Inheritance

A CROWN OF ICE AND SNOW

When the first pale rays of light streaked across the surface of the dimpled sea, illuminating the crests of the translucent waves-which glittered as if carved from crystal-then Eragon roused himself from his waking dreams and looked to the northwest, curious to see what the light revealed of the clouds building in the distance.

What he beheld was disconcerting: the clouds encompassed nearly half the horizon, and the largest of the dense white plumes looked as tall as the peaks of the Beor Mountains, too tall for Saphira to climb over. The only open sky lay behind her, and even that would be lost to them as the arms of the storm closed in.

We shall have to fly through it, Glaedr said, and Eragon felt Saphira’s trepidation.

Why not try to go around? she asked.

Through Saphira, Eragon was aware of Glaedr examining the structure of the clouds. At last the golden dragon said, I do not want you flying too far off course. We still have many leagues to cover, and if your strength fails you-

Then you can lend me yours to keep us aloft.

Hmph. Even so, it is best to be cautious in our recklessness. I have seen the likes of this storm before. It is larger than you think. To skirt it, you would have to fly so far to the west that you would end up beyond Vroengard, and it would probably take another day to reach land.

The distance to Vroengard isn’t that great, she said.

No, but the wind will slow us. Besides, my instincts tell me that the storm extends all the way to the island. One way or another, we shall haveto fly through it. However, there’s no need to go through its very heart. Do you see the notch between those two small pillars off to the west?

Yes.

Go there, and perhaps we can then find a safe path through the clouds.

Eragon grasped the front of the saddle as Saphira dropped her left shoulder and turned westward, aiming herself toward the notch Glaedr had indicated. He yawned and rubbed his eyes as she leveled out; then he twisted round and dug out an apple and a few strips of dried beef from the bags strapped behind him. It was a meager breakfast, but his hunger was slight, and eating a large meal while riding Saphira often made him queasy.

While he ate, he alternated between watching the clouds and gazing at the sparkling sea. He found it unsettling that there was nothing but water beneath them and that the nearest solid ground-the mainland-was, by his estimate, over fifty miles away. He shivered as he imagined sinking down and down into the cold, clutching depths of the sea. He wondered what lay at the bottom, and it occurred to him that with his magic, he could likely travel there and find out, but the thought held no appeal. The watery abyss was too dark and too dangerous for his liking. It was not, he felt, a place where his sort of life ought to venture. Better, instead, to leave it to whatever strange creatures already lived there.

As the morning wore on, it became apparent that the clouds were farther away than they had first seemed and that, as Glaedr had said, the storm was larger than either Eragon or Saphira had originally imagined.

A light headwind sprang up, and Saphira’s flight became somewhat more labored, but she continued to make good progress.

When they were still some leagues from the leading edge of the storm, Saphira surprised Eragon and Glaedr by slipping into a shallow dive and flying down close to the surface of the water.

As she descended, Glaedr said, Saphira, what are you about?

I’m curious, she replied. And I would like to rest my wings before entering the clouds.

She skimmed over the waves, her reflection below and her shadow in front mirroring her every move like two ghostly companions, one dark and one light. Then she swiveled her wings on edge and, with three quick flaps, slowed herself and landed upon the water. A fan of spray shot up on either side of her neck as her chest plowed into the waves, sprinkling Eragon with hundreds of droplets.

The water was cold, but after so long aloft, the air felt pleasantly warm-so warm, in fact, that Eragon unwrapped his cloak and pulled off his gloves.

Saphira folded her wings and floated along peacefully, bobbing up and down with the motion of the waves. Eragon spotted several clumps of brown seaweed off to the right. The plants were branched like scrub brush and had berry-sized bladders at joints along the stems.

Far overhead, near the height Saphira had been, Eragon spotted a pair of albatrosses with black-tipped wings flying away from the massive wall of clouds. The sight only deepened his unease; the seabirds reminded him of the time he had seen a pack of wolves running alongside a herd of deer as the animals fled a forest fire in the Spine.

If we had any sense, he said to Saphira, we would turn around.

If we had any sense, we would leave Alagaesia and never return, she rejoined.

Arching her neck, she dipped her muzzle into the seawater, then shook her head and ran her crimson tongue in and out of her mouth several times, as if she had tasted something unpleasant.

Then Eragon felt a sense of panic from Glaedr, and the old dragon roared in his mind: Take off! Now, now, now! Take off!

Saphira wasted no time on questions. With a sound like thunder, she opened her wings and began to beat them as she reared out of the water.

Leaning forward, Eragon grabbed the edge of the saddle to keep from being thrown backward. The flapping of Saphira’s wings threw up a screen of mist that half blinded him, so he used his mind to search for whatever had alarmed Glaedr.

From deep below, rising toward Saphira’s underside faster than Eragon would have believed possible, he felt something that was cold and huge … and filled with a ravenous, insatiable hunger. He tried to frighten it, tried to turn it away, but the creature was alien and implacable and seemed not to notice his efforts. In the strange, lightless caverns of its consciousness, he glimpsed memories of uncounted years spent lurking alone in the icy sea, hunting and being hunted.

His own panic mounting, Eragon groped for the hilt of Brisingr even as Saphira wrenched herself free from the grasp of the water and began to climb into the air. Saphira! Hurry! he silently shouted.

She slowly gained speed and altitude, and then a fountain of white water erupted behind her, and Eragon saw a pair of shiny gray jaws emerge from within the plume. The jaws were large enough for a horse and rider to pass through unscathed and were filled with hundreds of glinting white teeth.

Saphira was aware of what he saw, and she twisted violently to the side in an attempt to escape the gaping maw, clipping the water with the tip of her wing. An instant later, Eragon heard and felt the creature’s jaws snap shut.

The needle-like teeth missed Saphira’s tail by inches.

As the monster fell back into the water, more of its body became visible: The head was long and angular. A bony crest jutted out over the eyes, and from the outer part of each crest grew a ropy tendril that Eragon guessed to be over six feet in length. The neck of the creature reminded him of a giant, rippling snake. What was visible of the creature’s torso was smooth and powerfully built and looked incredibly dense. A pair of oar-shaped flippers extended from the sides of its chest, flailing helplessly in the air.

The creature landed upon its side, and a second, even larger burst of spray flew toward the sky.

Just before the waves closed over the monster’s shape, Eragon looked into its one upward-facing eye, which was as black as a drop of tar. The malevolence contained therein-the sheer hate and fury and frustration that he perceived in the creature’s unblinking gaze-was enough to make Eragon shiver and wish he were in the center of the Hadarac Desert. For only there, he felt, would he be safe from the creature’s ancient hunger.

Heart pounding, he relaxed his grip on Brisingr and slumped over the front of the saddle. “What was that?”

A Nidhwal, said Glaedr.

Eragon frowned. He did not remember reading about any such thing in Ellesmera. And what is a Nidhwal?!

They are rare and not often spoken about. They are to the sea what the Fanghur are to the air. Both are cousins to the dragons. Though the differences in our appearance are greater, the Nidhwal are closer to us than are the screeching Fanghur. They are intelligent, and they even have a structure similar to the Eldunari within their chest, which we believe enables them to remain submerged for extended periods of time at great depth.

Can they breathe fire?

No, but like the Fanghur, they often use the power of their minds to incapacitate their prey, which more than one dragon has discovered to their dismay.

They would eat their own kind! Saphira said.

To them, we are nothing alike, Glaedr replied. But they do eat their own, which is one reason there are so few Nidhwalar. They have no interest in happenings outside their own realm, and every attempt to reason with them has met with failure. It is odd to encounter one so close to shore. There was a time when they were only found several days’ flight from land, where the sea is the deepest. It seems they have grown either bold or desperate since the fall of the Riders.

Eragon shivered again as he remembered the feel of the Nidhwal’s mind. Why did neither you nor Oromis ever teach us of them?

There is much we did not teach you, Eragon. We had only so muchtime, and it was best spent trying to arm you against Galbatorix, not every dark creature that haunts the unexplored regions of Alagaesia.

Then there are other things like the Nidhwal that we don’t know about?

A few.

Will you tell us of them, Ebrithil? Saphira asked.

I will make a pact with you, Saphira, and with you, Eragon. Let us wait a week, and if we are still alive and still possessed of our freedom, I will happily spend the next ten years teaching you about every single race I know of, including every variety of beetle, of which there are multitudes. But until then, let us concentrate upon the task before us. Are we agreed?

Eragon and Saphira reluctantly agreed, and they spoke of it no more.

The headwind strengthened into a blustery gale as they neared the front of the storm, slowing Saphira until she was flying at half her normal speed. Now and then, powerful gusts rocked her and sometimes stopped her dead in her course for a few moments. They always knew when the gusts were about to strike, for they could see a silvery, scalelike pattern rushing toward them across the surface of the water.

Since dawn, the clouds had only increased in size, and up close, they were even more intimidating. Near the bottom, they were dark and purplish, with curtains of driving rain connecting the storm with the sea like a gauzy umbilical cord. Higher up, the clouds were the color of tarnished silver, while the very tops were a pure, blinding white and appeared as solid as the flanks of Tronjheim. To the north, over the center of the storm, the clouds had formed a gigantic flat-topped anvil that loomed over all else, as if the gods themselves intended to forge some strange and terrible instrument.

As Saphira soared between two bulging white columns-beside which she was no more than a speck-and the sea vanished beneath a field of pillow-like clouds, the headwind abated and the air grew rough and choppy, swirling about them without an identifiable direction. Eragon clenched his teeth to keep them from clacking, and his stomach lurched as Saphira dropped a half-dozen feet and then, just as quickly, rose more than twenty feet straight up.

Glaedr said, Have you any experience storm-flying other than the time you were caught in a thunderstorm between Palancar Valley and Yazuac?

No, said Saphira, short and grim.

Glaedr seemed to have expected her answer, for without hesitation he began to instruct her about the intricacies of navigating the fantastic cloudscape. Look for patterns of movement and take note of the formations around you, he said. By them, you may guess where the wind is strongest and the direction it is blowing.

Much of what he said Saphira already knew, but as Glaedr kept talking, the old dragon’s calm demeanor steadied both her and Eragon. Had they felt alarm or fear in the old dragon’s mind, it would have caused them to doubt themselves, and perhaps Glaedr was aware of that.

A stray, wind-torn scrap of cloud lay across Saphira’s path. Instead of flying around it, she went straight through, piercing the cloud like a glittering blue spear. As the gray mist enveloped them, the sound of the wind grew muted, and Eragon squinted and held a hand before his face to keep his eyes clear.

When they shot out of the cloud, millions of tiny droplets clung to Saphira’s body, and she sparkled as if diamonds had been affixed to her already dazzling scales.

Her flight continued to be unsettled; one moment she would be level, but the next the unruly air might shove her sideways, or an unexpected updraft might lift one wing and send her slewing off in the opposite direction. Just sitting on her back as she fought against the turbulence was tiring, while for Saphira herself, it was a miserable, frustrating struggle made all the more difficult by knowing that it was far from over and that she had no choice but to continue on.

After an hour or two they still had not sighted the far side of the tempest. Glaedr said, We have to turn. You’ve gone as far west as is prudent, and if we’re to dare the full wrath of the storm, we had best do it now, before you are any more exhausted.

Without a word, Saphira wheeled north toward the vast, towering cliff of sunlit clouds that occupied the heart of the giant storm. As they neared the ridged face of the cliff-which was the largest single thing Eragon had ever seen, larger even than Farthen Dur-blue flashes illuminated the folds within as lightning crawled upward, toward the top of the anvil head.

A moment later, a clap of thunder shook the sky, and Eragon covered his ears with his hands. He knew that his wards would protect them from the lightning, but he still felt apprehensive about venturing near the crackling bolts of energy.

If Saphira was frightened, he did not sense it. All he could feel was her determination. She quickened the beat of her wings, and a few minutes later they arrived at the face of the cliff and then plunged through it and into the center of the storm.

Twilight surrounded them, gray and featureless.

It was as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist. The clouds made it impossible for Eragon to judge any distance past the tips of Saphira’s nose, tail, and wings. They were effectively blind, and only the constant pull of their weight let them differentiate up from down.

Eragon opened his mind and allowed his consciousness to expand as far as he could, but he felt no other living thing besides Saphira and Glaedr, not even a single stray bird. Fortunately, Saphira retained her sense of direction; they would not get lost. And by continuing to search with his mind for other beings, whether plant or animal, Eragon could ensure that they would not fly straight into the side of a mountain.

He also cast a spell that Oromis had taught him, a spell that informed him and Saphira exactly how close they were to the water-or the ground-at any given moment.

From the moment they entered the cloud, the ever-present moisture began to accumulate on Eragon’s skin and soak into his woolen clothes, weighing them down. It was an annoyance he could have ignored had not the combination of water and wind been so chilling, it would have soon drained the heat from his limbs and killed him. Therefore, he cast another spell, which filtered the air around him of any visible droplets, as well as-at her request-the air around Saphira’s eyes, for the moisture kept collecting on their surface, forcing her to blink all too frequently.

The wind inside the anvil head was surprisingly gentle. Eragon made a comment to that effect to Glaedr, but the old dragon stayed as grim as ever. We have yet to encounter the worst of it.

The truth of his words soon became evident when a ferocious updraft slammed into Saphira’s underside and carried her thousands of feet higher, where the air was too thin for Eragon to breathe properly and the mist froze into countless tiny crystals that stung his nose and cheeks and the webbing of Saphira’s wings like so many razor-sharp knives.

Pinning her wings against her sides, Saphira dove forward, trying to escape the updraft. After a few seconds, the pressure underneath her vanished, only to be replaced by an equally powerful downdraft, which shoved her toward the waves at a frightful speed.

As they fell, the ice crystals melted, forming large, globular raindrops that seemed to float weightlessly alongside Saphira. Lightning flared nearby-an eerie blue glow through the veil of clouds-and Eragon shouted with pain as the thunder boomed around them. His ears still ringing, he ripped two small pieces off the edge of his cloak, then rolled up the scraps of cloth and screwed them into his ears, forcing them in as far as he could.

Only near the bottom of the clouds did Saphira manage to break free of the fast-flowing stream of air. As soon as she did, a second updraft seized hold of her and, like a giant hand, pushed her skyward.

Then and for a long while after, Eragon lost all track of time. The raging wind was too strong for Saphira to resist, and she continued to rise and fall in the cycling air, like a piece of flotsam caught in a whirlpool. She made some headway-a few scant miles, dearly won and with great effort retained-but every time she extricated herself from one of the looping currents, she found herself trapped in another.

It was humbling for Eragon to realize that he, Saphira, and Glaedr were helpless before the storm and that, for all their might, they could not hope to match the power of the elements.

Twice, the wind nearly drove Saphira into the crashing waves. On both occasions, the downdrafts cast her out of the underbelly of the storm into the squalls of rain that pummeled the sea below. The second time it happened, Eragon looked over Saphira’s shoulder and, for an instant, he thought he saw the long, dark shape of the Nidhwal resting upon the heaving water. However, when the next burst of lightning came, the shape was gone, and he wondered whether the shadows had played a trick upon him.

As Saphira’s strength waned, she fought the wind less and less and, instead, allowed it to take her where it would. She only made an effort to defy the storm when she got too close to the water. Otherwise, she stilled her wings and exerted herself as little as possible. Eragon felt when Glaedr began to feed her a thread of energy to help sustain her, but even that was not enough to allow her to do more than hold her place.

Eventually, what light there was began to fade, and despair settled upon Eragon. They had spent the better part of the day being tossed about by the storm, and still it showed no sign of subsiding, nor did it seem as if Saphira was anywhere close to its perimeter.

Once the sun had set, Eragon could not even see the tip of his nose, and there was no difference between when his eyes were open and when they were closed. It was as if a huge pile of black wool had been packed around him and Saphira, and indeed, the darkness seemed to have a weight to it, as if it were a palpable substance pressing against them from all sides.

Every few seconds, another flash of lightning split the gloom, sometimes hidden within the clouds, sometimes streaking across their field of vision, glaring with the brightness of a dozen suns and leaving the air tasting like iron. After the searing brightness of the closer discharges, the night seemed twice as dark, and Eragon and Saphira alternated between being blinded by the light and being blinded by the utter black that followed. As close as the bolts came, they never struck Saphira, but the constant roll of thunder left Eragon and Saphira feeling sick from the noise.

How long they continued like that, Eragon could not tell.

Then, at some point in the night, Saphira entered a torrent of rising air that was far larger and far stronger than any they had previously encountered. As soon as it struck them, Saphira began to struggle against it in an attempt to escape, but the force of the wind was so great, she could barely hold her wings level.

At last, frustrated, she roared and loosed a jet of flame from her maw, illuminating a small area of the surrounding ice crystals, which glittered like gems.

Help me, she said to Eragon and Glaedr. I can’t do this by myself.

So the two of them melded their minds and, with Glaedr supplying the needed energy, Eragon shouted, “Ganga fram!”

The spell propelled Saphira forward, but ever so slowly, for moving at right angles to the wind was like swimming across the Anora River during the height of the spring snowmelt. Even as Saphira advanced horizontally, the current continued to sweep her upward at a dizzying rate. Soon Eragon began to notice that he was growing short of breath, and yet they remained caught within the torrent of air.

This is taking too long and it’s costing us too much energy, said Glaedr. End the spell.

But-

End the spell. We can’t win free before the two of you faint. We’ll have to ride the wind until it weakens enough for Saphira to escape.

How? she asked while Eragon did as Glaedr instructed. The exhaustion and sense of defeat that muddied her thoughts made Eragon feel a pang of concern for her.

Eragon, you must amend the spell you are using to warm yourself toinclude Saphira and me. It is going to grow cold, colder than even the bitterest winter in the Spine, and without magic, we shall freeze to death.

Even you?

I will crack like a piece of hot glass dropped in snow. Next you must cast a spell to gather the air around you and Saphira and to hold it there, so you may still breathe. But it must also allow the stale air to escape, or else you will suffocate. The wording of the spell is complicated, and you must not make any mistakes, so listen carefully. It goes as such-

Once Glaedr had recited the necessary phrases in the ancient language, Eragon repeated them back to him, and when the dragon was satisfied with his pronunciation, Eragon cast the spell. Then he amended his other piece of magic as Glaedr had instructed, so the three of them were shielded from the cold.

They waited, then, while the wind lifted them higher and higher. Minutes passed, and Eragon began to wonder if they would ever stop, or if they would keep hurtling upward until they were level with the moon and the stars.

It occurred to him that perhaps this was how shooting stars were made: a bird or a dragon or some other earthly creature snatched upward by the inexorable wind and thrown skyward with such speed, they flamed like siege arrows. If so, then he guessed he, Saphira, and Glaedr would make the brightest, most spectacular shooting star in living memory, if anyone was close enough to see their demise so far out to sea.

The howling of the wind gradually grew softer. Even the bone-jarring claps of thunder seemed muted, and when Eragon dug the scraps of cloth out of his ears, he was astonished by the hushed silence that surrounded them. He still heard a faint susurration in the background, like the sound of a small forest brook, but other than that, it was quiet, blessedly quiet.

As the clamor of the angry storm faded, he also noticed that the strain imposed by his spells was increasing-not so much from the enchantment that prevented their bodily heat from dissipating too quickly, but from the enchantment that collected and compressed the atmosphere in front of him and Saphira so that they could fill their lungs as they normally did. For whatever reason, the energy required to maintain the second spell multiplied out of all proportion to the first, and he soon felt the symptoms that indicated the magic was upon the verge of stealing away what little remained of his life force: a coldness of his hands, an uncertainty in the beating of his heart, and an overwhelming sense of lethargy, which was perhaps the most worrying sign of all.

Then Glaedr began to assist him. With relief, Eragon felt his burden decrease as the dragon’s strength flowed into him, a flush of fever-like heat that washed away his lethargy and restored the vigor of his limbs.

And so they continued.

At long last, Saphira detected a slackening of the wind-slight but noticeable-and she began to prepare to fly out of the stream of air.

Before she could, the clouds above them thinned, and Eragon glimpsed a few glittering specks: stars, white and silvery and brighter than any he had seen before.

Look, he said. Then the clouds opened up around them, and Saphira rose out of the storm and hung above it, balancing precariously atop the column of rushing wind.

Laid out below them, Eragon saw the whole of the storm, extending for what must have been a hundred miles in every direction. The center appeared as an arching, mushroom-like dome, smoothed off by the vicious crosswinds that swept west to east and threatened to topple Saphira from her uncertain perch. The clouds both near and far were milky and seemed almost luminous, as if lit from within. They looked beautiful and benign-placid, unchanging formations that betrayed nothing of the violence inside.

Then Eragon noticed the sky, and he gasped, for it contained more stars than he had thought existed. Red, blue, white, gold, they lay strewn upon the firmament like handfuls of sparkling dust. The constellations he was familiar with were still present but now set among thousands of fainter stars, which he beheld for the very first time. And not only did the stars appear brighter, the void between them appeared darker. It was as if, whenever he had looked at the sky before, there had been a haze over his eyes that had kept him from seeing the true glory of the stars.

He stared at the spectacular display for several moments, awestruck by the glorious, random, unknowable nature of the twinkling lights. Only when he finally lowered his gaze did it occur to him that there was something unusual about the purple-hued horizon. Instead of the sky and the sea meeting in a straight line-as they ought to and always had before-the juncture between them curved, like the edge of an unimaginably big circle.

It was such a strange sight, it took Eragon a half-dozen seconds to understand what he was seeing, and when he did, his scalp tingled and he felt as if the breath had been knocked out of him.

“The world is round,” he whispered. “The sky is hollow and the world is round.”

So it would appear, Glaedr said, but he seemed equally impressed. I heard tell of this from a wild dragon, but I never thought to see it myself.

To the east, a faint yellow glow tinted a section of the horizon, presaging the return of the sun. Eragon guessed that if Saphira held her position for another four or five minutes, they would see it rise, even though it would still be hours before the warm, life-giving rays reached the water below.

Saphira balanced there for a moment more, the three of them suspended between the stars and the earth, floating in the silent twilight like dispossessed spirits. They were in a nowhere place, neither part of the heavens nor part of the world below-a mote passing through the margin separating two immensities.

Then Saphira tipped forward and half flew, half fell northward, for the air was so sparse that her wings could not fully support her weight once she left the stream of rising wind.

As she hurtled downward, Eragon said, If we had enough jewels, and if we stored enough energy in them, do you think we could fly all the way to the moon?

Who knows what is possible? said Glaedr.

When Eragon was a child, Carvahall and Palancar Valley had been all he had known. He had heard of the Empire, of course, but it had never seemed quite real until he began to travel within it. Later still, his mental picture of the world had expanded to include the rest of Alagaesia and, vaguely, the other lands he had read of. And now he realized that what he had thought of as so large was actually but a small part of a much greater whole. It was as if his point of view had, within a few seconds, gone from that of an ant to that of an eagle.

For the sky was hollow, and the world was round.

It made him reevaluate and recategorize … everything. The war between the Varden and the Empire seemed inconsequential when compared with the true size of the world, and he thought how petty were most of the hurts and concerns that bedeviled people, when looked at from on high.

To Saphira, he said, If only everyone could see what we have seen, perhaps there would be less fighting in the world.

You cannot expect wolves to become sheep.

No, but neither do the wolves have to be cruel to the sheep.

Saphira soon dropped back into the darkness of the clouds, but she managed to avoid getting caught in another cycle of rising and falling air. Instead, she glided for many miles, skipping off the tops of the other, lower updrafts packed within the storm, using them to help conserve her strength.

An hour or two later, the fog parted, and they flew out of the huge mass of clouds that formed the center of the storm. They descended to skim over the insubstantial foothills piled about its base, which gradually flattened into a quilted blanket that covered everything in sight, with the sole exception of the anvil head itself.

By the time the sun finally appeared above the horizon, neither Eragon nor Saphira had the energy to pay much attention to their surroundings. Nor was there anything in the sameness below to attract their attention.

It was Glaedr, then, who said, Saphira, there, to your right. Do you see it?

Eragon lifted his head off his folded arms and squinted as his eyes adjusted to the brightness.

Some miles to the north, a ring of mountains rose out of the clouds. The peaks were clad in snow and ice, and together they looked like an ancient, jagged crown resting atop the layers of mist. The eastward-facing scarps shone brilliantly in the light of the morning sun, while long blue shadows cloaked the western sides and stretched dwindling into the distance, tenebrous daggers upon the billowy, snow-white plain.

Eragon straightened in his seat, hardly daring to believe that their journey might be at an end.

Behold, said Glaedr, Aras Thelduin, the fire mountains that guard the heart of Vroengard. Fly quickly, Saphira, for we have but a little farther to go.