The Diamond of Darkhold - 4 (10 page)

“Doom!” said Trogg. He grinned, revealing square yellow teeth. “What a name! Your parents must have known you were headed for trouble.”

“Not
Doom,
” said Doon. “Doon, with an
n.
”

“Oh,” said Trogg. “All right, Doon. We’re going to have to tie you up for now. Sit him here, Yorick.” The son pushed Doon into the chair and held him there while Trogg rooted around in the heaps of stuff and came up with a long rope. A black rage filled Doon as they wound it around him, and he kicked and thrashed and tried his best to butt them with his head—but their strength was too much for him, and in minutes he was bound up like a package, tied to the chair, hands and feet completely helpless.

The wife and daughter dragged a couple of boxes up close and sat on them to stare at the curious captured creature. The son stood next to Doon, looking eager to reach out and twist an arm if necessary. The father pulled a pair of glasses from the pocket of the loose, grubby shirt he wore. He put the glasses on and squinted through them. They had heavy dark rims and made his wide face look like a brick wall with two windows in it. His hands grasped his knees, his elbows sticking out. Behind him, the fire smoked and smoldered.

“So,” he said. “What I want to know is, who are you? How did you get here? And why did you come?”

The whole family leaned forward to hear Doon’s answer. Even the light-haired person lurking in the background came a few steps closer. But Doon was still so flabbergasted by the astonishing presence of these strange people in his city that his mind was a whirl of confusion. He couldn’t think of an answer. He stared at the faces confronting him and at the flames just behind them. It was like being in a bad dream, the kind where you’re in some familiar place—your own bedroom, or your school room—that has been strangely changed so it doesn’t look like itself. Worse, it doesn’t
feel
like itself. That was how Harken Square felt now. Where there used to be glowing streetlamps and people crossing the wide space on their errands, there was this savage fire and this strange and terrible family.

“Speak up!” cried Trogg. “Explain yourself!”

Doon stumbled over his words. “I just . . . I just happened to . . . I’m just here by accident. I’ll leave right away.”

“No,” said Trogg, “you will not.”

“Just try it,” said the son, yanking on Doon’s arm. “You’ll get your bones broken.”

“No breaking bones!” Trogg punched the air in his son’s direction. “I’m doing the talking here. Be quiet. And get me a different pair of glasses. I can’t see right through these.” He yanked them off.

Yorick hurried over to a box that seemed to be full of glasses. Doon heard them rattling as Yorick shuffled through them.

“Here,” Yorick said, handing his father a wire-rimmed pair. Trogg put them on. They made his eyes look huge.

“Really,” said Doon. “If you let go of me, I’ll leave right this minute. I was planning to anyway. Why do you think I only brought one candle?” He thought with gratitude of his pack, lying in the dark back on Grey-stone Street where he had set it down. “I just wanted to take a look,” he went on. “Sorry to intrude. I didn’t know you were here. I didn’t know
any
of this was here.” He made a rolling motion with his head, indicating the city. “I found a crack in the mountain, and then I . . . and then there was a path, and so . . .” He trailed off. “So if you’ll just untie me, I’ll get out right away.”

“Not possible,” said Trogg. “You don’t understand. Now that you’re here, you have to stay.”

Crouched behind the trash bin, with the stink of old garbage in her nose, gazing in horror at the transformed Harken Square, Lina had seen Doon’s captors drag him out into the square. She had watched as they tied him up and showed him off to the other people. She could see—she could
feel
—Doon’s fury as the bearded man scolded him and jabbed him with questions. She, too, felt angry. Who
were
these people who thought they owned the city? But her fear was stronger than her anger.

The words Doon had called out repeated themselves in her mind.
Get away! Go home, get help. Get away! Go home, get help.
She was so stunned by what had happened, she could hardly make sense of them. Go home? What could he have meant? Her thoughts went first to the home she’d had here in Ember, over on Quillium Square, with her grandmother and Poppy. But of course that was her home no more. Her home was in Sparks now, a long day’s walk across the hills. Could Doon really mean she should go back there? Back out through the Unknown Regions, back across the planks that bridged the pit, back up that long, long path?

She hid behind the trash bin until her legs began to ache from holding so still. She heard everything—or almost everything. Sometimes the voices were too low or were drowned out by a burst of crackling from the fire. But she heard enough to know that these people had taken over her city and had captured Doon and did not intend to let him go.

There
must
be some way to rescue him without going back to Sparks for help. Ideas sped through her mind:

Could she make a noise and get the Troggs to run after her, giving Doon time to untie himself and escape? No, because surely they wouldn’t
all
run after her. Someone would be left behind to guard the captive. Besides, how could Doon untie himself? His hands were bound.

Could she dash out there, taking them all by surprise, and untie Doon and run off with him? No, because the untying would take too long, and they’d just capture her, too.

Could she wait and watch and hope for a chance to free him some other time? But when would that be? It might take days and days. She might
never
get the chance.

There was no other way: to get help for Doon, she’d have to go back to Sparks. All that distance, and fast, and by herself.

CHAPTER 9
______________________

Perfectly Safe and Comfortable

Doon stared up at Trogg’s smug smile. “Stay?” he said. “What do you mean, stay?”

“I mean live here with us, of course,” said Trogg. “Otherwise, you’d go out there and tell the world, right? Underground city! Room for hundreds! Pioneer family already living there, done the hard work; all we have to do is move in!”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Doon.

“Of course you would. Anyone would. Then we’d have the hordes down here, ruining everything. We can’t have that. This is our domain, our stronghold, our place of safety. So you’ll have to stay. Don’t worry, we can use you. There’s plenty of work. Count yourself lucky to have found us.” He scratched at his neck, digging with a grimy fingernail through the thick tangle of beard. “What were you doing, anyhow, wandering around in the mountains? Lost? Got left behind by your parents?”

Doon ignored this question. “Why do you think hordes of people would come
here
?” he said. “This place is—not fit to live in.”

Trogg thrust his face toward Doon and narrowed his eyes. “Up above,” he said, “life is tough. There’s rain, wind, and snow, in case you haven’t noticed. Food is scarce. Rats eat your grain; wolves steal your flocks. Worst of all, people are always getting in your way, bossing you around. Up there, it’s work and trouble all the time.”

“Oh,” said Doon. He realized he’d had a similar thought himself, earlier this same day.

“Bandits, too,” said Trogg. “Mustn’t forget to mention bandits.”

“I don’t know much about bandits,” Doon said.

“Well, let me tell you,” said Trogg. “My family knows about them. We know a lot more than we want to know. Bandits came to our village.”

The whole family pressed closer to Doon, staring down at him, their backs to the fire, their faces lit only dimly by the candles they wore in their strange caps. They were a circle of fire-horned monsters, looming over him, closing in. He stifled the urge to scream at them and struggle. It wouldn’t help. He would have to use his wits to get out of this. Pay attention, pay attention, he reminded himself. It was what his father had told him when he first started working in the Pipeworks, the vast system of tunnels beneath Ember’s streets, down by the river that supplied the city’s water. It had helped him then. Maybe it would help him now, too. So he listened hard to what Trogg was saying.

“They came out of the forest,” Trogg said, “roaring at the top of their lungs.”

“They had torches,” said Kanza, stretching one hand up over her head. “Three-foot-high flames.”

“Oh, the terror, the terror,” wailed the mother, as if she were seeing it all happening again. She clasped her head in her hands and pulled down, making her eyes droop at the sides and turning her mouth into an upside-down U. “Woe and alas! I thought our house would burn. I thought my children would die.”

“And our house
did
burn!” cried Trogg. “They rampaged through the village. They set fire to our roofs; they stole the stores from our barns; they drove off our animals.”

“And even worse,” said Yorick, bending over to speak into Doon’s ear, “they had knives and they—”

“Silence!” shouted Trogg. “I’m telling this story! They had knives as long as your arm, boy. Torch in one hand, knife in the other. Anyone stupid enough to step out of the house got sliced up like a piece of cheese.”

“And not only that,” said Kanza, “anyone stupid enough to stay
inside
the house got burned up like a stick of wood!”

“Not us, though,” said Yorick.

“Not us,” said Trogg, “because I know trouble when I see it coming, and I hustled my family out the back just in time.”

“We hid in the mud,” said Kanza.

“Behind the pigsty,” said Yorick.

“Oh, it was dreadful.” Minny rocked from side to side, still holding her head. “The foul odors. The shrieking from beyond. But my husband is so brave, so clever, so—”

“So when those barbarian bandits had gone,” Trogg interrupted, “we got busy, the few of us left in the village, treating wounds, building houses, fixing our fences and our wagons and starting all over.”

“It was three years ago,” said Kanza.

“No, four,” said Yorick.

“Quiet!” shouted Trogg. “Your sister’s right, you ignorant pup. It was three years ago. And then just a few weeks ago, I heard that more were on the way.” He shook his finger in Doon’s face. “Do you think I was going to sit still and wait for them to show up?”

“I don’t know,” said Doon, who was trying hard to pay attention to this horrible story coming at him from all directions.

“You don’t know? You don’t know?” screamed Trogg. His glasses slid down his nose, and he ripped them off. “Maybe you’re the kind of person who would leave his family in danger, but not me! I take action! I packed up my wagon, loaded in my family, and headed out to look for a place of safety.”

“Like a remote valley,” said Kanza.

“Or an ancient abandoned lodge on a high peak,” said Yorick.

“But what we found,” said Trogg, “was far, far better.”

“It sure was,” said Yorick eagerly. “You oughta see what we discovered when we went back into the—”

Trogg jumped to his feet and let loose an absolute explosion of fury and insults. When he’d finished calling Yorick a dozen kinds of mush-brained idiot, he lowered his voice and hissed at him, “We don’t talk about that. Not to someone who just showed up out of nowhere. When the time comes to talk about it,
I
will do the talking.”

Yorick cowered, hunching his shoulders up around his ears. “Sorry,” he said. “Forgot.”

“Oh, Yorick, Yorick, alas,” moaned his mother. “You’ll endanger us all if you aren’t more careful. Listen to your father.”

“To go on,” said Trogg, sitting back down. “What we found was the entrance to a cave. We went in; we found a nice smooth wide path; we followed it down and down, quite a distance. And at the bottom, we found something very interesting, boy,” said Trogg. “You would never guess.”

I bet I would, Doon thought.

“We found a pool,” said Trogg, “jammed with empty boats.
Jammed.
There must have been a hundred of ’em, just floating there, some of them wrecked, some of them half sunk. ‘Something happened here,’ I says to Yorick. We didn’t like the look of it. We could tell these boats had come on an underground river. Only way to travel that river from where we were was to swim upstream.”

“Which we didn’t want to do,” said Yorick.

“So we went back out, tramped around some more, and wal
lah
.”

“Wal
lah
?” said Doon.

“Ancient expression,” said Trogg. “It means, ‘there it is.’ A crack in the mountainside. And here’s an interesting thing, boy, that I spotted because of my long experience observing the terrain. Somebody
made
that crack and then blocked it up.”

“But it wasn’t blocked,” said Doon. “That’s how I came in here.”