As Eragon started to leave the half circle of stones, Glaedr said, Do what you must, but be careful.
* * *
Outside the nesting house, Eragon was pleased to see patches of stars and enough moonlight shining through the gaps in the clouds for him to make out his surroundings.
He bounced on the balls of his feet a few times, wondering where to go, and then he set off at a brisk trot toward the heart of the ruined city. After a few seconds, his frustration got the better of him and he increased his pace to an all-out run.
As he listened to the sound of his breathing and of his footsteps pounding against the paving stones, he asked himself, Who am I? But no answer came to him.
He ran until his lungs began to fail, and then he ran some more, and when neither his lungs nor his legs would sustain him any longer, he stopped by a weed-filled fountain and leaned on his arms against it while he recovered his breath.
Around him loomed the shapes of several enormous buildings: shadowy hulks that looked like a range of ancient, crumbling mountains. The fountain stood in the center of a vast square courtyard, much of which was littered with pieces of broken stone.
He pushed himself off the fountain and slowly turned in a circle. In the distance, he could hear the deep, resonant croaking of the bullfrogs, an odd booming sound that grew especially loud whenever one of the larger frogs participated.
A cracked slab of stone several yards away caught his eye. He walked over, grasped it by the edges, and, with a heave, picked it off the ground. The muscles in his arms burning, he staggered to the edge of the courtyard and threw the slab onto the grass beyond.
It landed with a soft but satisfying thump.
He strode back to the fountain, unclasped his cloak, and draped it over the edge of the sculpture. Then he strode to the next piece of rubble—a jagged wedge that had cleaved off a larger block—and he fit his fingers underneath it and lifted it onto his shoulder.
For over an hour, he labored to clear the courtyard. Some of the fallen masonry was so big, he had to use magic to move it, but for the most part he was able to use his hands. He was methodical about it; he worked back and forth across the courtyard, and every piece of rubble he encountered, no matter how large or small, he stopped to remove.
The effort soon left him drenched in sweat. He would have removed his tunic, but the edges of the stone were often sharp and would have cut him. As it was, he accumulated a host of bruises across his chest and shoulders, and he scraped his hands in numerous places.
The exertion helped calm his mind and, since it required little thought, left him free to mull over all that he was and all that he might be.
In the midst of his self-appointed task, as he was resting after having shifted a particularly heavy length of cornice, he heard a threatening hiss, and he looked up to see a snalglí—this one with a shell at least six feet tall—gliding out of the darkness with startling speed. The creature’s boneless neck was fully extended, its lipless mouth was like a slash of darkness splitting its soft flesh, and its bulbous eyes were pointed directly at him. By the light of the moon, the snalglí’s exposed flesh gleamed like silver, as did the track of slime it left behind.
“Letta,” said Eragon, and he straightened upright and shook drops of blood from his torn hands. “Ono ach néiat threyja eom verrunsmal edtha, O snalglí.”
As he spoke his warning, the snail slowed and retracted its eyes several inches. It paused when it was a few yards away, hissed again, and began to circle around to his left.
“Oh no you don’t,” he muttered, turning with it. He glanced over his shoulders to make sure no other snalglí were approaching from behind.
The giant snail seemed to realize that it could not catch him by surprise, for it stopped and sat hissing and waving its eyeballs at him.
“You sound like a teapot left to boil,” he said to it.
The snalglí’s eyeballs waved even faster, and then it charged at him, the edges of its flat belly undulating.
Eragon waited until the last moment, then jumped to the side and let the snalglí slide past. He laughed and slapped the back of its shell. “Not too bright, are you?” Dancing away from it, he began to taunt the creature in the ancient language, calling it all sorts of insulting but perfectly accurate names.
The snail seemed to puff up with rage—its neck thickened and bulged, and it opened its mouth even farther and began to sputter as well as hiss.
Again and again, it charged at Eragon, and every time he jumped out of the way. At last the snalglí grew tired of the game. It withdrew a half-dozen yards and sat staring at him with its fist-sized eyeballs.
“How do you ever catch anything when you’re so slow?” Eragon asked in a mocking tone, and he stuck his tongue out at the snail.
The snalglí hissed once more, and then it turned around and slid off into the darkness.
Eragon waited several minutes to be sure it was gone before he returned to clearing the rubble. “Maybe I should just call myself Snail Vanquisher,” he muttered as he rolled a section of a pillar across the courtyard. “Eragon Shadeslayer, Vanquisher of Snails.… I would strike fear into the hearts of men wherever I went.”
It was the deepest part of the night when he finally dropped the last piece of stone onto the border of grass that edged the courtyard. There he stood, panting. He was cold and hungry and tired, and the scrapes on his hands and wrists smarted.
He had ended by the northeastern corner of the courtyard. To the north was an immense hall that had been mostly destroyed during the battle; all that remained standing was a portion of the back walls and a single, ivy-covered pillar where the entryway had been.
He stared at the pillar for the longest time. Above it, a cluster of stars—red, blue, and white—shone through an opening in the clouds, gleaming like cut diamonds. He felt a strange attraction to them, as if their appearance signified something that he ought to be aware of.
Without bothering to consider his action, he walked to the base of the pillar—scrambling over piles of rubble—then reached as high as he could and grasped the thickest part of the ivy: a stem as big around as his forearm and covered with thousands of tiny hairs.
He tugged on the vine. It held, so he jumped off the ground and began to climb. Hand over hand, he scaled the pillar, which must have been three hundred feet tall, but which felt taller the farther he got from the ground.
He knew he was being reckless, but then, he felt reckless.
Halfway up, the smaller tendrils of vine began to peel off the stone when he put his full weight on them. After that, he was careful to only grab hold of the main stem and some of the thicker side branches.
His grip had almost given out by the time he arrived at the top. The crown of the pillar was still intact; it formed a square, flat surface large enough to sit on, with over a foot to spare on each side.
Feeling somewhat shaky from the exertion, Eragon crossed his legs and rested his hands palm upward on his knees, allowing the air to soothe his torn skin.
Below him lay the ruined city: a maze of shattered husks that often echoed with strange, forlorn cries. In a few places where there were ponds, he could see the faint, glowing lights of the bullfrogs’ lures, like lanterns viewed from a great distance.
Angler frogs, he thought suddenly in the ancient language. That’s what their name is: angler frogs. And he knew he was right, for the words seemed to fit like a key in a lock.