CHAPTER 9

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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 wallah.”

“Wallah?” 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.”

“It isn’t blocked now,” Trogg said. “But it used to be. I could tell from looking at the stones lying outside it. They’re covered with earth and grass now, but still, my expert eye spotted them. Too square to be natural. What happened was, the earth shifted, and”—he put his palms together, made a growly creaking sound, and pulled them apart—“stones fell out, crack opened up,” he said.

Doon was confused. “What do you mean, the earth shifted?”

Trogg goggled at him as if he were an ignoramus. “Earthquake, boy! Never heard of them? Where have you been all your life? Didn’t you notice that dent in the ground leading up to the crack? It’s a sure sign. Earth shakes, falls in, everything budges, things that once were closed now are open. Probably happened in that quake we had ten or twelve years ago.”

“Oh,” said Doon. He hadn’t noticed any quake; but then, he would have been a baby, or not even born.

“So,” said Trogg, “I squeezed into that crack, found a skinny passage that led to a cliff at the edge of a huge hole. And down at the bottom of that hole, I saw—”

Utter darkness, thought Doon.

“Utter darkness,” said Trogg, “for a long time, and then—” He paused again, peering at Doon from under his bristling eyebrows—“and then . . . something breathing.”

“What?”

“Something breathing, I said. Aren’t you listening? It was like something breathing. Way down in there, a mist of light came up.” Trogg put his hands low to the ground and raised them slowly. “In the light, shapes, dark shapes like buildings. And then in a couple of minutes, it went down.” He floated his hands down. “Faded in, faded out. Like something breathing, like something almost dead, breathing.”

“Ah,” said Doon. The generator, he thought—its last gasps. Still sending out weak pulses of power now and then. He was filled with amazement and sorrow, as if the city were indeed a living thing on its way to death.

“Now,” said Trogg. “I should tell you that I am a rock climber. Fearless, and skillful as a spider. I saw this place; I knew it was meant for my family. I discovered the narrow path along the wall. I went down. A solo expedition. Encountered some trouble, though. That ditch out there. Very deep.”

Doon shuddered, remembering.

“Luckily,” Trogg went on, “I am a person of great ingenuity. I simply tied a hammer to the rope I carried with me and hurled it across, which let me measure, more or less, the width of the thing. Not out of the question, I thought. So I jumped it.”

“What?” said Doon, not sure if he’d heard right.

“Gave myself a good running start,” said Trogg, “and then”—he chugged his arms back and forth like pistons, clenched his face into ferocious determination, and roared—“r-r-r-r-rrrrrrraaaaaargh! Ran like crazy, leaped; almost made it.”

“Almost?”

“Hit the opposite bank, had to do some scrambling up through the bones and slime, but I got over.” Trogg beamed, clearly proud of himself.

Doon spent a moment imagining the kind of nerve it would take to jump over that ditch in the dark. Not to mention the leg muscles. He felt a kind of horrified admiration.

Trogg went on. “I found this place. I claimed it. I named it. Darkhold, because it is the dark place where we hold off the hard and treacherous world outside.” He swept out an arm in a lofty gesture, indicating his private kingdom. “Then I simply wrenched some boards off a wall, put together a decent bridge, and flopped it over the pit. Climbed back up to my family, told them my discovery. All of us came down, and we’ve been settling in ever since.”

“How long have you been here?” Doon asked.

“Four weeks. More or less,” Trogg said. “Hard to tell what divides day from night if there’s no sun. But we came prepared. We’ve got that.” He pointed, but Doon couldn’t tell what he was pointing at. “The hourglass, boy!” said Trogg. “Right there, on that heap of sacks!”

Doon had never heard the word “hourglass,” but he saw that it must be the thing shaped more or less like a figure eight—two glass funnel shapes attached one on top of the other, the top one right side up and the bottom one upside down, all of it held in a wooden frame. Something in the top funnel was sifting slowly down into the bottom one.

“Never seen one, hah, Droon? It works thusly: the sand trickles down from the top to the bottom in exactly eight hours. Then we turn the thing upside down, and it starts again. Sixteen hours equals day, eight hours equals night. All we have to do is remember to turn it.”

“Hmm,” said Doon. Actually, he thought this was a very clever device, but he didn’t want to admire it out loud.

“Whoever used to live here left in a hurry,” Trogg went on. “Abandoned all their stuff. This place is a treasure trove. We can live here, perfectly safe and comfortable, for a good long time. As long as no one tells the world about us.” He stood up and smacked his hands together. Yorick sprang up, too, and Doon saw the light-haired person struggle to his feet. “Now,” said Trogg. “We can get back to work, as soon as we take care of one thing.” He raised his bristling eyebrows at Doon.

And that was when, all of a sudden, the city breathed. The streetlamps over Harken Square buzzed and sizzled and blinked. Everyone stopped moving and looked up at them. Dimly, the lamps began to shine. Faint lights showed in the upstairs windows of a few apartments. The light grew brighter and brighter, until for a moment Doon saw Ember as he remembered it, its great lamps making pools of light on the streets, casting shadows, lighting the steps and columns of the Gathering Hall. And then the lights began to fade.

But before they did, Doon’s eye was caught by a quick movement down at the base of the Gathering Hall steps—a hand, fluttering. A face appeared beside it, and he realized it was Lina, leaning out from behind the big trash bin by the wall. Their eyes connected, and Doon, seeing that the Troggs were all gazing upward at the lights, shaped silent words with his mouth, hoping Lina would understand. Go home, he mouthed. He aimed a look upward to make clear what he meant. Get away. Go home. Get help. He thought he saw Lina nod—but then the lamps went out, and darkness fell again.

“So there you are,” said Trogg. “That’s what I was telling you about. Don’t suppose you’ve seen anything like that before, have you?”

“Not exactly,” said Doon.

“Think you could get used to living here?”

“No,” said Doon.

“Too bad,” said Trogg. “This is your new home.”