Murtagh Group Spork: Part II, Chapter 2, "Questions for a Cat"

[snarkbotanya]

 

Welcome back to #NotMyMurtagh, all. When we last left off, our protagonist had attempted to contact his not-so-secret admirer Ilenna, but instead roused suspicion with a mage whose description sounded like Lucius Malfoy got Isekai’d into Alagaësia. I’m not sure whether that would be an upward, downward, or lateral move. Anyway, Murtagh then got bailed out by some guy who claimed to be sent by the werecat Carabel, and has now followed the purported messenger into a dark tunnel.

We open this chapter with Murtagh thinking how easy it would now be for this guy to hit him over the head. While he did consider the risk last chapter and here comforts himself with the fact that his palm-itching Spidey Sense isn’t going off, I still have to question this. Why? Because I think Murtagh should be having an intense trauma reaction in this scene.

Think about it. Murtagh’s whole ordeal serving unwillingly under Galbatorix began with being ambushed and dragged into a tunnel. If there is any good occasion to hit us over the head with the “Murtagh is traumatized” stick and give some much-needed recap for new readers, this is it. Have Murtagh’s pulse rush as he’s transported back to that horrid scene, the Urgals closing in around him and Ajihad, overwhelming them by sheer numbers. Recount the terror he felt watching the Varden’s leader fall, certain that he would be next, but instead of killing him they dragged him into the tunnels, bearing him away to some horrid fate.

Paolini loves to beat us with the “Murtagh is traumatized” stick during filler scenes, but once a piece of the alleged plot that doesn’t directly have to do with it gets rolling, he almost seems to forget about it. At best he’ll pay a little lip service. It's especially grating here because this could be some really good setup for a reaction he'll have later in the chapter, but unfortunately the most we get right now is this:

Murtagh was tempted to summon a werelight, but there was no point in revealing that he could use magic.

As he felt his way through the dark, a profusion of possibilities bedeviled him. A thousand likely—and unlikely—fates, each worse than the last. It was fruitless speculation, so he wrenched his thoughts away and instead reviewed his answers to every question he could imagine.

He wasn’t about to allow Carabel to catch him out, even if she were the cleverest of werecats.

This is choppy and fragmentary, the sort of writing that tells me Paolini really isn’t interested in the current scene and just wants to get on to the next. And yet, he takes an entire goddamned page longer to get to the end of this section.

That’s right. The two pages that begin this chapter are nothing but traveling through a tunnel. It’s probably even more padded than you think, too, because a good amount of space is taken up by counting steps in a series of single-word “paragraphs.”

Using his staff for balance, he climbed.

One…

Two…

Three… 

Four… 

Fi— He slipped on the fifth step; a patch of water caused his boot to lose its grip. He caught himself on his staff and then continued, heart pounding.

Five…

Six…

Seven. A dim thread of light appeared before him, tall and straight.

Counting down can, of course, be a good way to build tension. I did something like that in the first chapter of Consequence, when Vanora is in line to have a go with the dragon eggs. However, that countdown was a lot shorter and it was fully interspersed with descriptions of Vanora’s emotions and what was going on around her. That is, admittedly, harder to do with something as comparatively quick as footsteps, but the few moments when something does happen here just illustrate how pointless the steps where nothing happens are.

Let’s apply the editing knife.

He started to climb, counting the steps as he went. On the fifth, his boot hit a patch of water and he had to catch himself on his staff. He took a moment to catch his breath, heart pounding, then ascended the final two. As his heart finally began to slow, a dim thread of light caught his eye.

THERE, I FIXED IT.

Despite the thread of light being “tall and straight,” when Murtagh reaches out and pushes the door open, it’s described as “arched.” It leads into a storeroom full of barrels and cured meats, which for some reason has a candle burning despite nobody else being there.

We then spend only a couple paragraphs heading through the fortress before we get to Carabel’s door and on to the next section.

I’m really not sure why there’s a section break here. There’s no major time skip or scene shift; sure, Murtagh is going into a new room to interact with a new character, but it follows very clearly, logically, and immediately upon the previous scene. Having a section break just feels superfluous.

Anyway, our new setting is Carabel’s study, where the lady in question is waiting at her desk. We get a whole paragraph describing her, which also serves to establish what human-form werecats look like to any new readers. For some reason Murtagh not having seen a werecat before gets its own paragraph right after that; I think it would have flowed better as a part of the preceding paragraph.

Carabel has Murtagh’s letter from the last chapter, as well as the birdcage. The bird itself is absent. We get five short paragraphs of attempted tension-building before he speaks up, commenting that she seems to have “enjoyed the bird.”

What follows is fairly typical for Paolini writing a werecat. It’s a bunch of “verbal sparring” that Paolini clearly thinks is clever, but mostly it just feels stale. Murtagh asks why Carabel took the letter and Carabel says that he should instead ask how she knew to take the letter. Apparently the page tattled to his master, Lord Relgin’s chamberlain, who in turn immediately tattled to Lord Relgin himself; Lord Relgin responded by sending a bunch of his people to apprehend “Tornac.” This isn’t really surprising, but in the course of it being laid out, Paolini has Murtagh make basically every wrong assumption so that Carabel can correct him.

This despite Murtagh having been raised in Galbatorix’s court, where he had to play Dangerous Evil Court PoliticsTM.

Incidentally, Carabel actually refers to Ilenna by a full name: Ilenna Erithsdaughter. I’m not sure whether Erith is a feminine or masculine name; the former would suit the established naming conventions in Alagaësia, but that’s hardly been consistent in this book. I mostly bring this up so that I can point out something amusing about Inheriwiki, which I discovered when I went to see if either of her parents were named. Ilenna does not actually have a page on Inheriwiki. She is, however, mentioned on Murtagh’s page… which incorrectly calls her Lord Relgin’s daughter. No, Lord Relgin doesn’t have his own page either.

Carabel does, though. It’s only a single sentence and a basic bio widget, but it’s a page.

Speaking of Carabel, she’s clocked who Murtagh really is and calls him “Murtagh son of Morzan” right to his face. This, naturally, freaks Murtagh out, and he wants to know how she knows. She tells him that werecats know the name Tornac and he smells of dragon. Still freaked out, Murtagh demands to know what she wants. She asks him what he was looking to talk to Ilenna for, and he brushes it off as a personal matter.

By the way, there was a section break after Carabel said Murtagh’s name. Why didn’t I mention it when it came up? Because I wanted to show you exactly how stupidly unnecessary it was. 

The section breaks in this chapter have been pure Cliffhanger Chops. Paolini really, really wanted Carabel addressing Murtagh by his real name to be a Wham Line, but you can’t just force something to be a Wham Line by breaking the section right after it. If there’s no actual change in scene, it’s just an annoying speed bump that messes up the flow of the writing.

Murtagh realizes that Carabel’s got something going on, so he asks if something’s happened to Ilenna. The werecat brushes it off and there’s a little more pointless verbal sparring before she just outright says that there’s no way contacting Ilenna won’t lead to discovery for Murtagh. At this point, I’m pretty sure any reader could tell that Carabel is about to offer Murtagh some alternative, but he doesn’t clue on that she’s offering help for another couple lines of dialogue.

To be fair, this may not be entirely due to Paolini dumbing Murtagh down. Carabel appears to be allergic to saying anything directly until her partner in conversation picks up on her hints. As someone who often misses hints due to autism, this does not endear her to me.

Anyway, Carabel says she wants to help Murtagh in exchange for “the smallest of favors.” This rubs Murtagh the wrong way.

In an instant, things became clear to Murtagh. A cynical laugh escaped him. “Of course. And what is this smallest of favors?”

The werecat lifted her pointed chin, defiant. “A task that needs doing, and none there are in Gil’ead who can do it, save you.”

“Somehow I doubt that.” He frowned at her; she was trying to manipulate him. “I’m not your errand boy, cat. No one gets to order me about. Not you, not Relgin, not even Nasuada.”

This is an understandable sentiment from a man who was magically enslaved for a good year or so. However, here it falls a bit flat because we just know he’s going to end up doing what Carabel wants.

Why? Because this is a required quest.

If you’ve ever played any kind of video game, this concept should be annoyingly familiar. To open the door to the next area, you need to get the key, but the key is locked in a safe and you need to find the villain’s journal where he wrote down the combination, only instead of writing down the actual combination he wrote down where he hid each individual number so now you have to find all the items he mentioned, pick them up, and rotate them. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; puzzles are a good way to add interactivity to a game that’s otherwise a walking simulator, keeping the player engaged with the game and its story.

It becomes a problem, however, if the quest seems more like it’s delaying the story than actually contributing to it. And that’s a problem whether we’re talking about a game or a book.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There will be plenty of time to talk about that.

Murtagh and Carabel spar verbally for a whole other page before he finally decides that this is probably his best shot and shows her the spooky rock and amulet. Carabel reacts like the cat gifs I would always put in my Eragon spork chapters whenever Angela showed up.

Carabel demands to know where he got them, Murtagh tells a truthful but slightly abridged version, and Paolini uses parentheses just to annoy me. The writing is pretty choppy here, again as if Paolini was speeding through to get to the bit he actually wanted to write.

In true Paolini tradition, Carabel responds by telling Murtagh that he’s asking questions he might not really want answered. Murtagh, ignoring the warning, asks if she knows where to find Bachel, the stone, and the Dreamers. Carabel admits that she does and agrees to trade the information for her task. Of course this means we need yet more “how can I trust you” sparring before we actually get to the chase, with Murtagh passive-aggressively threatening to try and talk to Ilenna instead so that Carabel can drop this pretentious bit of prattle for how she can possibly know these things if Ilenna doesn’t:

“Because I am a cat, human. I hear many things, and I know more. I hunt in shadows, and I dance in moonbeams, and wherever I walk, I walk alone.”

Murtagh dismisses this as “nonsense and riddles.” Paolini probably intends for us to disagree, but I’m really not inclined to.

Finally, finally, Carabel actually gets to give her quest pitch. Apparently someone’s been kidnapping young werecats. The most recent abductee was a girl named Silna, about three days ago. The werecats have tracked her scent to a door in one of the city guard barracks “that never opens,” and Carabel wants Murtagh to see if she’s there.

Oh, and apparently werecats call their children “younglings.”

Seriously, Paolini? Do you really want to invite more Star Wars comparisons? And even if you do, did it have to be one of the most commonly and relentlessly mocked names for something in the Star Wars universe?

Murtagh is sympathetic to the werecats’ plight, but still has to ask why Carabel can’t ask Lord Relgin about it, even though the answer of “the city guard is involved, so there’s a chance the orders came from the top” is practically staring him in the face. That answer plays second fiddle to some more riddling from Carabel about how werecats are “the ones who walk through doors” and thus them not being able to get through this door is weird. Murtagh then asks about Du Vrangr Gata, and Carabel comments that she “would not trust them to catch a mouse with three broken legs,” which is actually a pretty decent cat idiom, so I’ll give Paolini one point of credit for that.

Murtagh considers why, if Carabel needs someone she can trust, she hasn’t gone to the elves, but decides, for once, not to ask. Then he thinks about Silna again and how she must be terrified, and Paolini finally takes the opportunity to talk about Murtagh’s backstory.

Instead of focusing on the torture he suffered offscreen during the events of Eldest, though, we get treated to a story from several years earlier. Apparently, when Murtagh was fourteen, he snuck out of Uru’baen while Galbatorix and his retinue were away and got caught on his way back in. The soldiers on watch didn’t recognize him, so they threw him into their jail, where he stayed until Galbatorix returned and sent his chamberlain to retrieve him. And of course the chamberlain then had Murtagh beaten.

The torture by the Twins does come up, but it’s only for a couple of sentences before the infodump about this other incident. I can only assume Paolini did this to emphasize how awful growing up in Galbatorix’s court was, but it rings hollow, and I can only imagine it would ring even hollower for fans, because we just had Murtagh’s perspective during Eldest, which fans would no doubt want to hear about, dangled in front of our faces before being shoved aside for a new, far less interesting story.

The recollection ends more or less as it began, with Murtagh feeling sorry for Silna, but this time we also have him resenting Carabel for using Silna’s plight to get his help. He says he’ll do the task, but for Silna, not for Carabel. Carabel tells him that all werecats will be grateful if he does, and again calls him “Murtagh son of Morzan,” which he reacts to with an unvoiced “Stop calling me that!” and a voiced “Where are the barracks?”

I honestly kind of like the little unvoiced thought here. It effectively shows Murtagh’s discomfort without giving some canned description, and also shows that he either doesn’t want to raise the issue or sees no point in it. That’s a lot closer to the Murtagh I know.

Carabel says that it won’t be as simple as visiting the barracks, as if Murtagh just waltzes in there and raises the alarm, they might kill Silna or smuggle her out. Murtagh, who has in the space of a couple paragraphs gone from “actually might be the character I know” to “dumbed-down Eragon clone,” asks how the hell he’s supposed to get in quietly, and Carabel suggests… well, this.

“You must become a member of the city guard and join Captain Wren’s company.”

Oh yes. The key to the next area is in a locked safe, and to get it, you must find the code.

Murtagh says he can probably talk his way into the ranks, but Carabel shoots that down by informing him that Captain Wren only recruits from the guard and is selective about it. Since there’s no way Murtagh can earn genuine trust in that amount of time, he’s going to have to really impress Captain Wren. And so…

“It is very simple, human. To impress him, you must kill a fish.”

“A fish? A fish? Do you take me for a fool?”

“Not at all. But, alas, to kill the fish, you will need a special lure.”

The combination to the safe, you see, is in the villain’s journal. But he didn’t just write the combination down, oh no, it has to be more complicated than that.

Murtagh angrily demands an explanation, complete with Paolini’s favorite exclamation of “Bah!” It seems that in the lake, there’s a giant man-eating fish called Muckmaw, and the city guard has put a bounty of four gold coins and a job on its head. Carabel completely dismisses Murtagh’s suggestion of finding the fish with his mind and killing it with a spell, insisting that he will need a very special lure.

“A scale of the dragon Glaedr, whose body lies burned and buried outside this city.”

Yes, the villain wrote the individual numbers of the code on various specific items in the current area, so you need to go find them and turn them around with the game’s physics engine.

This is a video game quest and Carabel just laid out all the little steps that Murtagh has to take to complete the damn thing. I feel like instead of reading a novel, I’m reading a bad transcript of someone’s generic fantasy MMO Let’s Play.

The reaction to that quest requirement has to be seen to be believed.

Murtagh’s immediate reaction was outrage. “You must be jesting!”

You had so many options here, Paolini, for a formal and/or old-timey way to say “You must be joking.” You could have had Murtagh say “Surely you jest,” or “Do not jest, cat,” or “You jest of such things?” But no, you just replace “joking” with “jesting” as if that doesn’t sound like the palest imitation of Ye Olde Medievale Speeche ever committed to paper.

Carabel is all solemn and says only a dragon scale will work as a lure for Muckmaw. Meanwhile, Murtagh has to push away the intrusive thoughts about being forced to kill Oromis and Glaedr. He doesn’t say what he’s thinking of, but he does tell Carabel he’s not happy with this, and she tries to comfort him.

“You slew Glaedr. Now, by fate’s design, you may use a part of him to help save an innocent. What could be more right than that?”

I get what he was going for, but I don’t think he quite got there. Still, this apparently “strikes Murtagh to his core.” Whatever will move the alleged plot forward, I suppose.

Also, it was Galbatorix who killed Glaedr. At that point in the fight, Murtagh was a meat puppet.

Murtagh reasonably assumes that the elves probably set wards on Glaedr’s grave, and Carabel concurs, saying that’s why the werecats haven’t tried to get a scale themselves. I don’t know why they would try at all; the whole Muckmaw plot to get into the city guard probably wouldn’t work if the one presenting the fish-head was a member of the very species whose kids they’re stealing. If they want to go the subtle route, they definitely need a human ally.

Carabel tells Murtagh that if he hadn’t come to Gil’ead the werecats would have stormed the barracks even if it meant fighting all the guards inside. Murtagh has a bit more conflict about having committed to this, thinking Thorn won’t like that he gave his word and hating Carabel for being smug and manipulative. He confirms the plan, and Carabel adds one final detail: there have been rumors about people making ready to leave the city, so there’s a time limit on this quest to boot.

Timed quests are the worst.

Murtagh resolves to rescue Silna even if he has to pull the city apart to find her, because even this bastardized version of him can’t escape his inherent compassion, and the chapter ends on this bizarre note.

A savage, toothy smile spread across Carabel’s face.

Was Paolini trying to red-herring that Carabel will betray Murtagh here? I genuinely can’t tell, because his section breaks in this chapter have been so shit. If he was, I doubt returning readers will fall for it; they know he loves to portray werecats as weird, enigmatic, and a bit sketchy. If he wasn’t, this is going to unintentionally mislead new readers.

I don’t have enough faith in his skills to assume he actually meant for new readers to fall for the trick while returning readers are in on the joke.

Regardless, this chapter is over, and now we’re moving on from getting reminded of Star Wars by “younglings” to getting reminded of LotR by “Barrow-Wights.”

Spoiler: there are no barrow-wights in the next chapter, nor does the word “wights” occur at any point in the actual prose text. But I’ll let Epistler talk about that.

Until next time, my friends.

Comments

[epistler]

Plus, it's a waste of an expensive candle.

Why not use one of those flameless lanterns or a werelight instead?

All werecats everywhere, regardless of whether they have smelled a dragon ever in their life, are intimately familiar with the smell of dragon enough tp oick it out of all the other smells that a traveller from another city might have.

Also, all dragons smell the same, regardless of environment, diet, circumstances, or genetics.

Yeaaah, seems legit. Where was Carabel (I cannot read that name without thinking of caramel) during the war anyway?

Books and games are fundamentally different media, what works in a game does not work in abook and vice versa. Paolini should know this.

A friend of mine who's a lifelong obsessive D&D player as well as a writer told me that turning your D&D campaign into a novel pretty much never works, and this is why.

Murtagh, only known son of Morzan (at the time), who was the Emperor's right and man. Murtagh, the highest-ranked teenager in the entire empire because Galby didn't have any acknowledged children of his own. Morzan, the son of one of the most dangerous and successful assassins in the Empire, Selena "the black hand", who was married to a Rider and Galbatorix's right hand man.

Yeaaaaah. Unless he was wearing a disguise (unlikely) him somehow going unrecognised is preposterous.
EDIT: No, I don't care that his existence was supposedly kept a secret for some damn reason.