A touch of panic spiked his pulse. He had made no wards to filter the air. An oversight. He turned to run, and the glowing tip of the Dauthdaert sliced past his ear.
He flinched and used Zar’roc to beat the haft of the lance away. Then he lunged toward Bachel, but the distance was wrong; she was out of reach, laughing amid the brimstone mist.
Grieve came at him from the side, swinging his iron-shod club with ruthless efficiency. He caught Murtagh in an awkward position, and the club slammed down against Murtagh’s right arm. His wards deflected, and the club skated away amid swirls of vapor.
At the same time, cruel thoughts assailed Murtagh’s mind: Bachel and Grieve attempting to batter down his defenses and assume control over his consciousness. Their mental attacks were as strong as any he had ever encountered, including Galbatorix’s. But Murtagh was no weakling, and he held fast within his inner being, secure in who and what he was.
Bachel stabbed again and again with Niernen, fast as an elf. The Dauthdaert flicked like a deadly tongue through the vapor. The edges were so sharp, they parted the cloud like cut gauze.
Only seconds had passed, but already Murtagh’s lungs were on fire. He felt as if he were going to explode. He needed air, needed to breathe….
He launched a counterattack against Bachel’s and Grieve’s minds, a desperate attempt to overwhelm them with the sheer force of his consciousness. From a distance, he felt Thorn adding strength to his own, and the realization gave him courage.
Then Murtagh stepped back, and his heel caught against the lip of a stone tile in the floor.
His stomach lurched as he fell. He twisted, intending to catch himself on one arm, but—
—too slow. He landed on his side, and the impact drove the air from his lungs. He inhaled without meaning to, and bitter, sulfurous fumes filled his nose and mouth and throat.
Coughing, he scrambled backward, keeping Zar’roc above his head to ward off blows. Bachel and Grieve were advancing on him, black shapes in the clotted clouds, their outlines bending and breaking, and he felt as if he were falling again and his body lacked substance and a horrible rushing sounded, as a wind across a desolate plain at the end of all things.
He tried to rise, tried to shout, tried to focus his will on a word or spell, but the world was dissolving around him, and his thoughts were as scattered as seeds before that horrible howling wind, and again he saw the black sun and the rising dragon, and an inexorable foreboding of doom crushed any hope he had.
Bachel’s face materialized before him, wisps of vapor wreathing her angled features. Her eyes were glowing with fevered ecstasy, and her lips were ruby red as if painted with blood. And she said, “You cannot win, Kingkiller. I serve the power of dream and He whose mind conjures dream. Sleep.”
Murtagh fought with all his might, but blackness descended, and Bachel and the chamber and all that he knew vanished.
CHAPTER XIII
Nightmare
Black sun, black dragon, and an eternity of despair. He was falling toward the bottom of an incomprehensibly large void, and at the bottom lay slumbering a mind of impossible size, whose thoughts moved as slowly as the currents within an icebound sea and were just as black, cold, and hostile. He felt a presence that made him shudder and shrink to insignificance, and all of human endeavor seemed of no more importance than the accomplishments of a colony of ants.
He searched for Thorn, but the bond they shared was no longer to be found. He was utterly alone, without recourse, resource, or hope of rescue.
Then he was spinning through space, and all around malevolence pressed against him with crushing force. He saw dragons tearing at his flesh, and the bodies of his foes laid out across the mortified earth, scorched with flame, charred with soot. He saw the darkness beneath the mountains, and felt the coolness of the earth firm against his sides. Worms fed off his putrefying limbs as the smell of death wrapped him in its charnel embrace.
The void yawned wider. Amid the despair and screeching horrors, a bloody dawn spilled across a brazen land, and he saw himself triumphant: a golden crown upon his head, Zar’roc in his hand, Thorn by his side, and Bachel too…and a world at his feet, bowing to him as they had bowed to his father and Galbatorix.
A vision. A premonition. A dreadful promise.
Then he was in his cell beneath the citadel in Urû’baen. Stone walls wet with seeping moisture, black mold grown in veined maps across the crumbling mortar, ground mixed with droppings and urine and fallen crumbs from week-old crusts of bread. The jailers beat the bars of the cells and jeered at the prisoners—no sympathy from them, no help or kindness. And when the jailers left, terrors came crawling forth from cracks within the walls: fat-bodied spiders, pale and heavy, with furred legs and long feelers. They dragged their bloated stomachs across him and bit and bit him, and always it seemed he could feel the jittery touch of their clawed feet. The sounds of them moving about kept him awake nights, and never could he sleep in earnest.
A red egg before him, knee-high and shot through with white. Behind him, the unseen shadow of HIM. The egg cracked, and he watched, breathless, as a piece of shell fell free, and he saw the most delicate, beautiful, helpless hatchling: red and squalling and hungry, hungry, hungry. He reached for it, and snout and hand touched, and the contact was electric….
He yanked against his shackles, screaming, sobbing, as he felt the hatchling’s torment from the other side of the wall. HE bent over him—close-cropped beard like a black dagger, thin mouth distorted in angry delight—and said, “Swear to me, Murtagh. Swear to me, or I’ll have them strip every scale from his body. Swear fealty to me as your father did before you.”
He shook and shivered and raged, but he couldn’t hold out. The pain of the hatchling—the pain of such a perfect, innocent creature, a pain that he felt as if each fleck of agony were his own—it was too much. Of his own, he could have endured. But not this.
“I swear,” he sobbed. “I swear fealty to you.”
The evil smile widened. “In the ancient language now. Use the words I gave you.”
So he swore as instructed, and the words were ashes in his mouth.
Later came more oaths. And later still, HE spoke their true names, and then Murtagh and Thorn both were lost, lost, lost….
Awareness returned, hazy as a cloud.
Murtagh blinked, uncertain of himself, his place, and how he had gotten there. He felt stuffed full of wooclass="underline" thick, slow, and heavy.
He sat up, befuddled.
Marble walkway beneath him. Curved tunnel walls around him. And before him…a woman with tumbling hair, a glowing spear in one hand, and the light of triumph in her hawk-eyed face. She was fierce and beautiful and terrible. No mercy or comfort was to be found in her features, only burning passion that would sweep aside anything that barred her way.
Bachel. Remembering the name was a struggle; speaking it, impossible.
The woman bent toward him. “Rise, Kingkiller,” she commanded, and her voice thrummed with power.
Her words were irresistible. In a daze, he rose to his feet, still unable to form a coherent sound.
She put her lips together and blew on him. Vapor whorled toward him, and with it, a heavy, rotten odor. For some reason, he no longer found it offensive. Rather, it was intoxicating, as if he could never breathe enough of it. Each lungful was an exhilaration that set his head spinning and prevented him from focusing on any one thing for more than a moment.