He started to cry. That much he remembered. The horse was so handsome, and now it was ruined, and he had no others like it.

  His father’s voice rose in an angry shout. “—don’t stop that brat and his mewling, then I will!” And there was the scrape of a chair being shoved back and a cry of terror from his mother, and a heavy weight struck Murtagh in the back and knocked him flat against the hearth.

  Zar’roc fell beside him with a clatter, the blade’s edge so sharp it was invisible.

  Murtagh knew he screamed, but he felt no pain, only a sense of cold and weakness as blood spread in a pool around him. His mother’s face appeared over him, her expression pinched with fear, and that disturbed him more than anything. He didn’t want her to worry, didn’t want her to be afraid.

  Then the hall grew hazy, and the last thing he was aware of was his mother murmuring in an unfamiliar language as the dreadful chill settled in his bones.

  Murtagh stopped by a mound of mushrooms and gasped as if he’d taken a blow to the stomach. He clenched his jaw and stared at the rocky ceiling for a time as tears spilled from his unblinking eyes. “That’s not for you,” he muttered to whatever force inhabited the caves. Why had he been compelled to relive that particular moment? He went to great lengths to not think about it, although the knotted scar on his back had been reminder enough: a memento of both his father’s cruelty and his mother’s love. The latter part was why he’d kept the mark. Removing the scar would be easy enough with a spell, but to do so felt like repudiating his past to such a degree, he might as well have declared himself nameless and kinless. Perhaps he should have. Morzan’s legacy had brought him nothing but pain. But his mother’s…was more complicated. From her he had life and love, and just because his life had been difficult, that did not negate her love.

  Quick tip-taps circled him in the shadowed distance. He heard, but he did not care.

  Murtagh looked at Zar’roc. He scowled with barely contained disgust, and his hand shook. Scar or not, he hated the sword, hated what it represented. Zar’roc. Misery. His father’s choice of name, and a fitting one, given Morzan’s history. That wasn’t what Murtagh wanted for his life, and yet he had taken the blade from Eragon, to claim it as his own, as if somehow it would protect him.

  Instead of it protecting, he felt as if it were defining him. Zar’roc. Misery. Names were important, even for the smallest thing. By naming, one might gain understanding. Even more, one might recast the very nature of a thing. Had he not experienced that himself in the citadel of Urû’baen when his true name had changed?

  An idea occurred to him. A bright, promising idea that brought with it fierce determination. He knew the Name of Names, the very key to the ancient language and its arcane power. By it he could use or define or even change the words of the language.

  Which meant…he could rename Zar’roc. If he so wanted.

  Murtagh did not have to stop to consider. He wanted.

  But rename to what? If not Misery, then Happiness? Hardly the right meaning for his or any sword. Besides, Murtagh had never tended toward happiness—he wasn’t sure he knew what it really was—and he would have felt ridiculous carrying a blade called Happiness.

  Even though time was short, he stood still in the dark and let his mind range wide as he sorted through dozens of possible names. At its core, the question was simple: What did he want Zar’roc to represent? That was, what value did he want to give pride of place in the center of his being?

  All around, he continued to hear the tip-taps of the marauding shadow spiders. But they held their distance, and he paid them little attention, for the problem he was wrestling with was all-encompassing and, he felt, crucial to his survival.

  In the end, the answer came from within, as it must—from his memory of Morzan hurting him, and from his own true name, which he saw with new clarity: what it had been, and what it now was. For he was a changed person. The pain he had clung to so assiduously no longer held sway over him; he had new cares and new values, and he was determined to pursue them.

  Fired by inspiration, Murtagh opened the pouch on his belt, took out the compendium, and, one-handed, flipped through the parchment pages until he found that which he sought.

  He studied the short line of runes. Was he sure? Yes. More than ever before.

  The spell required energy he did not have to spare, but nonetheless, he drew upon his body and, soft as a falling feather, spoke the Word and, with it, renamed the sword:

  “Ithring”…Freedom.

  As he spoke, the barbed glyph stamped upon blade and sheath shimmered and shifted into a new shape, a new understanding. And he recognized the glyph as that which the elves used for the sword’s new name.

  The hate and anger that had been boiling inside of him cooled into calm determination. He nodded. Freedom. His father had chosen to spread misery through life and land. Perhaps Murtagh could do better.

  A crooked smile crossed his lips. He had no delusions. He knew he had responsibilities that bound him. To Thorn, if nobody else. But they were responsibilities he had accepted for himself, not ones imposed from the outside. Freedom had always been what he aspired to, and what he would always cherish. His blade could stand as a symbol for that. And when he fought, as he knew he would soon need to, then it would fall to him to grant his foes their final release. And besides, he might use Ithring to help those, like Alín, who could not help themselves. To cut their bonds and set them loose, even as he and Thorn had freed themselves of Galbatorix’s oaths.

  His mother, he thought, would have been proud of him for it.

  “Ithring.”

  The word felt strange upon his tongue, yet fitting also. The sword itself seemed different: an ineffable change that left the blade brighter and cleaner.

  Murtagh felt different as well. He stowed the compendium and resumed his journey with a new sense of lightness, as if renaming the sword had somehow helped drive back the oppressive presence of the caves. And when the dark denizens of the undercroft again attacked him—the shadow spiders and their gnashing blades, and the fingerrats reaching for his throat—he dispatched them with a calm efficiency that had previously escaped him. For he knew who he was and why he was there, and he no longer sought to fight with misery, but in pursuit of freedom.

  CHAPTER III

  To Hold the Center

  A pale glow appeared ahead of Murtagh—spilling out from behind a fold of rock—and his pulse quickened. At last! Bachel was near. He could feel her. And not just her, others besides. Thirteen of them, by his count.

  He readied himself with a long, slow breath and a drawing in of his mind. Bachel might not have a legion of Eldunarí to command, as had Galbatorix, but she was no less dangerous. Murtagh had no intention of underestimating her. She’d gotten the best of him before; it wouldn’t happen again, regardless of her source of power. That he swore to himself.

  He spared a quick thought for Thorn and then continued.

  His boots were soft against the stone as he rounded the fold of rock. Beyond it, he beheld a vast, circular chamber that looked as if it had been scraped out of the granite by a great millstone. He hardly noticed the slime-veined walls, for a cluster of white crystals thrust upward at various angles from the ground. The crystals were semi-opaque and translucent along their sharp edges, and they varied in size from small protrusions no larger than the thorn of a rose to enormous pillars as thick around as an aged oak. Large or small, the crystals glowed with a natural radiance, white and pure and beautiful to behold.

  In the center of the chamber lay a wide clearing with a gaping hole at its heart: a void twenty paces across that opened to yet further depths.

  At the height of the chamber was another opening, and he had a sense that it led up, up, up to the Well of Dreams. For all his walking, he’d merely ended directly below where he’d started.

  Bachel stood waiting for him by the void.

  He hardly recognized her. The witch still wore the enchanted half mask that transformed her aspect to that of a dark, draconic being. But she had exchanged her dress for a suit of armor that encased every inch of her body, and the armor was made not of leather or metal but rather of dragon scales.

  The scales were reddish black and glimmered with an oily sheen. They emitted a dim glow, dying embers still pulsing with contained heat. The scales must have come from an old dragon, for some looked to have been cut from even larger pieces. Seeing the armor, Murtagh realized that the leather garb the cultists had donned for the festival of black smoke had been made to resemble Bachel’s fantastic suit.

  In her hand, the witch held the Dauthdaert Niernen. Its blade matched the light from the slime along the walls.

  Six acolytes stood to Bachel’s left and six to the right, as if two great wings extending from she who served as their central body. The impression was marred slightly by the pair of acolytes who held Alín between them, their hands firm around her arms and wrists as they kept her kneeling upon the stone.

  A reddened bruise discolored Alín’s cheek, and blood spotted one corner of her mouth, but her neck was unbowed and desperate hope filled her eyes as she beheld Murtagh. “My Lord!” she cried.

  Dark rage gripped Murtagh as he saw her plight. He welcomed the emotion, knowing it would serve him well in the fight to come.

  The acolytes carried neither swords nor spears but tall staffs of knotted wood, each embellished with strange carvings. For the oddest moment, Murtagh was reminded of Brom. Then the cultists stamped the butts of their staffs against the ground, and the sound echoed again and again from the domed ceiling, and they began to chant in a low chorus that filled the chamber with building urgency.

  Murtagh picked his way between the crystals, careful to avoid their sharp edges.

  As he approached, Bachel lifted Niernen and pointed the lance at him. She seemed entirely unafraid, and she said, “I am impressed, Murtagh son of Morzan. The power of Azlagûr’s dreams drives to madness most who venture into the depths below Nal Gorgoth.”

  “But not you or your servants.”

  “I am the Speaker. I am Azlagûr’s chosen mouthpiece. His protection grants certain privileges to me and those I choose as my attendants.”

  Murtagh wasn’t so sure about that. He affected a casual expression and spun Ithring in his hand as he paced forward, keeping a close watch on the cultists. “What of those…things in the caves? Are they your doing as well?”

  Beneath the mask, Bachel’s mouth twisted with amusement. “Not mine, Kingkiller. Mites and fleas of Azlagûr are they. Useful tools, nothing more.”

  He nodded in a pretense of understanding. The twelve acolytes couched their staffs toward him as he stopped some ten paces in front of Bachel. If he could somehow maneuver behind them, he could drive Bachel toward the hole in the floor, and it would limit her movement….

  A column of thick black smoke jetted up through the hole, as loud and fast as a giant waterfall, only in ascent. Heat followed, so intense that Murtagh fell back a step, and the stench of brimstone was overwhelming.

  Bachel seemed unaffected. She extended Niernen and let the tip of the lance enter the flow of smoke. The glow from the blade illuminated the dense haze from within, giving it an unearthly hue.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the torrent ceased, and what remained continued upward, lifted by the heated currents of air. It vanished into the shadows above, but Murtagh knew that, in a few minutes, it would arrive at the surface and thence would seep through the ground and into the polluted air around Nal Gorgoth.

  “What is this place, witch?”

  Bachel drew herself up, eyes bright with fury, and her mask lent her voice terrifying power. “You will address me by my rightful title, desecrator! This place is Oth Orum, the hidden heart of the world, the very center of all being, and your presence is an affront to Azlagûr Himself. No outlander has set foot here, not in all the thousands of years the Draumar have guarded it. To come here unconsecrated is to invite death, and death you shall have unless you realize your error and kneel before me.”

  “I shall not kneel. Not to you. Not to Azlagûr. Not to anyone.”

  Bachel’s fury increased, but she mastered herself and, in a cold tone, said, “Why, Kingkiller? I have offered you everything, and still you scorn me.”

  “No, you have taken, not offered.” Murtagh did not blink as he met her gaze. “I am my own man. By my will, I make my way. I will let no one steal that from me, least of all you, witch. Surrender now, or I swear the worms will feed on you this very day.”

  “Desecrator!” she declared. “Defiler! You will rue those—”

  The ground shook beneath them, and a thunderous rumble echoed through the caves and tunnels. Flakes of stone fell from above, and billows of grey dust clouded the chamber.

  Murtagh dropped into a half crouch, alarmed. Was this Bachel’s magic again?

  But no, the witch and her minions staggered, as if surprised, and then Bachel laughed, low, throaty, delighted. “Do you feel that, Kingkiller?! Do you? That is Azlagûr come to purge the unbelievers! He shall sweep aside the unworthy, like maggots before the flame! Submit!”

  Worry gnawed at Murtagh’s confidence. He still did not fully understand the forces he was dealing with; whatever lay at the bottom of the hole, it was concerning.

  Raising Ithring, he pointed at Bachel, even as she had pointed at him with Niernen. “Let Alín go,” he said, and his voice rang loudly. “She has no part in our quarrel.”

  “Oh, but she does,” said Bachel. “She is my vassal, and you have turned her against me, and against Azlagûr Himself. She shall pay for her sins, Rider. She shall pay most dearly. Her blood will be a welcome sacrifice to our dread god.”

  “Liar!” shouted Alín. “Hypocrite! You broke our creed! You went against everything you told us was sacred!” She spat on the floor in Bachel’s direction. “You are the defiler! You are the desecrator!”

  Bachel turned, the slightest smile upon her distorted features. “Foolish girl. There are deeper truths than you know. Everything I have done has been in service of Azlagûr’s will. You dare question me? She whom He has chosen as His Speaker?”

  Hair flew wild about Alín’s face as she shook her head. “How can you say that? All my life, we worshipped the dragons, as you taught us. You said—”

  “The dragons?” said Bachel, her voice so loud that Alín quailed into submission. The witch laughed, and there was nothing pleasant in the sound. “You wish to understand that which is above your station, wretch, but I will indulge you this once. Azlagûr has no regard for the little worms. They may serve Him or not, and if not, the calamity of His arrival shall sweep them aside. That is as He desires. That is as it shall be. The little worms are not gods. They are noisome spawn, weak, blind, and benighted.”

  The twelve staff-wielding Draumar seemed unsurprised. Murtagh wondered if they were Bachel’s inner circle, privy to information kept from the rest of the cult.

  “No,” said Alín in a small voice. She was shaking. “That cannot be. Why w—”

  Bachel rapped Niernen against the stone. “Because! The little worms are aspects of Azlagûr, but they are not Azlagûr Himself. It is the Great Devourer we worship above all else.” The witch shook her head, as if disgusted, and held out her off hand toward the nearest of the Draumar. “Give me now your knife.”

  The acolyte obliged by producing a short-bladed dagger from within the sleeve of his jerkin. The iron blade appeared as grey velvet in the light from the crystals.

  Bachel took the dagger and strode toward Alín.

  “No!” shouted Murtagh, and he launched his thoughts at Bachel’s mind in a furious assault.

  The witch’s steps faltered, and then she stopped, and Murtagh strove to hold her in place as he charged forward.

  Bachel motioned at the Draumar. Their chanting increased, and Murtagh stumbled and fell to one knee as the full force of twelve more minds crashed into his. Their voices filled his ears with a throbbing rhythm. His head seemed to pulse with the same tempo, and darkness crept in about the edges of his vision.

  Moving was impossible. Murtagh’s awareness of his body shrank as he focused inward and armored himself against the onslaught. His sense of self became the center of his existence; it was all he allowed himself to think of, all he allowed himself to imagine. What he saw, he observed without judgment or reaction, as if he were watching events without meaning.

  Bachel raised an arm and threw a vial toward him.

  The glass shattered on the stone by his hand. A cloud of pearly white vapor floated up to his face and wrapped itself around him. But he smelled none of it, and it had no effect on him—his wards at work.

  The witch bared her teeth. “Your magics will not—”

  Another tremor passed through the mountain, and for a moment, the ground seemed to rise beneath him.

  The disturbance provided a useful distraction. Two of the Draumar lost their concentration, and Murtagh seized the opportunity to drive deep into their minds. But only for a second. Then the combined might of the cultists forced him to retreat within himself.

  Bachel abandoned Alín and advanced upon him. The butt of Niernen tapped against the ground in time with the witch’s every step. Her guards followed, two of them dragging Alín between them.

  Bachel stopped in front of Murtagh, and the staff-wielding acolytes closed in around him, forming a tight circle. Their chanting increased in volume again, a dozen voices drumming against his ears, a dozen minds battering against his consciousness.

  “Why do you strive so?” Bachel said, her voice a low purr. “Surrender to me, my son. Join us. Join us in service to Azlagûr, and never again will you be tormented by doubt. Your place in the world will be secured, and your name will be sung for a thousand generations.”