The City of Ember (17 page)

CHAPTER 18

Where the River Goes

For a second, Lina saw the banks of the river streak by. Ahead was the opening of the tunnel, like an enormous mouth. They plunged into it and left the light of the Pipeworks behind. In complete darkness, the boat pitched and rolled, and Lina, in the bottom of it, banged from side to side, gripping Poppy with one arm and grabbing with the other hand for anything to hold on to. Doon slid into her, and she slid into the boxes. Poppy was shrieking wildly.

“Doon!” Lina shouted, and he shouted back, “Hold on! Hold on!” But she kept losing her grip on the edge of the boat and being flung sideways. She was terrified that Poppy would slam into the metal bench, or be torn from her arms and tossed into the river.

The boat hit something and shuddered, then raced on. It felt like being swallowed, this rushing through the dark, with the river roaring like a thousand voices.

Lina’s legs were tangled with Doon’s, and Poppy’s arms were so tight around her neck that she could hardly breathe. But it was the dark that was most terrible—going so fast into the dark.

She closed her eyes. If they were going to smash into a wall or plunge into a bottomless hole, there was nothing she could do about it. All she could do was hold tight to Poppy. She did that, for what seemed a long time.

And then at last the current slowed, and the boat stopped thrashing about so wildly. Lina managed to sit up, and she felt Doon moving, too. Poppy’s shrieks turned to whimpers. The darkness was still complete, but Lina sensed space above and around her. Where were they? She had to
see.

“Doon!” she said. “Are you all right? Can you find us a candle?”

“I’ll try,” Doon said. She felt him scramble past her to the back of the boat, and she heard a scrape as he pulled a box out from its place under the bench. “Can’t find the latch!” Doon said. Then a second later, “There, I’ve got it. This is the matches, so this one must be candles.” More scraping and banging. The boat lurched, Lina slid forward. Doon slid, too, and slammed into her back. He gave a yell of rage. “Dropped the match! Hold on, I almost had it.” Long seconds of scrambling and clattering. Then a light flared up, and Doon’s shadowed face appeared above it. He touched the match to a candle, and the light grew steadier.

It was only a small flame, but it cast glints of light on the tunnel walls and the silky surface of the water. The tunnel had an arched ceiling, Lina saw, like the tunnels of the Pipeworks, but it was much wider than those tunnels. The river ran through it like a moving road.

“Can you light another?” Lina asked. Doon nodded and turned back to the boxes, but once again the boat struck something, causing a spray of water to slap into them and put the candle out.

It was several minutes before Doon managed to light it again, and more before he finally had two burning at once. He jammed one of them into a space between the bench and the side of the boat, and he held the other in his hand. His hair was flattened against his forehead, and dripping. His brown jacket was torn at the shoulder. “That’s better,” he said.

It was better—not only did they have light to see by, but the current was slower, and the boat sailed more smoothly. Lina was able to unwrap Poppy from her neck and look around. Ahead she could see that the tunnel curved. The boat swung into the curve, banged against the wall, straightened itself, and sped on. “Hand me a candle, too,” she said.

Doon gave Lina the candle he was holding and lit another. They found places to wedge all three candles into the frame of the boat, so they could keep their hands free. For a while they rushed along almost silently, the river having become nearly as smooth as a sheet of glass.

Then suddenly the current slowed even more, and the tunnel opened out. “We’ve come into a room,” said Lina. Far overhead arched a vaulted ceiling. Columns of rock hung down from it, and columns of rock rose from the water, too, making long shadows that turned and mingled as the boat floated among them. They glimmered in the candlelight, pink and pale green and silver. Their strange lumpy shapes looked like something soft that had frozen—like towers of mashed potatoes, Lina thought, that had hardened to stone.

Now and then the boat bumped into one of these columns, and they found that they could use a paddle to knock themselves free again. In this way they crossed the room to the other side, where again the passage narrowed and the current ran faster.

Much faster. It was as if the boat were being pulled forward by a powerful hand. The water grew rough again, and splashes of spray put out their candles. Lina and Doon huddled in the bottom of the boat with Poppy between them, their arms clasped around her. They clenched their teeth and squeezed their eyes shut, and soon there was nothing in their minds but the roll and plunge of the boat and nothing in their bodies but the effort not to be thrown out. Once, the sound of the river rose to a crashing, and the front of the boat tipped downward, and they were pitched about so violently that it seemed they were tumbling down stairs—but that lasted only a few seconds, and then they were streaming onward as before.

Lina lost track of time. But a while later, maybe a few minutes, maybe an hour, the current slowed. The candles they’d stuck in the boat had been knocked overboard, so Doon lit new ones. They saw that they had come to another pool. There were no lumpy columns of rock here; nothing interrupted the wide flat surface of the water, which stretched out before them in the flickering light from their candles. The ceiling was smooth and only about ten feet above their heads. The boat drifted, as if it had lost its sense of direction. Using a paddle to poke against the walls, Doon guided the boat around the edge of the pool.

“I don’t see where the river goes on,” said Doon. “Do you?”

“No,” said Lina. “Unless it’s there, where it flows into that little gap.” She pointed to a crack in the wall only a few inches wide.

“But the boat can’t go there.”

“No, it’s much too small.”

He poled the boat forward. Their shadows moved with them along the wall.

“Wanna go home,” said Poppy.

“We’re almost there,” Lina told her.

“We certainly can’t go back the way we came,” said Doon.

“No.” Lina dipped a hand in the water. It was so cold it sent an ache up her arm.

“Could this be the end?” said Doon. His voice sounded flat in this closed-in place.

“The end?” Lina felt a shiver of fear.

“I mean the end of the trip,” Doon said. “Maybe we’re supposed to get out over there.” He pointed to a wide expanse of rock that sloped back into the darkness on one side of the pool. Everywhere else, the walls rose straight out of the water.

He poled the boat over to the rock slope. The boat scraped bottom here—the water was shallow. “I’ll get out and see if this goes anywhere,” said Lina. “I want to be on solid ground again, anyway.” She handed Poppy to Doon and stood up. Holding a candle, she put one foot over the edge of the boat and into the cold water, and she waded ashore.

The way did not look promising. The ground sloped upward, and the ceiling sloped downward. As she went farther back she had to stoop. A few yards in, a tumbled heap of rocks blocked the way. She inched around them, turning sideways to squeeze through the narrow space, and crept forward, holding the candle out in front of her. This goes nowhere, she thought. We’re trapped.

But a few steps farther along, she found she could stand up straight again, and a few steps beyond that she turned a corner, and suddenly the candlelight shone on a wide path, with a high ceiling and a smooth floor. Lina gave a wild shout. “Here it is!” she cried. “It’s here! There’s a path!”

Doon’s voice came from far away. She couldn’t tell what he was saying. She made her way back toward the boat, and when it came in sight she yelled again, “I found a path! A path!”

Doon scrambled out and waded ashore, carrying Poppy. He set her down, and then he and Lina took hold of the boat and hauled it as far as they could up the slope of rock. Poppy caught the excitement. She shouted gleefully, waving her fists like little clubs, and stomped around, glad to be on her feet again. She found a pebble and plunked it into the water, crowing happily at the splash it made.

“I want to see the path,” said Doon.

“Go up that way,” Lina told him, “and around the pile of rocks. I’ll stay here and take things out of the boat.”

Doon went, taking another candle from the box in the boat. Lina sat Poppy down in a kind of nook formed by a roundish boulder and a hollow in the wall. “Don’t move from here,” she said. Then she pulled Doon’s bundle from under the seat of the boat. It was damp, but not soaked. Maybe the food inside would still be all right. She was hungry all of a sudden. She’d had no dinner, she remembered. It must be the middle of the night by now, or maybe even morning again.

She carried Doon’s bundle ashore, along with the boxes of candles and matches, and as she set them down, Doon came back. His eyes were glowing, the reflection of a tiny flame dancing in each one. “That’s it for sure,” he said. “We’ve made it.” Then his eyes shifted. “What’s Poppy got?” he asked.

Lina whipped around. In Poppy’s hands was something dark and rectangular. It wasn’t a stone. It was more like a packet of some kind. She was plucking and pulling at it. She lifted it to her mouth as if to tear it with her teeth—and Lina jumped to her feet. “Stop!” she shouted. Poppy, startled, dropped the packet and began to cry.

“It’s all right, never mind,” Lina said, retrieving what Poppy had been about to chew on. “Come and have some dinner now. Hush, we’re going to have dinner. I’m sure you’re hungry.”

In the light of Doon’s candle, with Poppy squirming on Lina’s lap, they examined Poppy’s find. The packet was wrapped in slippery, greenish material and bound up with a strap. It wasn’t wrapped very well; it looked as if someone had bundled it up quickly. The material was loose, and blotched with whitish mold.

Lina edged the strap off carefully. It was partly rotten; on the end of it was a small square buckle, covered with rust. She folded back the wrapping.

Doon took a sharp breath. “It’s a book,” he said. He moved his candle closer, and Lina opened the brown cover. The pages inside had faint blue lines across them, and someone had written along these lines in slanted black letters, which were not neat like the writing in the library books, but sprawling, as if the writer had been in a hurry.

Doon ran his finger under the first line. “It says,
They tell us we
. . . learn? . . . No, leave.
They tell us we leave tonight.
”

He looked up and met Lina’s eyes.

“Leave?” said Lina. “From where?”

“From Ember?” Doon asked. “Could someone have come this way before us?”

“Or was it someone leaving the other city?”

Doon looked down at the book again. He riffled through the pages—there were many of them.

“Let’s save it,” said Lina. “We’ll read it when we get to the new city.”

Doon nodded. “It’ll be easier to see there.”

So Lina wrapped up the book again and tied it securely into Doon’s bundle. They sat on the rock shelf for a while, eating the food Doon had brought. The candles wedged in the boat still shone steadily, and their light was cozy, like lamplight. It made golden shapes on the still surface of the pond.

Doon said, “I saw the guards run after you. Tell me what happened.”

Lina told him.

“And what about Poppy? What did you tell Mrs. Murdo?”

“I told her the truth—at least I hope it’s the truth. I caught up with her on her way home after the Singing. She’d seen the posters—she was terrified—but before she could ask questions, I just said she must give Poppy to me. I said I was taking her to safety. Because that’s what I suddenly realized on the roof of the Gathering Hall, Doon. I’d been thinking before that I
had
to leave Poppy because she’d be safe with Mrs. Murdo. But when the lights went out, I suddenly knew: There
is
no safety in Ember. Not for long. Not for anyone. I couldn’t leave her behind. Whatever happens to us now, it’s better than what’s going to happen there.”

“And did you explain all that to Mrs. Murdo?”

“No. I was in a terrible hurry to get to the Pipeworks and meet you, and I knew I had to go while there were still crowds in the street, so it would be harder for the guards to see me. I just said I was taking Poppy to safety. Mrs. Murdo handed her over, but she sort of sputtered, ‘Where?’ and ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘You’ll know in a few days—it’s all right.’ And then I ran.”

“So you gave her the note, then?” said Doon. “The one meant for Clary?”

“Oh!” Lina stared at him, stricken. “The message to Clary!” She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out the crumpled piece of paper. “I forgot all about it! All I was thinking of was getting Poppy and getting to you.”

“So no one knows about the room full of boats.”

Lina just shook her head, her eyes wide. “How will we get back to tell them?”

“We can’t.”

“Doon,” said Lina, “if we’d told people right away, even just a few people . . . if we hadn’t decided to be grand and announce it at the Singing . . .”

“I know,” said Doon. “But we didn’t, that’s all. We didn’t tell, and now no one knows. I did leave a message for my father, though.” He told Lina about pinning his last-minute message to the kiosk in Selverton Square. “I said we’d found the way out, and that it was in the Pipeworks. But that’s not much help.”

“Clary has seen the Instructions,” Lina said. “She knows there’s an egress. She might find it.”

“Or she might not.”

There was nothing to be done about it, and so they put the supplies back into Doon’s pillowcase and got ready to go. Lina used Doon’s rope to make a leash for Poppy. She tied one end around Poppy’s waist and the other around her own. She filled her pockets with packs of matches, and Doon put all the remaining candles in his sack—in case they arrived in the new city at night. He filled his bottle with river water, lit a candle for himself and one for Lina, and thus equipped, they left the boat behind and crept up the rocky shelf to the path.