Read Online The Diamond of Darkhold - 4 by Jeanne DuPrau - Free Book Online Page A

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