The Diamond of Darkhold - 4 Read Online Free PDF Page B

back room, where Edward Pocket was making his library, hadn’t been damaged, and some people had grumbled about that. Why couldn’t the useless books have gotten ruined instead of the food?
    Doon was standing outside the back room door. The wind flapped his jacket. He wasn’t wearing the old brown jacket he’d always worn before. In just the last month or so, that one had gotten impossibly small for him, and he now had a dark green one that came from the donation pile the people of Sparks had put together for their new citizens. It was a bit frayed around the cuffs, but at least his bare wrists didn’t poke out from the sleeves.
    “Come inside,” Doon said, “out of the wind.” He led her into the back room, where a giant heap of books had accumulated over the years. They picked their way among the tumbled piles in the dim light coming from the one dirty window. Doon made two book stacks for them to sit on. Before Lina could say anything, he began explaining. “I know you think I’ve lost my mind,” he said.
    “Well,” Lina said, “I do think so, sort of. I don’t see how we could find our way to Ember. Even if we could, it would take too long to get there—we’d have to be out in the cold at night. It took us four days to get to Sparks after we came out of Ember.”
    “But you and I could go much faster,” Doon said. “When we came from Ember, we had old people and small children with us, and we didn’t know where we were going. You and I could do it in one long day’s walk, I’m sure.”
    “But even if we could get there,” said Lina, “we couldn’t get into the city. We couldn’t go against the current up the river.”
    “I know,” said Doon. “But we might be able to get in from above. I’m thinking we could go back to that ledge we threw the message from. We could check the slope of the cliff. Maybe we could get down it.”
    “But even if we could get down,” Lina said, “the city’s completely dark. We’d never find anything there—even if we did know what we were looking for.”
    “But we have candles now,” Doon said. “We’ll take lots of them with us. I’ll study every word of that book for clues about what we’re looking for and where it is. And listen—we might not find the thing in the book, but we could find other things. There might still be food there. Or medicine. Remember that salve we used to rub on cuts? If some of that was left, it could help my father. He won’t say so, but I can tell his hand hurts him terribly. It might be infected.”
    “I remember that salve,” Lina said. “It was called Anti-B. I think we still had an old tube of it at Granny’s, mostly empty.”
    “Even a little would help,” Doon said. “And there might be other useful things people could trade with. We could find out.”
    Lina could see how excited he was, how much he wanted to do this. To her it seemed dangerous, difficult, and probably hopeless. But she had to admit that his excitement inspired her a bit. Life had been hard and dull lately; an adventure would change that. She wasn’t a bit sure that Doon’s plans would succeed. Things were always so much neater in a person’s imagination than they were in real life. But just to go on a journey, even if they found nothing and had to turn right around and come home . . . She was tempted.
    “But we can’t just disappear,” Lina said. “People would worry.” She remembered how terribly anxious Mrs. Murdo had been the two times before when she’d gone away without saying where she was going: when she left Ember on the day of the Singing, and just a few months ago when she went off to the ancient ruined city. She didn’t want to put Mrs. Murdo through that again.
    But Doon had all this figured out, too. It was complicated, but he was sure it would work. Lina, he said, must go and talk to Maddy. She was the one who’d come to town during the summer with Torren’s brother, Caspar, and stayed on, after Caspar’s quest