The acrid stench of bird droppings struck him, making his breath catch and his eyes water. He screwed up his face and padded into the dark interior.
It took a minute for his eyes to adjust well enough to make out even basic shapes. He was standing at the bottom of a great cylinder, which started at the base of the tower and rose right to the top. Lining the walls were hundreds of tiny wooden coops, each with a section of a bark-covered branch protruding from the front to serve as a perch. From inside the coops, he heard a thousand little murmurs—the sounds of sleeping birds—and the silky whisper of feathered wings shuffling and readjusting. The floor was soft with a thick layer of droppings, and there were crates and barrels and other objects piled along the bottom of the walls.
Murtagh stared. The tower was as curious a space as he’d ever seen, even including the catacombs under Gil’ead. It was a demented, oversized version of the dovecotes that Yarek the spymaster had built in Urû’baen for housing his homing pigeons. But what birds were these? Not pigeons or doves, he suspected.
He cast about on the filthy floor, looking for feathers that might help identify the birds. Instead, he stepped on something hard and felt it break beneath his foot. Holding his breath, he bent to look.
Half buried in the droppings was a beaked skull. The skull of a crow. Of course. The tower had to be where the Dreamers raised the birds that Bachel used to make her amulets. Murtagh straightened. The sheer number of crows in the tower made him wonder just how many amulets Bachel had enchanted.
How are they fed? he wondered. It would be no small task tending to so many birds.
Keeping a hand out for balance, Murtagh felt his way around the outer curve of the chamber, intending to make a circuit and then depart. What was he looking for? He didn’t know. Crows weren’t used for carrying messages. There would be no writing desk with secret messages lettered across slips of parchment. No maps or magical items used for enchanting, assuming he was correct about Bachel’s spellcasting. But he felt obliged to be thorough.
Three-quarters of the way around the tower, he stepped in a particularly slippery patch of droppings, and one foot slid out from under him. He flailed and caught himself with a hand on the floor. His right knee banged against the corner of a crate, sending a hot jolt through his leg, and the tip of Zar’roc’s scabbard knocked against a barrel.
A muted chorus of disquiet passed through the tower as the crows shifted in their sleep, their murderous minds for a moment disturbed.
Murtagh clenched his teeth, held his breath, and didn’t move. His knee throbbed. A spike of alarm came from Thorn, and Murtagh quickly reassured him: I’m fine. Don’t worry.
Then he whispered, “Maela.” It was said that the ancient language was the mother tongue all creatures had spoken at the beginning of time. Murtagh wasn’t sure if he entirely believed that—he had his own ideas about how the language might have been enchanted to influence living beings—but it was true that animals responded to the ancient language in ways they didn’t to other tongues.
Sure enough, the birds began to settle down, and shortly thereafter they were again quiet.
Murtagh made a face as he started to push upright and the droppings squished between his fingers. He uttered a single, soundless curse, as foul as the situation he found himself in.
The heel of his palm sank into the excrement and touched cold hardness buried within. He frowned. Huh.
Despite his disgust, he dug down until he could grasp the object. It felt like metaclass="underline" oval, half the size of his hand, with carving on one side. A coin? But no, it was too large for that.
Keeping a firm grip on the object, he stood up and carefully made his way back out through the tower door.
Thorn wrinkled his snout and retreated several steps as Murtagh approached. “That bad?” said Murtagh, rueful, closing the small gate behind him.
If you don’t bathe before tomorrow, everyone for a league will know where you’ve been.
“Uh-huh.” Murtagh turned so the moon was behind him and held up the object he’d found. As he’d suspected, it was a flat piece of metaclass="underline" electrum, by the looks of it (although it was hard to be sure in the moonlight; it could just as easily have been gold), with an iron hook on the back. It was a clasp for a cloak that would be fastened at one shoulder. Droppings were embedded in the design on the clasp’s face, and Murtagh spent the better part of a minute scraping the muck away with his thumbnail before he could make sense of it.
A shock of recognition passed through him, as a bolt of lightning through a drought-stricken tree.
What is it? Thorn asked.
Murtagh shared with him a memory of Galbatorix’s private dining hall, where crimson banners hung along the walls, banners embroidered with the crests of the Forsworn. The one opposite the middle of the table, facing the chair where Murtagh had so often sat, had borne the same design as the clasp.
“It is the mark of Saerlith.”
A similar shock passed through Thorn. How came it to this place?
“I don’t know.” Saerlith had been a lesser name among the Forsworn; he’d done little to distinguish himself from his fellow traitors, although he had shared in their general infamy. All Murtagh knew of him was that he was human and had come from somewhere around the city of Teirm. That, and his dragon was unfortunate enough to have puce-colored scales. Like the other dragons of the Forsworn, the name of Saerlith’s dragon had been lost, erased by the collective will of their species. Dragons did not forgive those they considered betrayers. A fault of theirs, perhaps, but when it came to the Forsworn, an understandable one.
Murtagh tried to recall how Saerlith had died. Not in Nal Gorgoth, that much he knew. Accounts were mixed, but supposedly Galbatorix had dispatched Saerlith to Alagaësia’s southern coast, where the Rider and dragon had been ambushed and killed. By whom, Murtagh had never heard, although he assumed the Varden or their allies had been responsible.
Regardless, Saerlith had perished long before Murtagh’s time.
Thorn said, If Saerlith and his dragon discovered Nal Gorgoth—
“Then maybe Galbatorix knew about this place.” Murtagh bounced the clasp in his hand. “Or maybe Saerlith was working with the Dreamers for his own gain.”
Galbatorix would have killed him for that.
“If he knew of it.” Murtagh placed the clasp in the pouch on his belt. Again he felt as if the village were a living thing that was waiting and watching with unknown intent. He grimaced, knelt, and used the ground to scrape more of the crow dung off his fingers. “I don’t like this,” he said, straightening back up. “I don’t like this at all. There’s more at work here than Bachel is willing to admit.”
Thorn nodded toward the pouch. A strange people to leave makings of the Forsworn lying about.
“It’s careless, all right. Or arrogant.” He paused to consider, and his skin prickled with gooseflesh as an unsettling thought occurred to him. “What if…what if Galbatorix found Nal Gorgoth when he was traveling back through the Spine, after Urgals killed his dragon? Or what if this is where he and my father fled after they betrayed the Riders? I’ve always heard it said that Galbatorix hid in an evil place, where the Riders dared not follow. What if Nal Gorgoth is that place? What if this is where Galbatorix met Durza and…where they trained my father?”