The Diamond of Darkhold

by Jeanne DuPrau

  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.

  Gradually, as the news of the roamers’ arrival spread through town, people gathered in the plaza to see them. A murmur of disappointment ran through the crowd when the sorry-looking troop appeared. The man who seemed to be their leader was a short, stocky person with wild hair springing from every part of him. He wore a pair of big square-rimmed glasses, though anyone could see that the frames were empty, because a few of his eyebrow bristles poked right through. He jumped up onto a stack of boxes and began his spiel in a loud, growly voice.

  “Come and look!” he cried. “Bring your best goods, because you’ll see that we have what you want! Unusual items! Things never seen before! Gather around!”

  Doon had come into town that day to pick up some leftover scraps of lumber from the old town hall. Lina was at the bakery, buying bread. When the roamers came into the plaza and the man began to shout, both of them felt a jolt, as if they’d been suddenly struck by a flying stone, and they turned from their tasks and saw that they were right: the Troggs had come to Sparks.

  Doon spotted Lina coming out of the bakery and waved urgently at her. She saw him right away and hurried toward him through the growing crowd.

  “It’s them, isn’t it?” she said.

  Doon nodded. The sight of the Troggs was doing strange things to his stomach and stirring up unpleasant thoughts in his mind.

  “That woman is the roamer who sold you the book,” said Lina. “That’s Maggs, the shepherd, Trogg’s sister. She looks even worse than before.”

  “And that thin, sad-looking boy with the twisted leg is Scawgo,” said Doon. Seeing Scawgo struck him with a special pain. It was a complicated pain—sadness that he hadn’t been able to rescue Scawgo, as well as gratitude for Scawgo’s help. He hoped Scawgo had not had to take the blame for the diamond’s disappearance.

  “Step up!” Trogg shouted. “Look! I have canned corn and canned greens—it’s from the ancient days and yet just as good as when it was cooked. I have thirty-seven pairs of eyeglasses! I have sweaters, I have mittens, I have shoes for babies. I have four bottles of cough medicine, only partly used.”

  People pressed a little closer. Lina whispered to Doon, “Are you going to say something to him?”

  Doon’s thoughts felt like moths fluttering in his head. What to do? Speak out against Trogg? Dash up and snatch Scawgo away?

  “I have bags of wool,” Trogg called. “Good for stuffing pillows, good for weaving. You’ll need it for next winter, when that blasted cold weather comes again.” He heaved three fat bags from the back of the truck and plunked them down.

  “Nice, fluffy wool,” said Maggs. “No burrs in it. No dirt.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Lina whispered.

  “Also useful rainjackets.” Maggs held up a garment that looked very much like the covering of her old wagon, patched together from crinkled old pieces of plastic. “I made them myself.”

  “Step right up,” called Trogg, “and offer me some good trades for these exceptional wares. Especially welcome would be the fire-lighting gadgets I know you have in this town—matches. Special deals for those with matches.”

  People sighed and shrugged and shook their heads. They wouldn’t get those special deals, because the town had no matches. They’d used the last one just a few weeks ago.

  Doon felt a stab of a very unexpected emotion: he felt sorry for Trogg, who thought he knew everything. Trogg had had the key to light and power in his hands, but it did him no good, because he didn’t know what it was.

  The trading would start soon. Doon still wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to do, but he knew he had to make himself known to the Troggs and to Scawgo. He had to speak up. He turned to Lina. “I’m going to . . . I’m going up there.” He edged between the people in the crowd until he came to the front, and then he stood as tall as he could and called out, “Wash-ton Trogg!”

  Trogg jerked his head up. He spotted Doon instantly. His mouth opened as if he were going to speak, but there was a long pause before he did. Kanza and Yorick made noises of surprise in that pause, Minny wailed, and Scawgo cried out, “Doon!” in his high, wavery voice. But Trogg just glared for a long moment. Then his eyebrows came down like storm clouds, and his face crunched into a scowl. “Thief!” he shouted. “Sneaking, treacherous thief!”

  The crowd of villagers went silent, except for a few people at the back, saying, “What? Why is he shouting? What’s going on?”

  “It’s true,” Doon said. “I stole from you.”

  “And after I was so good to you, taking you into my own family!” Trogg was purple with rage. He shook his hairy fist at Doon. “Traitor, ingrate, robber!” he screamed.

  “Criminal!” yelled Yorick.

  Trogg reached sideways and socked him on the shoulder. “Quiet!” He glared at Doon. “You stole from me,” he said, “and you should pay.”

  “I have paid you,” said Doon. “With my time. And my labor.”

  Kanza shouted out. “That’s not enough! We were going to buy a castle with that thing!”

  Minny let out a piercing wail.

  Currents of excited talk ran through the crowd as people realized who these roamers were. The Emberites especially stared in fascination at the strange grubby people who had taken over their city. Lina, still standing at the back, heard them whispering to each other in tones of horror and outrage.

  “My daughter is right!” shouted Trogg. “It’s not enough!” He spread his arms wide and stared out at the villagers. “It’s wrong to protect a thief!” he roared. “I demand justice!”

  Before Doon could respond, another voice rang out. It was Scawgo, limping toward Trogg, then tugging at his sleeve. “It’s my fault, not his! I stole the diamond. Don’t blame him, please don’t.”

  And that was when it occurred to Doon that he could make everything right—he could do it easily, right here and now. “No,” he said. “I’m the one who wanted it, and I’m the one who took it away. So—I will give it back.”

  Trogg had been about to burst into another bout of rage. He had his fist in the air, ready to shake it at Doon. When he heard this, he stopped short. “What?”

  “I will return what I took,” said Doon. But he realized then that he couldn’t—not right here, not this moment. He had no diamond with him. He stood there uncertainly, reluctant to walk away, not sure what to do next.

  But Lina knew. “Doon!” she cried. “Wait one minute!” She elbowed her way through the crowd and darted into the nearest shop. In a moment, she was pressing through the crowd again, this time holding a diamond, and when she got to Doon, she gave it to him. He held it up so Trogg could see it. “Here it is!”Doon cried. “For you.”

  All the bluster went out of Trogg. He took the diamond and gaped at it, and his family gathered around him and stared, too. Minny stretched out a hand and stroked the diamond, as if it were a little animal. Kanza chuckled in glee.

  Scawgo, though, was looking at Doon, and his face was sad.

  The villagers watched all this, murmuring and muttering.

  “Well,” said Trogg finally. “You did the right and proper thing, Droon. Now that we have our property back, let’s get on with the trading.”

  “All right,” said Doon, “but first you have to listen to what I’m going to say.”

  Trogg shrugged. “Say it, then.”

  Everyone else listened, too, pressing up close. The mutterings and murmurings stopped.

  “My name is not Droon; it’s Doon. Doon Harrow. This
town, Sparks, is where I live. And the city of Ember—which you called Darkhold—is where I was born and grew up. And so did about four hundred of the people who now live in this town.”

  “No,” said Trogg. Kanza giggled nervously, and Yorick’s jaw dropped open.

  “Yes,” said Doon, and a chorus of agreement rose from the Emberites in the crowd.

  Trogg scratched his neck, frowning. “Now, hold on a minute here—” he said.

  “No,” said Doon. “You hold on.” He told him about the people of Ember and how they’d left the city and come to Sparks. He told him how he and Lina Mayfleet had returned to the city and how their plan had been so horribly interrupted by Trogg and his family. “It’s true,” he said. “I took your diamond when Scawgo offered it to me. I knew it belonged out in the world, not with you.”

  Trogg made a noise of disgust. “Pfffft. How could you possibly know that?”

  “I knew it because of the book you found with it,” Doon said. “The book I bought from your sister. It said, ‘For the people from Ember’ on the cover. Besides,” he added, “I was sure you didn’t know what the diamond really was.”

  “I did, too.” Trogg folded his arms and stuck his chin out stubbornly.

  “What was it, then?” asked Doon.

  “A jewel, nutbrain! I don’t suppose you miserable, poverty-stricken people have ever come across enough jewels to know one when you see one.”