Inheritance i-4

by Christopher Paolini

  Once the bowl was full, Eragon retreated a few feet and set it on a piece of stone that was the height of a table. Then he fixed an image of Roran in his mind and murmured, “Draumr kopa.”

  The water in the bowl shimmered, and an image of Roran appeared against a pure white background. He was walking next to Horst and Albriech, leading his horse, Snowfire. The three men looked tired and footsore, but they still carried weapons, so Eragon knew the Empire had not captured them.

  He next scryed Jormundur, then Solembum-who was tearing at a freshly killed robin-and then Arya, but Arya’s wards hid her from his sight, and all he saw was blackness.

  At last Eragon released the spell and tossed the water back into the puddle. As he climbed over the barrier surrounding their camp, Saphira stretched and yawned, arching her back like a cat, and said, How are they?

  “Safe, as far as I can tell.”

  He dropped the bowl on the saddlebags, then lay on his bedroll, closed his eyes, and returned to scouring his mind for ideas as to what his true name might be. Every few minutes, he thought of a different possibility, but none touched a chord within him, so he discarded them and began anew. All of the names contained a few constants: the fact that he was a Rider; his affection for Saphira and Arya; his desire to vanquish Galbatorix; his relationships with Roran, Garrow, and Brom; and the blood he shared with Murtagh. But no matter in what combination he placed those elements, the name did not speak to him. It was obvious that he was missing some crucial aspect of himself, so he kept making the names longer and longer in the hope that he might stumble across whatever it was he was overlooking.

  When the names began to take him more than a minute to say, he realized he was wasting his time. He needed to reexamine his basic assumptions once again. He was convinced that his mistake lay in failing to notice some fault, or in not giving enough consideration to a fault he was already aware of. People, he had observed, were rarely willing to acknowledge their own imperfections, and he knew the same was true of himself. Somehow he had to cure himself of that blindness while he yet had time. It was a blindness born of pride and self-preservation, as it allowed him to believe the best of himself as he went about his life. However, he could no longer afford to indulge in such self-deception.

  Thus he thought and continued to think as the day wore on, but his efforts met only with failure.

  The rain grew heavier. Eragon disliked the sound of it drumming against the puddles, for the featureless noise made it difficult to hear if anyone was trying to sneak up on them. Since their first night on Vroengard, he had seen no sign of the strange, hooded figures whom he had watched wending their way through the city, nor had he felt any hint of their minds. Nevertheless, Eragon remained conscious of their presence, and he could not help feeling that he and Saphira were about to be attacked at any moment.

  The gray light of day slowly faded to dusk, and a deep, starless night settled across the valley. Eragon heaped more wood onto the fire; it was the only illumination within the nesting house, and the cluster of yellow flames was like a tiny candle within the huge, echoing space. Close to the fire, the glassy floor reflected the glow of the burning branches. It gleamed like a sheet of polished ice, and the blades of color within often distracted Eragon from his brooding.

  Eragon ate no dinner. He was hungry, but he was too tense for food to sit well in his stomach, and in any case, he felt that a meal would slow his thinking. Never was his mind so keen as when his belly was empty.

  He would not, he decided, eat again until he knew his true name, or until they had to leave the island, whichever came first.

  Several hours passed. They spoke little amongst themselves, although Eragon remained conscious of the general drift of Saphira’s moods and thoughts, even as she remained conscious of his.

  Then, as Eragon was about to enter into his waking dreams-both to rest and out of hope that the dreams might provide some insight-Saphira uttered a yowl, reached forward with her right paw, and slapped it upon the floor. Several branches within the fire crumbled and fell apart, sending a burst of sparks toward the black ceiling.

  Alarmed, Eragon sprang to his feet and drew Brisingr while he searched the darkness beyond the half circle of stones for enemies. An instant later, he realized that Saphira’s mood was not one of concern or anger but of triumph.

  I have done it! exclaimed Saphira. She arched her neck and loosed a jet of blue and yellow flame into the upper reaches of the building. I know my true name! She spoke a single line in the ancient language, and the inside of Eragon’s mind seemed to ring with a sound like a bell, and for a moment, the tips of Saphira’s scales gleamed with an inner light, and she looked as if she were made of stars.

  The name was grand and majestic, but also tinged with sadness, for it named her as the last female of her kind. In the words, Eragon could hear the love and devotion she felt for him, as well as all the other traits that made up her personality. Most he recognized; a few he did not. Her flaws were as prominent as her virtues, but overall, the impression was one of fire and beauty and grandeur.

  Saphira shivered from the tip of her nose to the tip of her tail, and she shuffled her wings.

  I know who I am, she said.

  Well done, Bjartskular, said Glaedr, and Eragon could sense how impressed he was. You have a name to be proud of. I would not say it again, however, not even to yourself, until we are at the … at the spire we have come to see. You must take great care to keep your name hidden now that you know it.

  Saphira blinked and shuffled her wings again. Yes, Master. The excitement running through her was palpable.

  Eragon sheathed Brisingr and walked over to her. She lowered her head until it was at his level. He stroked the line of her jaw, and then pressed his forehead against her hard snout and held her as tightly as he could, her scales sharp against his fingers. Hot tears began to slide down his cheeks.

  Why do you cry? she asked.

  Because … I’m lucky enough to be bonded with you.

  Little one.

  They talked for a while longer, as Saphira was eager to discuss what she had learned about herself. Eragon was happy to listen, but he could not help feeling a little bitter that he still had not been able to divine his own true name.

  Then Saphira curled up on her side of the half circle and went to sleep, leaving Eragon to ruminate by the light of the dying campfire. Glaedr remained awake and aware, and sometimes Eragon consulted with him, but for the most part, he kept to himself.

  The hours crawled past, and Eragon grew increasingly frustrated. His time was running out-ideally he and Saphira should have left for the Varden the previous day-and yet no matter what he tried, he seemed unable to describe himself as he was.

  It was nearly midnight, by his reckoning, when the rain ceased.

  Eragon fidgeted, trying to make up his mind; then he bounded to his feet, too wound up to bear sitting any longer. I’m going for a walk, he said to Glaedr.

  He expected the dragon to object, but instead Glaedr said, Leave your weapons and armor here.

  Why?

  Whatever you find, you need to face it by yourself. You cannot learn what you are made of if you rely on anyone or anything else to help you.

  Glaedr’s words made sense to Eragon, but still he hesitated before he unbuckled his sword and dagger and pulled off his mail hauberk. He donned his boots and his damp cloak, and then he dragged the saddlebags that contained Glaedr’s heart of hearts closer to Saphira.

  As Eragon started to leave the half circle of stones, Glaedr said, Do what you must, but be careful.

  * * *

  Outside the nesting house, Eragon was pleased to see patches of stars and enough moonlight shining through the gaps in the clouds for him to make out his surroundings.

  He bounced on the balls of his feet a few times, wondering where to go, and then he set off at a brisk trot toward the heart of the ruined city. After a few seconds, his frustration got the better of him and he increased his pac
e to an all-out run.

  As he listened to the sound of his breathing and of his footsteps pounding against the paving stones, he asked himself, Who am I? But no answer came to him.

  He ran until his lungs began to fail, and then he ran some more, and when neither his lungs nor his legs would sustain him any longer, he stopped by a weed-filled fountain and leaned on his arms against it while he recovered his breath.

  Around him loomed the shapes of several enormous buildings: shadowy hulks that looked like a range of ancient, crumbling mountains. The fountain stood in the center of a vast square courtyard, much of which was littered with pieces of broken stone.

  He pushed himself off the fountain and slowly turned in a circle. In the distance, he could hear the deep, resonant croaking of the bullfrogs, an odd booming sound that grew especially loud whenever one of the larger frogs participated.

  A cracked slab of stone several yards away caught his eye. He walked over, grasped it by the edges, and, with a heave, picked it off the ground. The muscles in his arms burning, he staggered to the edge of the courtyard and threw the slab onto the grass beyond.

  It landed with a soft but satisfying thump.

  He strode back to the fountain, unclasped his cloak, and draped it over the edge of the sculpture. Then he strode to the next piece of rubble-a jagged wedge that had cleaved off a larger block-and he fit his fingers underneath it and lifted it onto his shoulder.

  For over an hour, he labored to clear the courtyard. Some of the fallen masonry was so big, he had to use magic to move it, but for the most part he was able to use his hands. He was methodical about it; he worked back and forth across the courtyard, and every piece of rubble he encountered, no matter how large or small, he stopped to remove.

  The effort soon left him drenched in sweat. He would have removed his tunic, but the edges of the stone were often sharp and would have cut him. As it was, he accumulated a host of bruises across his chest and shoulders, and he scraped his hands in numerous places.

  The exertion helped calm his mind and, since it required little thought, left him free to mull over all that he was and all that he might be.

  In the midst of his self-appointed task, as he was resting after having shifted a particularly heavy length of cornice, he heard a threatening hiss, and he looked up to see a snalgli-this one with a shell at least six feet tall-gliding out of the darkness with startling speed. The creature’s boneless neck was fully extended, its lipless mouth was like a slash of darkness splitting its soft flesh, and its bulbous eyes were pointed directly at him. By the light of the moon, the snalgli’s exposed flesh gleamed like silver, as did the track of slime it left behind.

  “Letta,” said Eragon, and he straightened upright and shook drops of blood from his torn hands. “Ono ach neiat threyja eom verrunsmal edtha, O snalgli.”

  As he spoke his warning, the snail slowed and retracted its eyes several inches. It paused when it was a few yards away, hissed again, and began to circle around to his left.

  “Oh no you don’t,” he muttered, turning with it. He glanced over his shoulders to make sure no other snalgli were approaching from behind.

  The giant snail seemed to realize that it could not catch him by surprise, for it stopped and sat hissing and waving its eyeballs at him.

  “You sound like a teapot left to boil,” he said to it.

  The snalgli’s eyeballs waved even faster, and then it charged at him, the edges of its flat belly undulating.

  Eragon waited until the last moment, then jumped to the side and let the snalgli slide past. He laughed and slapped the back of its shell. “Not too bright, are you?” Dancing away from it, he began to taunt the creature in the ancient language, calling it all sorts of insulting but perfectly accurate names.

  The snail seemed to puff up with rage-its neck thickened and bulged, and it opened its mouth even farther and began to sputter as well as hiss.

  Again and again, it charged at Eragon, and every time he jumped out of the way. At last the snalgli grew tired of the game. It withdrew a half-dozen yards and sat staring at him with its fist-sized eyeballs.

  “How do you ever catch anything when you’re so slow?” Eragon asked in a mocking tone, and he stuck his tongue out at the snail.

  The snalgli hissed once more, and then it turned around and slid off into the darkness.

  Eragon waited several minutes to be sure it was gone before he returned to clearing the rubble. “Maybe I should just call myself Snail Vanquisher,” he muttered as he rolled a section of a pillar across the courtyard. “Eragon Shadeslayer, Vanquisher of Snails.… I would strike fear into the hearts of men wherever I went.”

  It was the deepest part of the night when he finally dropped the last piece of stone onto the border of grass that edged the courtyard. There he stood, panting. He was cold and hungry and tired, and the scrapes on his hands and wrists smarted.

  He had ended by the northeastern corner of the courtyard. To the north was an immense hall that had been mostly destroyed during the battle; all that remained standing was a portion of the back walls and a single, ivy-covered pillar where the entryway had been.

  He stared at the pillar for the longest time. Above it, a cluster of stars-red, blue, and white-shone through an opening in the clouds, gleaming like cut diamonds. He felt a strange attraction to them, as if their appearance signified something that he ought to be aware of.

  Without bothering to consider his action, he walked to the base of the pillar-scrambling over piles of rubble-then reached as high as he could and grasped the thickest part of the ivy: a stem as big around as his forearm and covered with thousands of tiny hairs.

  He tugged on the vine. It held, so he jumped off the ground and began to climb. Hand over hand, he scaled the pillar, which must have been three hundred feet tall, but which felt taller the farther he got from the ground.

  He knew he was being reckless, but then, he felt reckless.

  Halfway up, the smaller tendrils of vine began to peel off the stone when he put his full weight on them. After that, he was careful to only grab hold of the main stem and some of the thicker side branches.

  His grip had almost given out by the time he arrived at the top. The crown of the pillar was still intact; it formed a square, flat surface large enough to sit on, with over a foot to spare on each side.

  Feeling somewhat shaky from the exertion, Eragon crossed his legs and rested his hands palm upward on his knees, allowing the air to soothe his torn skin.

  Below him lay the ruined city: a maze of shattered husks that often echoed with strange, forlorn cries. In a few places where there were ponds, he could see the faint, glowing lights of the bullfrogs’ lures, like lanterns viewed from a great distance.

  Angler frogs, he thought suddenly in the ancient language. That’s what their name is: angler frogs. And he knew he was right, for the words seemed to fit like a key in a lock.

  Then he shifted his gaze to the cluster of stars that had inspired his climb. He slowed his breathing and concentrated on maintaining a steady, never-ending flow of air in and out of his lungs. The cold, his hunger, and his trembling exhaustion gave him a peculiar sense of clarity; he seemed to float apart from his body, as if the bond between his consciousness and his flesh had grown attenuated, and there came upon him a heightened awareness of the city and the island around him. He was acutely sensitive to every motion of the wind and to every sound and smell that wafted past the top of the pillar.

  As he sat there, he thought of more names, and though none fully described him, his failures did not upset him, for the clarity he felt was too deep-seated for any setback to perturb his equanimity.

  How can I include everything I am in just a few words? he wondered, and he continued to ponder the question as the stars turned.

  Three warped shadows flew across the city-like small, moving rifts in reality-and landed upon the roof of the building to his left. Then the dark, owl-shaped silhouettes spread their barbed plumes and stared at him w
ith luminous, evil-looking eyes. The shadows chattered softly to one another, and two of them scratched their empty wings with claws that had no depth. The third held the remains of a bullfrog between its ebony talons.

  He watched the menacing birds for several minutes, and they watched him in return, and then they took flight and ghosted away to the west, making no more noise than a falling feather.

  Near dawn, when Eragon could see the morning star between two peaks to the east, he asked himself, “What do I want?”

  Until then, he had not bothered to consider the question. He wanted to overthrow Galbatorix: that, of course. But should they succeed, what, then? Ever since he had left Palancar Valley, he had thought that he and Saphira would one day return, to live near the mountains he so loved. However, as he pondered the prospect, he slowly realized that it no longer appealed to him.

  He had grown up in Palancar Valley, and he would always consider it home. But what was left there for him or Saphira? Carvahall was destroyed, and even if the villagers rebuilt it someday, the town would never be the same. Besides, most of the friends he and Saphira had made lived elsewhere, and the two of them had obligations to the various races of Alagaesia-obligations that they could not ignore. And after all the things they had done and seen, he could not imagine that either of them would be content to live in such an ordinary, isolated place.

  For the sky is hollow and the world is round.…

  Even if they did return, what would they do? Raise cows and farm wheat? He had no desire to eke out a living from the land as his family had during his childhood. He and Saphira were a Rider and dragon; their doom and their destiny was to fly at the forefront of history, not to sit before a fire and grow fat and lazy.

  And then there was Arya. If he and Saphira lived in Palancar Valley, he would see her rarely, if at all.