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

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