Yet another door met him at the far end, and it too differed from those that came before. The lancet structure was made of a single piece of yellowed dragon bone. Perhaps a shoulder blade or a section of enormous skull. An iron ring hung from the center of the door. Embedded above it was a decorative pattern of gems of all different colors: rubies and emeralds and rainbowed diamonds. Tourmaline, star sapphires, and banded chrysoberyl.
Wary, Murtagh touched one of the stones. As he suspected, it contained a notable amount of energy.
He lowered his hand. The door was trapped. That seemed obvious. And if he triggered the trap, there was a good chance it would alert the magician who had made the door. At least, that was how Murtagh would have done it.
Or was it? What if the magician were on the other side of Alagaësia? Alerting them might take a prohibitive amount of energy.
Murtagh scratched his chin, thinking. He could just trigger the trap and trust his wards to protect him, but…that was hardly the smartest path forward. The question was, what would it take to outthink the magician who had enchanted the door? If the spellcaster were clever enough, doing anything to meddle with the door or its surroundings would set off an alarm. Even the Name of Names was no guarantee that Murtagh could completely subvert someone else’s spells, as his experience with Muckmaw had taught him.
Blast it. I can’t waste time.
He paced back and forth, debating. What if he tunneled around the door? That would take a lot of energy; he’d be exhausted by the time he broke through into the room on the other side. And there was a good chance that the walls surrounding the next room were enchanted with some sort of warning spell as well. Again, it was what he would do.
Murtagh squatted and rested his head in his hands. To subvert a ward, you had to think in a sideways fashion. Which was hard—very hard—but in a way, that was the point. The difficulty of imagining a new approach was what protected the person or thing behind the ward.
He imagined inverting a sphere without breaking it. He imagined moving in a straight line down a right angle. Every impossible action that his mind could conceive, he thought of.
A small smile formed on his lips. Perhaps…Eragon had defeated Galbatorix not by trying to hurt him but by trying to help him understand the consequences of his own actions—an approach that neither the king nor his many enemies over the years had thought of. It was possible that a similar indirect approach might work on the door.
The jewels contained energy needed to power whatever enchantments were imbued into the bone door. And if that power were consumed, it would need to be replaced. So it ought to be possible to both place and remove energy from the gems without triggering an additional trap.
Again, it depended on how clever the mysterious magician had been.
Murtagh decided to chance it. What was the worst that could happen? A grim chuckle left him. Most people might say death, but dying was far from the most fearful fate. He and Thorn had already passed through the darkest valley; nothing the wards might do could approach the depths of pain, fear, and debasement they had already faced.
First he needed a place to funnel the energy; it was too much to hold within his body. He’d burn up if he tried. Normally he would store energy within Zar’roc’s ruby pommel, but without the sword…
He retrieved the teardrop-shaped yellow diamond from his cloak. It seemed the stone was going to prove its usefulness sooner than expected.
Holding the diamond in his left hand, he pressed his right against the door. The facets of the jewels were sharp against his palm. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and slowly, cautiously, began to siphon energy out of the gems and into the yellow diamond.
For the first few seconds, the flow of energy was smooth and untroubled. But then he felt increasing resistance, and the diamond grew warm in his hand. The heat quickly increased to an unbearable level. His skin began to burn.
In an instant, he realized the stone was about to explode.
He dropped the diamond and gasped, “Brisingr!”
A bright blue werelight sprang into existence to his right: a burning ball of flame hanging at eye level, the rippling flames causing the air to shimmer and waver like crystal water.
He diverted the energy into the werelight, which grew brighter and brighter, until it was painful to look at, and waves of heat washed off the fist-sized knot of flames. Murtagh ducked his head and leaned away, but he kept his hand on the gems, and he kept drawing on them.
He slowed the flow of energy when the heat became unbearable. Beyond that, his own wards would have been triggered.
Minutes passed while the miniature sun blazed beside him, a pocket furnace suspended by invisible forces, fueled by the potential stored within the jewels.
At last, he felt the flow subsiding, and the werelight dimmed and cooled. He drained every last iota of energy from the gems, emptied them of their dregs, and left them as brittle chalices ready to again be topped to the brim.
Then he ended his spell, and wings of shadows wrapped around him as the werelight vanished.
He wiped the sweat from his brow. His heart was pounding painfully fast, and he felt shaky. The spell, he knew, had nearly killed him. If the diamond had exploded, he doubted that his wards would have been strong enough to protect him.
He picked up the gem. It was still uncomfortably warm. Murtagh had never had difficulty storing energy in a gem before. Though now that he thought about it, he’d only really used the ruby in Zar’roc’s pommel, and that was a far larger stone, of finer quality too, and woven through with elven enchantments. The diamond had none of those advantages. It must have already been filled to its limit. That or there had been significantly more energy stored in the door than he’d realized.
He carefully tucked the diamond back into the hem of his cloak. It was a matter that bore more attention, when he had the time.
He squared his shoulders. Now for the most dangerous part…
He pushed on the door.
It didn’t move.
He pulled, and still…it remained obstinately closed.
Angered, Murtagh said, “Ládrin.” Open, and he put the full force of his will behind the arcane word.
With an alarming creak, the door swung inward on hidden hinges. Murtagh waited a moment to see if he’d triggered a trap, but nothing happened, so he again took up his candle and stepped across the threshold.
Another light sprang to life from a piece of quartz set into the ceiling of the third room. By the calm, unwavering light, Murtagh saw an underground garden. Raised beds of dirt, edged with brick, lay to the right and left of a narrow path, and in those beds grew trees, flowers, vines, bushes, and all manner of small, woody herbs. The air was warm and aromatic with a heady perfume, and it was moist too, as if a bank of mist had settled across the ground. The low hum of bees sounded amid the leaves.
Some of the plants Murtagh recognized: healing plants, poisonous plants, plants for inducing visions and compelling sleep. But many were unknown to him. There was a lily whose leaf and stem seemed made of living gold and whose petals were of a whitish metal. A drooping tree with berries that glittered like beryls. Mushrooms that had purple caps and electric-blue gills.
And he saw a plant unlike any he had encountered before. It had a single stem topped with a fleshy, pitcher-shaped cup perhaps two hands high. And from the cup stood small orange tentacles, which waved gently in the air.
Even as he watched, a frog hopped past the pitcher plant. Two of the tentacles reached out, fast as snakes, grabbed the frog, and pulled it into the mouth of the cup and held it there.