A pensive silence followed as Uvek picked at his belt, and Murtagh drifted closer to sleep, lulled by the stillness of their cells.
Then the Urgal spoke again: “Two moons ago, Draumar came to my hut. They told me go with them. I say no. They say yes, so we fight, Murtagh-man. But there were too many, and I was alone. No, not all alone. I say wrong. There was raven. She would visit me every day, and I talk to her. She listen, and I give her seeds. Twelve years, Murtagh-man, she came to me. Kiskû, I name her. She tried to help me, attack Draumar.” Uvek made a deep, rolling sound like falling rock. “But Draumar kill her. That one, Grieve, he threw rock at Kiskû, hit her. Is a bad thing to do, Murtagh-man. Raven not like crow. Raven bring life and luck and tidings from afar.” Uvek rocked in place, and his horns tapped against the bars of his cell. “Draumar caught me, Murtagh-man, like rabbit in snare, and they brought me here, and here I stay while dreams rot my head.” The Urgal scratched underneath this chin. “There your story, Murtagh-man. Now you know how stupid I am and how I get caught. Hrmm. Was wrong to live apart. I could not help clans, and clans could not help me.” He shook his head. “Is better to find way to be close to ones we care for, even if not always fit in easily. The bees know it. The wolves know it. Now I know it.”
Bachel was growing more and more impatient, and her methods became increasingly cruel as a result.
Murtagh knew his limits, and he was at them. His wards were gone—those that would have protected him against physical damage, at least—and his body weak, and his mind a muddled haze. At times, it felt as if the witch held his consciousness in a controlling grasp. At other times, that he was still able to evade her burrowing mental attacks. But often he could not tell whether he was free or not, and he feared that his thoughts were no longer his own.
When he grew incapable of responding as the witch desired, she wove wordless magic and healed his wounds. But never all of them, and only enough to restore him to a semblance of awareness. It was the cruelest form of care, and he hated the falseness of it almost more than the tortures themselves.
A crow cawed.
It was night. Late or early, he could not tell. The stones were cold beneath him and damp too. Uvek’s breathing was a steady sound across the dungeon.
Murtagh stared into the blackness. Patterns of light formed before his eyes, an iridescent display of chaotic ornamentation, oranges and reds and pulsing blues of a purity rarely found in nature.
He could not sleep. He tried to compose a poem to still his mind, but the words escaped him. Even the very concept of the poem eluded him. What he could not name, he could not describe, and all seemed hopeless.
Again the crow cawed.
Two cultists held him down while a third forced thin gruel into his mouth. He choked and tried to spit it out, but they held his nose shut until he swallowed. The gruel burned like brandy.
His eyes jolted wider as a shiny, black-bodied spider skittered across the stones in front of him. He cried out and tried to push himself away, but pain made his arms give out, and he fell onto his side.
The spider disappeared into a crack along the wall. He stared at the narrow crevice, convinced that dozens, no, hundreds more spiders would come pouring out at any moment. Every touch of his clothes made him feel as if there were insects upon his body. Once a drop of moisture fell from the ceiling and landed upon the back of his neck and he scratched and scrabbled as if to tear off his own skin.
When he finally closed his eyes, spiders filled his waking dreams. Spiders both black-bodied and white, and he thought to hear Nasuada whispering in his ear, urging him to surrender. He looked and saw her there beside him, but then her face melted into Galbatorix’s, and the king smiled in his vulpine manner.
Murtagh screamed.
While in the extremes of agony, Murtagh felt a snap in his mind, and a flood of emotions rushed through him. Even in his dazed state, he recognized the feel of Thorn’s thoughts, and he clung to them as a drowning man might cling to a passing branch.
Images of the courtyard floated before Murtagh’s eyes; it was difficult to tell which part of himself was in the dungeon beneath the temple and which part was above, lying on the flagstones. Thorn was in pain equal to his own, and somehow the strength of their shared torment had overcome the stifling resistance of the vorgethan and the Breath.
Recognition came from Thorn, and relief and affection. Regret too, and confusion, for all was a blurred haze….
Twice more Murtagh saw Alín standing by the door of the cell. The woman seemed increasingly troubled, and she spoke to him in a voice that sounded as if at the end of a great tunnel….
She gave him food. That much he remembered. Solid food, and he was grateful to eat something other than the slop the cultists had forced into him. But solid or not, the food still burned with the hated taste of brandy.
Bachel bent low over Murtagh, her distorted, half-hidden face gilded with garish adornment by the light of the copper brazier. He could smell the sweat on her skin and feel the heat of her breath.
“You will serve me, and through me, Azlagûr,” she whispered. “If I cannot have your obedience sworn of your own tongue, I shall have it by other means. In the end, you will bow before me, my son, and do my bidding in these, the end of days.”
“Never,” Murtagh managed to croak.
“No being is meant for never. Not even Azlagûr. We are creatures of change. Be so now, Kingkiller. Change. Become!”
The witch raised her arms, and her draconic aspect strengthened until it seemed as if he were staring into the eyes of a great, fiery beast. She cried out in a voice not her own, and he felt the forces of magic swirling about him. Down swung her arm. She dashed a vial against the floor, and a clinging cloud of Breath enveloped him. Then her claws dug into his torn flesh with fresh savagery, and Murtagh shouted with such violence that his voice broke and blood filled his throat.
Through Thorn’s eyes, he saw heavy-browed Grieve swing an iron lash, and the dragon roared with mirrored torment.
Up and down lost all meaning. Reason and logic abandoned Murtagh—and Thorn too—leaving only feeling, and what they felt was unbearable.
What could not continue…did not.
Murtagh broke. He felt it, he knew it, but in the moment, he did not care. All he wanted was for the pain to cease. He could not swear fealty to Bachel, that was beyond him, but he could no longer keep fighting.
So he stopped.
He gave up, and his mind retreated from the horrors of the situation, and a strange shell of passivity formed around him, numbing his emotions, dulling his thoughts. What he was shrank until it nearly vanished.
He could feel a sense of triumph radiating from Bachel. But he did not care. It did not matter.
None of it did. Only that the pain had stopped.
And it had. For Thorn had given up also, and the two of them lay in their respective places—chained and fettered—and waited to be told what to do.
CHAPTER XVIII
Without Flaw
Murtagh stood unmoving before Bachel’s high-backed, fur-strewn throne. Above, the rustles and whispered caws of hidden crows echoed off the stones of the shadowed ceiling: a constant accompaniment to the doings below.