Murtagh

“Lucky me.” Murtagh drank deeply of the watered wine and then started in on the smoked bergenhed. As he chewed, he studied Uvek. “Why does Bachel seek your fealty?”

“The Draumar seek fealty from all who cross path.”

Murtagh shook his head again. He was having trouble summoning the words he needed. “Yes, but…No. Why…why you?”

“Because I was one they could find.”

That still wasn’t what Murtagh wanted to know, but expressing himself was too difficult, so he grunted and focused on eating.

When the food was gone, he leaned back and rested his head against the cold stone of the cell, closing his eyes while he tried to strengthen the thin, nearly indetectable umbilical cord that joined him and Thorn. Uvek watched the whole while, but Murtagh didn’t care. There was plenty of iron separating him from the Urgal, and besides, he didn’t feel threatened by Uvek…though he felt sure that Uvek was capable of great violence when the occasion called for it.

Murtagh found little success with Thorn. All he could discern were indistinct emotions, none of them pleasant. Full thoughts and words still proved impossible to exchange. In any case, Murtagh’s mind kept wandering, and he noticed himself slipping in and out of awareness, as if the world were divided into short sections of consciousness, brief flashes of lucidity, and the rest madness, or worse, nonexistence.

Yet throughout, his mind kept returning to Nasuada, and the horrible intimacy of their time together in the Hall of the Soothsayer. His shame swelled, and with it, his respect for her. That she had resisted Galbatorix and endured for so long now seemed miraculous to Murtagh. He wasn’t sure how she had managed. Nor how she had recovered. He feared he wasn’t as strong.

He was nearly asleep—or lost in a fugue state that resembled sleep—when Uvek said, “Murtagh-man, why did you and Thorn-dragon come to Nal Gorgoth?”

“Wanted to…find out…who Bachel…brimstone…stone.”

“How did Draumar catch you? Was when earth shook?”

It was too difficult to explain in full. “No…got careless…after feast…”

He heard Uvek shift, and the Urgal made an angry sound. “Feast! How long you been in Nal Gorgoth, Murtagh-man?”

“Two…two days.”

“Why not kill Draumar when you could?”

Murtagh forced his eyes open. “…was curious. Important to know before act.”

Uvek’s beetled brow smoothed, and then his heavy head moved up and down. “Ah. That wise, Murtagh-man. But now you trapped like Uvek. Would have been better act sooner, save much pain, much…”

His voice faded into oblivion as Murtagh’s eyes rolled back, and he fell away from the cell, down, down, down, through endless black, into the harsh visions of promised dreams.

CHAPTER XVII Fragments

The cultists came for him again.

The cell door banged open, and Murtagh woke with a start, confused. It felt like the middle of the night, though there was no way to tell in the windowless space. Night or day, time had lost all sense of cohesion, and for a scattered few seconds, he had no idea where he was or what was happening.

Arms lifted him off the floor, and a pair of white-robed men dragged him from the cell even as he began to protest.

The cultists carried him back to the room of torment. Coal-lit, bloodstained, the strained stench of terror clinging to the chiseled stones with dogged, unkind persistence.

Bachel was waiting for him, again bedecked with headdress and dragon-aspect mask, her figure tall and fearsome, with a crow perched on either shoulder.

Murtagh fought to no avail as the cultists chained him to the rough slab table. Murmuring softly, Bachel bent over him, and the sound of Murtagh’s agony echoed off the indifferent walls.

***

There was a monotony to pain. Every hurt brought fresh discomfort—immediate and insistent and demanding of Murtagh’s attention—and yet the pain possessed a deadly sameness that blurred into a single smear of agony. The repetitiveness was nearly as unbearable as the injuries themselves. The process was all so miserably predictable. He hated knowing the direction of Bachel’s cruel intentions, and he hated how effective her not-so-tender ministrations were. Experience provided no protection; if anything, it made his trials harder to endure, and the continual confusion that snarled his thoughts only increased the inhuman strain of every eternal instant.

Yet for all that, he still managed to evade and confound Bachel’s mental attacks. And the witch grew frustrated, and she used the Breath on him again, and time fractured around him, and he could not order the happening of events. He seemed to skip between moments, unmoored from a constant present, a castaway thrown from one chopped fragment of time to the next, as a piece of flotsam from whitecap to whitecap.

Murtagh held fast to the one thing he was sure of: his own sense of self. That much he knew. The core of what he knew himself to be—the truth of his name in the ancient language—gave him strength even in the depths of his despair.

***