogg—but somehow he didn’t think so. “Are they keeping you a prisoner here?” he asked.
The boy shook his head.
“But you don’t want to be here, do you?”
“Yes, I do,” said the boy, hoisting his bucket out of the water. He seemed barely strong enough to do it—his arms trembled.
Doon reached over and helped him lift. “But they treat you like a slave!” he said. “Wouldn’t you leave if you could?”
Again, the boy just shook his head.
“If I could figure out how to get away,” Doon said, “would you come with me?”
“I can’t,” the boy said, pointing down at his twisted leg. “I can’t walk right.”
“How did you get down here, then?” Doon asked.
“He took me on his back,” said the boy.
“Trogg? So he does care about you, then?”
“A little,” said the boy. “He’s trying to make me strong.”
“But he’s so mean to you.”
The boy nodded. “He took my treasures.”
“Treasures?”
“Just some things I like. Things I’ve been collecting.”
His eyes were so sad as he said this that Doon had to look away. He lifted his bucket, now full and heavy, out of the water. “Why did he take them?”
“I was defiant,” said the boy.
Doon couldn’t picture this timid little person being defiant. “You mean you talked back to him?”
“No, no. I just didn’t jump up fast enough when he told me to.”
“What’s your name?” Doon asked.
The boy kept his eyes on the murky water. “He gave me a new name,” he said. He heaved up his full bucket and headed for the door.
Doon clanked after him. “You could help me find the key,” he said. “If I could get this chain off, I could get away and bring someone to rescue you.”
The boy didn’t answer. Water from his bucket sloshed out as he struggled toward the stairs. At the top step, he turned his head halfway toward Doon. “He put my treasures on the top shelf,” he said. “I can’t reach them.”
“The top shelf of what?”
“In the kitchen.” The boy set his bucket down, lowered his bad leg onto the first step, got his other leg down with a little hop, picked up the bucket and moved it down one step, and repeated the ungainly process all the way down the stairs.
Doon followed. They lugged their buckets of water in silence, and when they got to the bonfire, they emptied them, according to Trogg’s instructions, into a big pot, which Trogg set on the fire.
Then they waited. The lame boy sat on the ground, leaning against a pile of sacks with his knees up and his chin on his knees. He stared into the fire without moving. Minny puttered around making dinner preparations, and Trogg sat in an armchair, sipping from a cup of water he’d scooped from the washtub, and made Doon sit on the ground beside him. “The day will come,” Trogg said, “when you’ll realize how lucky you were to join up with us here in Darkhold. When that happens, we can get rid of this.” He reached down and jangled the chain that bound Doon’s feet. Minny, who was going by at the time with a sack of potatoes, jumped at the sound. “Of course, we have to be very, very sure,” said Trogg, “before that can happen.”
That would be one way out, thought Doon—to pretend that he was happy to be here and wouldn’t want to run away. But it would take a long time to prove that to Trogg. Doon thought of Lina, alone now, and of his father, injured and disabled. He thought of the people in Sparks, who had so little to get by on for the winter. He thought of the ancient book about something meant for the people of Ember, something he was longing to find. And most of all, he thought of the great sunlit world—he would rather be there and hungry than here and fed. There wasn’t time to pretend he’d grown happy with the Troggs. He had to get away now.
CHAPTER 11
________________________
The Shepherd
As soon as she’d waved at Doon and the lights had gone out again, Lina started on her r
eturn journey. The first task was to find her way out through the Unknown Regions to the place where the path led up along the cave wall. Using her third match, she lit a candle and went back through Ember the way she’d come, repeating to herself, in reverse order, the names of the streets she’d traveled, and in a few minutes she found herself once again on the corner where the white rocking chair stood. That chair, she thought, must be here on purpose. It must be here to mark the place where you go out.
So she ventured forward, stepping from the paved street onto the bare pebble-strewn ground. She moved slowly, keeping her eyes on the circle of candlelight beneath her feet. There was no way to know if she was walking toward the bottom of the path; she would just have to hope that if she went directly away from the city, she would come to it. She put one foot ahead of the other, feeling as if she had to push back a wall of darkness with every step.
An empty can appeared just in front of her right foot, and she kicked it without meaning to. Startled, she stopped. When she moved her candle a bit to the right, she saw another empty can lying on its side. She remembered: on the way in, they’d seen cans and broken jars. She’d thought they were litter, but what if they were markers? What if those people who had taken over the city had put them here so they could find their way to the path?
It made sense. She began to look for them. Soon she saw that each bit of junk was just a few steps beyond the last. Every time she came to one, if she took four or five steps beyond it, she would see the next. In this way, she arrived after a while at the spot she dreaded most: the plank bridge that crossed the chasm.
She stood for quite a while just looking at it: the two splintery boards reaching out into the dark and the ghastly drop below. I can’t do it, she thought. I have to turn around and go back, and try to rescue Doon some other way.
But there was no other way; she knew that. She would have to reach into herself and find the courage to cross that bridge. It must be there somewhere.
She closed her eyes, felt her heart beating, felt her feet planted firmly on the rocky ground. She tried to find her best self, and she remembered: She was fast; she was sure-footed. These narrow boards would be nothing to her if they lay across a stream or even stretched from the roof of one building to the roof of another. It wasn’t the bridge that scared her; it was what lay beneath. She would have to block the pit of bones from her mind and be her messenger self again, stopping at nothing to make an urgent delivery. She took a long breath, gripped her candle, fixed her eyes on the boards, and stepped onto them. Without pausing for even a second, she sped across the pit with a swift, steady stride. When she reached the other bank, she ran a few steps and then stopped, breathed again, and waited while her heart crashed around in her chest and her whole body trembled.
Then she went on her way, and before too long, she came to the place where the path began to slope upward along the cave wall.
It was a lonely, frightening walk, but almost easy compared to getting across the pit. Halfway up, when she was so high that she was once more looking down at the spot of fire glowing in the center of the city, her candle burned low and grew too warm to hold. She jammed it into a crack in the rocky wall beside her, and with shaky hands, she pulled another candle from her pack and held its wick to the flame. Here on this uneven ledge, with a steep drop inches away, she did not want to be left in total darkness even for a moment.
The climb seemed endless. Her legs began to ache, and the sound of her own hard breathing filled her ears. All the way, the image of Doon captured and tied up stayed with her, a terrible picture burned into her mind. She should have paid attention to her bad feeling about coming here. It was a mistake, a dreadful mistake.
But there was no point in thinking about that now. She was coming to the top of the path at last—she could tell by how far above the spot of light she was. And sure enough, a few more steps and she found herself on the ledge, with the entrance to the passage on her right. She sidled through and came out into the clean, cold air of the upper world.
The sun, low and red in the sky, blinded her for a moment. She could tell that it was late afternoon—maybe four o’clock or even later. Not much daylight was left. Could she find her way back to Sparks in the dark? She couldn’t bear leaving Doon a prisoner a second longer than she had to. She imagined how desperate he must be feeling. He wouldn’t even know if she’d got safely out of the cave. He might think she’d fallen into the pit or slipped off the edge of the path on the way up. She had to hurry.
So she retrieved the rolled-up blankets and supplies they’d left between the rocks and stuffed them into her pack. She began to walk, heading down around the mountain the way they’d come.
She’d gone no more than twenty steps when exhaustion washed over her like a wave. Her legs wobbled; her head felt heavy. There was no way around it: she would have to rest before she could go on. She staggered a little farther and made it to the main cave entrance. Inside, she threw a blanket on the ground, flopped down upon it, and went instantly to sleep.
When she awoke, the daylight was nearly gone, and somewhere not far away, someone was shouting. Lina scrambled to her feet, snatched up the blanket, and hurried out into the open. There she saw a startling sight: a tented wagon drawn by a scrawny horse. Beside it walked some sheep and a shepherd who Lina recognized right away: it was the roamer who had come to Sparks.
“Hey!” the shepherd shouted, starting toward Lina, coming through the flock of sheep, poking them out of the way with her long stick. The sheep bleated and sidestepped nervously.
Lina ran forward. “Please help me!” she cried. “I have to get home! I have to hurry!” In a rush, the awfulness of her situation came over her: Doon a prisoner, the sun going down, the long walk ahead. Her heart began to hammer.
The shepherd came closer. Her eyes were a watery blue in the red of her face, and her nose showed a network of fine red lines. “Are you lost? Are you a runaway?” She tilted her head and peered hard at Lina. “Haven’t I seen you before?”
“Yes,” said Lina. “I saw you in Sparks, where I live. That’s where I’m going. I have to get there tonight.”
The shepherd poked her stick at the rear end of a sheep that had separated itself from the rest. “Get back here, you filthy fluffball!” she yelled. Then she pointed the stick at Lina. “You,” she said, “are a foolish child. You can’t possibly get there tonight. What are you doing up here, anyhow, so far from home?”
The words spilled out of Lina in a rush. “We came to our old city, looking for things, but there are people living there, and they captured Doon! I have to get help for him!”
“Your old city?” said the shepherd.
“Yes, underground!” Lina’s voice was shaking. “Awful people have taken it over.”
“Captured your friend, you say?”
“Yes, tied him up!”
The shepherd crooked a corner of her mouth and shook her head. “Up to his mischief,” she muttered.
Before Lina could ask what she meant, the shepherd turned away abruptly. One of her sheep was wandering off. She strode after it and gave it a whack with her stick to steer it back toward the flock. “Move, fuzzface!” she yelled at it, and the sheep put its head down in a sorrowful way and trotted toward its companions.
Lina felt more and more desperate. How could she get this woman to help her? She saw that lanterns hung from the front and back of her wagon. There was even a lantern dangling from the side of the horse. So maybe the shepherd could travel at night. Besides, she’d been to Sparks before. She knew how to get there. “Could I go with you?” Lina called, running after the shepherd, who was still dealing with the wayward sheep. “Could you take me back to Sparks tonight?”
“I don’t travel at night.”
“But you could,” Lina said. “You have lanterns. You know the way.”
“I could,” said the shepherd. “But I don’t want to. Too hard and too dangerous. Wolves out there, you know. I heard them howling just a littl
e while ago. Besides, it’s going to rain.” She tilted her head toward the clouds at the horizon. “Anyhow, I’m not going that direction. I’m heading due south tomorrow. Just made my last delivery.” She thumped her stick on the ground. “He can get his own, after this,” she said. “Maggs is quitting!”
“Quitting what?” Maggs, Lina assumed, must be the shepherd’s name.
“Quitting this job of food-finder. I’m sick of it. It’s cold and miserable up here, and nobody in the towns has anything to trade with, and I’m through.”
Lina was confused. “Finding food for who?”
The shepherd flung up her arms, and her raggedy sleeves flapped in the wind. “My brother! King of the Underground!” she cried. “That’s what he’s made himself. And I’m supposed to drop down supplies for a few months and then go down there and join them. Well, I’ve decided I don’t want to. Especially if he’s taken to kidnapping people.” She shouted at her flock again, which had drifted away. “Scurvy beasts! Wretched meatbrains! Get back here!” She flailed her stick at them. The horse lowered its head and ripped up a mouthful of grass.
“You mean,” said Lina, putting all this together, “that’s your brother down there? That awful man?”
“He’s not that awful,” Maggs said. “He’s gotten too high and mighty, is the problem. Too set on having his perfect little world, all for himself.”
Lina was paying attention now. “How do you deliver food to him?”
“Just drop it down,” said Maggs, gesturing behind her in the direction of the crack in the mountainside. “You may not know this,” she said, “but I am a kind and caring person. If I could, I would let my brother know he’s just had his last delivery, and he’s on his own now. But if you think I’m going down into that dark old cave to tell him, you can think again.”
“Why didn’t you write him a message,” Lina asked, “when you made the delivery?”