CHAPTER 18
Caspar’s Quest
On the last night of their journey to the city, the travelers stayed in a real house. It was roofless, but most of its walls still stood, providing shelter from the wind that blew strongly off the water. There was no furniture in the house, of course. They sat on the bare floor.
Caspar was excited that night. He talked so much that he almost forgot to eat—his third travelers’ cake sat on his knee getting cold. At one point, he turned to face Lina. “Now, listen,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something, so you’ll understand the importance of what we’re doing.” He paused. Then he spoke in a low, vibrating voice. “I happen to know,” he said, “that there is a treasure in the city.”
“There is?” said Lina. “How do you know?”
“Old rhymes and songs speak of it,” said Caspar.
“The trouble is,” said Maddy, “those old rhymes and songs don’t make sense anymore. If they ever did.”
“They make sense to me,” Caspar said. “But that’s because I’ve studied them carefully and have found out their deeper meaning.”
“What do the old rhymes say?” Lina asked.
“Various things,” said Caspar, “depending on what version you hear. But they’re always about a treasure in an ancient city.” He looked into the air and sang tunelessly: “‘There’s buried treasure in the ancient city. Remember, remember from times of old. . . .’ One of them starts like that.”
“Why hasn’t anyone searched for the treasure before?” asked Lina.
“I’m sure many people have,” Caspar said. “But no one has found it.”
“How do you know?” Lina asked.
“Because obviously, if someone had, we would have heard about it.”
Lina thought about this. She saw some holes in Caspar’s logic. Someone could have found the treasure, taken it away, and never said a word.
“Another problem,” said Maddy, “is that these rumors never say what city the treasure is in. It could be some city a thousand miles away.”
Caspar gave an exasperated sigh and set down his cup of water. He raised two fingers and pointed them at Maddy. “Listen,” he said. “Be logical. It’s here that the rumors are passed around. I’ve never heard them in the far north, where I was last year. I’ve never heard them in the far east, either. This talk of treasure in a city—I hear it here, and within a hundred or so miles of here.”
“Still,” Maddy said. “There are at least three ancient cities within a hundred miles of here.”
“But only one great ancient city,” said Caspar. “That’s the one we’re going to.”
“A city is big,” Lina said, remembering the myriad streets and buildings of Ember. “How will you know where in the city to look for the treasure?”
A crafty look came over Caspar’s face. He smiled, with his lips pressed together and his eyes narrowed. “That’s where my careful study comes in,” he said. “Many, many hours of study. I’ve written down every version of the rhyme I’ve heard—which is a great many, forty-seven to be exact. I’ve compared them, word for word, letter for letter. Then—” Caspar paused. He looked at them in a way Lina recognized—it was the same way Torren looked when he was about to make a big impression. “Then I applied my skill with numbers.”
“Numbers?” said Lina.
“That’s right. What you do is, you count the letters in the words. You count in all different ways, until you start to see a pattern. The pattern is the key to the code, and the code tells you the secret of the message.” He sat back, looking highly pleased with himself.
“And the secret of the message . . . ,” Lina said, confused.
“Is the location of the treasure, of course!” Caspar slapped a hand on his big thigh. “It’s obvious, once you’ve figured it out. Street numbers, building numbers—it’s all there.”
“Well, then,” said Maddy, “what is the location of the treasure?”
Caspar jerked his head back. “You think I’d tell you?” he said.
“I thought I was your partner in this,” said Maddy.
“You’ll know when it’s time,” said Caspar. “Until then, the information stays strictly with me.”
Lina glanced at Maddy in time to see her rolling her eyes toward the sky.
That night, Lina couldn’t sleep. Animal sounds kept her awake—scrambling and snuffling just beyond the walls, and a strange hooting in the distance. Dark thoughts troubled her, too. Caspar’s search sounded all wrong somehow. She didn’t want to help him. The thought of it filled her with dread. She lay on the hard floor of the house, staring at the black sky, feeling worse and worse, until finally she decided she must try to think about something else. So she said to herself, over and over for a long time, “Tomorrow I’ll see the city, tomorrow I’ll see the city.”
They traveled the next day, mile after mile, along a road that was nearly straight, though they had to trace a winding path around the places where the pavement was pitted or thrust up or crumbled away. On their right was the vast green sheet of water, bordered by waving grasses where great white birds stood knee-deep in pools and rose like floating paper, and flocks of black birds flew up trilling into the air, their shoulders red as blood. On the left was a forest of trees so thick they hid all but the briefest glimpses of the ruined buildings among them.
Lina’s excitement was rising. She rode standing up now. She’d climbed back into the crate and stuck her feet between the third and fourth slats of the side, which put her at the right height for holding on to the top edge and looking forward. She could see over Caspar’s and Maddy’s heads to the rear ends of the oxen, their sharp hip bones sticking up, left-right, left-right, their tasseled tails switching back and forth. The sun sank lower in the sky until it was directly ahead, blazing straight into Lina’s eyes. “We’ll be there before night,” Caspar said.
The road began to slope upward. Hills rose on either side, and soon Lina could no longer see the water, just the brown humps of the hills, spotted with clumps of trees and scarred here and there by the remains of old roads and buildings. The air was cooler. They rounded a curve—and all at once the city lay before them.