antishurtugal_reborn | Murtagh, part 2 chapter 11: The Door of Stone

Murtagh, part 2 chapter 11: The Door of Stone

We are now on page 216 of 624 (not counting the afterword and end matter) in my copy. A little over a third of the way through the story.

So far, Murtagh has:

had a Random Encounter with some mysterious enemies against whom the Name didn’t work
beat up and robbed a guy in front of his children
found an Interesting Rock
made a deal to rescue a werecat child in exchange for information about the Interesting Rock
robbed a grave
slain a Catfish Of Unusual Size
joined the city guard of Gil’ead

I can’t be the only one with issues about this story’s pacing and plotting. The various elements of the story so far don’t really have anything to do with each other, they’re like a string of unrelated quests in a poorly designed video game.

For contrast, page 216 of my copy of Shadow and Bone is a bit over two thirds of the book. Murtagh does not have twice as much story as Shadow and Bone.

This entire first third of the story could easily be cut entirely, without any negative effect on the second half of the story. All Paolini would need to do is a slight bit of rewriting to make the story open with Murtagh and Thorn on approach to the mysterious perilous place that Umaroth warned them about. How they discovered the location of that place can either be explained in dialogue or flashback, or even not at all. It’s not important how they learned the exact location of it. Perhaps they came across it fortuitously while searching various small towns for local rumours about monsters and such.

Instead, we get this whole convoluted video game style fetch quest of a prologue that takes over 200 pages (actually, if you follow my idea above, over 300 pages) just to get to the start of the actual story.

That said, on to chapter 11:

The chamber inside was totally dark.

No, really? An underground room under a prison, in the middle of the night, in an age before electric lights?

Murtagh conveniently finds a candle in the previous also-dark tunnel, and finds that the room he’s entered is a very generic war room as seen in any fantasy dungeon crawler you’ve ever played.

Paolini horribly underestimates the length of a pike, presumably mistaking it for a spear, by suggesting that a pike would fit into an underground room.

For the record, a historical pike was anywhere between 3 and 7 metres long (roughly 10 to 23 feet). Anything shorter than that is a spear. Pikes are two-handed weapons used in formation. Paolini seems to suggest that an underground tunnel would be guarded by a man holding a 10-foot pike, somehow.

Murtagh places the mini-pike on a table inside the room, which is another weird thing. How big is this table? Even a shorter spear would be around 6 feet. That’s a huge table.

He looked closer. The runes themselves were of an archaic design, and as he tried to read them, he realized that they were indeed runes such as the dwarves used, not humans. He shook his head. He could read many types of writing, but Dwarvish wasn’t one of them.

One of the few linguistic details that I will give credit to Paolini for: although the humans adopted the dwarven runes for their own language, they changed and adapted them to suit their own language, created new runes for sounds that the dwarven system doesn’t have, and dropped runes for sounds that they don’t use. This is consistent with how real languages develop and change writing systems, for example the way ancient Latin writers modified the (Etruscan, and before that, the) Ancient Greek alphabet to suit the Latin sounds they needed to transcribe.

It’s a nice touch of realism that Murtagh recognises the runes, but can’t translate them. It’s not much credit, but credit nonetheless.

After failing to pick a lock because of a clever idea that he fumbled at the last moment and just loudly destroying the door instead (because of course this version of Murtagh is hopelessly clumsy and incapable of stealth), Murtagh continues into a corridor lit by a magic glowing gemstone in the roof, and walls that are supported by dragon ribs. Murtagh immediately guesses, with zero evidence or reason to guess it, that they must the the rib bones of Morzan’s dragon. For some reason.

Murtagh then proceeds to loot the place, stealing a book of Ancient Language words and various other things such as a tiny scrap of yellow diamond, described as "nearly as big as his thumbnail". It is full of energy.

This is an introductory loot-room in a tutorial dungeon, and Murtagh is treating it exactly as if it was a game. Never mind if anyone heard the door breaking apart, Murtagh has all the time in the world to carefully pick through what he wants, and a Bag of Holding to store his new inventory.

He touched one of the ribs along the walls. The bone was cool and smooth against his hand, and he felt a pang imagining it was Thorn’s. But he was not sure how much sorrow he felt for Morzan’s dragon. The creature had chosen to serve Galbatorix as much as Morzan had himself; they were both culpable for their sins. As are we all, he thought.

First, Morzan and Not-Alaion entered Galby’s service knowingly and of their own free will (at least, according to canon taken at face value), they weren’t kidnapped and tortured until they were forced to swear fealty. They are NOT the same.

One point of difference between Murtagh and Eragon: When Murtagh encounters a door that might be magically alarmed, he stops and thinks about it instead of just breaking the door down.

He eventually decides to try siphoning the magic out of the gems in the door into the tiny little scrap of a gemstone he stole from the previous room.

Logically, the dozens of gemstones in the door contain far more energy than the, I remind you, thumbnail-sized fleck of diamond, so Murtagh panics and casts Eragon’s signature spell Brisingr to create a magic light that he channels the gem-energy into.

Point: Murtagh’s magic is supposed to be red, right? So why is his magic bright blue? That’s Eragon’s colour.

Murtagh eventually succeeds in draining all the magic out of the gems, creating a “miniature sun” in the process.

Then he ended his spell, and wings of shadows wrapped around him as the werelight vanished.

I don’t know if someone’s running a count for overwritten metaphors, but this is just silly. Now is not the time for purple poetry, we’re trying to have a tense atmosphere of danger and excitement.

He picked up the gem. It was still uncomfortably warm. Murtagh had never had difficulty storing energy in a gem before. Though now that he thought about it, he’d only really used the ruby in Zar’roc’s pommel, and that was a far larger stone, of finer quality too, and woven through with elven enchantments. The diamond had none of those advantages. It must have already been filled to its limit. That or there had been significantly more energy stored in the door than he’d realized.

And this is where Murtagh gave the shared Paotagonist brain cell to a different character in some other book. A thumbnail-sized scrap of diamond can hold less energy than a significantly larger and purer gemstone? Or several dozen larger stones connected to each other and embedded in a door? No, really?

Actually, what ARE the maths of gemstones and energy storage? Can magical energy even be measured and quantified*? Is there a specific ratio of size to energy capacity, and how does the chemical composition or “purity” of different gemstones affect the maximum amount of magic it can hold?

( * I’m reminded of The Science of Discworld, by Terry Prachett, in which the wizards at Unseen University quantify magic in units of energy called thaums.)

Is it only gemstones that can hold magic? What about quartz, basalt, or marble? Is it only translucent gemstones that can hold magic? What about lapis lazuli, or pyrite? Or gold?

Paolini’s grasp of mineralogy aside, Murtagh tries the door again and… it’s still locked. Because at least someone in Alagaesia isn’t a complete idiot, and thought to use multiple redundancies to safeguard their stuff.

Murtagh opens the door with a spell, because this random side-quest is already stretching on too long without adding a search for a key, and then we get a section break.

The door has led into an underground garden, which could have come straight out of Baldur’s Gate 2, although there are no dryads-in-distress here.

Some of the plants Murtagh recognized: healing plants, poisonous plants, plants for inducing visions and compelling sleep. But many were unknown to him. There was a lily whose leaf and stem seemed made of living gold and whose petals were of a whitish metal. A drooping tree with berries that glittered like beryls. Mushrooms that had purple caps and electric-blue gills.

And he saw a plant unlike any he had encountered before. It had a single stem topped with a fleshy, pitcher-shaped cup perhaps two hands high. And from the cup stood small orange tentacles, which waved gently in the air.

Even as he watched, a frog hopped past the pitcher plant. Two of the tentacles reached out, fast as snakes, grabbed the frog, and pulled it into the mouth of the cup and held it there.

Quoted because I read this as Paolini is trying to show that Alagaesia is a part of his shared Fractalverse world. Tentacles are a distinctive element in the Fractalverse books and stories so far, especially in the Unity Illusion-Of-Choice short story. So far, this is the first major mention of tentacles (where one would not expect tentacles) that I can recall in the Alagaesia books. It’s like Paolini waving the Fractalverse logo at us in the middle of a non-Fractalverse story. “hey look, this is part of my universe too!”

Murtagh continues to be clumsy, and trips on an uneven brick.

[…] he forgot to watch where he was walking, and he caught an ankle on the corner of a brick that stuck out. He stumbled forward a step.

I’m… struggling to understand how that works. Just, the physical blocking of it. Where is this brick, and why/how did he only catch his ankle on it? Is it sticking out sideways from the wall, or sticking up from the ground? If it’s sticking out sideways from the wall, where is Murtagh in relation to the wall?

This scene would work SO much better if he tripped on an uneven paving stone, instead of the corner of a brick that stuck out. Stuck out from WHAT? WHERE?

Anyway, Murtagh finds an “evil-looking egg” which everyone who has read the previous books should immediately know is a ra’zac egg, but credit to Paolini he remembered that Murtagh hasn’t seen a ra’zac egg before, and possibly doesn’t even know that ra’zac hatch from eggs.

I haven’t actually read ahead, but let me guess: this is sequel-bait that we will never see again at least in this book. Let me know in the comments if I’m right.

Murtagh finally opens the last door, and we get another section break.

In the final room, Murtagh finds an empty prison cell containing only a blanket and a candle. Murtagh has a moment of PTSD flashback which is honestly written decently well, as far as Paolini can:

For a moment, it felt as if he were back in Urû’baen, in the dungeons beneath the citadel—he and Thorn both—listening to the screams of other prisoners while the overpowering weight of the king’s mind bore down upon him. The walls seemed to close in on him, and he had a sudden feeling of being deep underground, alone and isolated, trapped in the airless dark.

His breath caught in his throat, and an oppressive grief collapsed upon him. Then a terrible rage began to build atop the grief, and his hands closed in fists, and he set his teeth and ground his jaw.

They would pay. They would all pay for what they had done to the werecat youngling, and he would teach them to fear him as they had feared his father.

“Curse you,” he muttered, and spun around to leave.

And then as he turns to leave, Murtagh is attacked by the werecat.

End chapter.

Main take-away: Lemon chicken with special fried rice. And a bag of prawn crackers.

Secondary take-away: This entire subplot is unnecessary to the story as a whole, and reads like a roleplaying game side quest. This would be decent as a video game in the tradition of Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Icewind Dale, or even Morrowind. As a story, it’s not great structure. As I said at the start of that chapter, the entire story arc of the first half of the book is basically irrelevant to the second half. There is no organic follow-through of themes or consequences from the earlier chapters, except for the stupid magic-breaking talisman.

None of what has happened so far matters, and none of it makes sense for the overall story.

Is it one continuous narrative where every element builds up toward the climax, or a series of vignettes in Murtagh’s life? I think this would have been better as a Tales of Alagaesia sequel featuring small unconnected moments of Adventure from Murtagh’s post-Inheritance life. Aside from the parts that were already in the first Tales of Alagaesia. Hunting the fish, dungeon crawling under Gil’ead, rescuing a kidnapped werecat child, visiting (but maybe not robbing) Oromis and Gladrag’s burial site. All of these could have been interesting stand-alone short stories as part of an anthology. As part of a novel, they just don’t fit together.

Worldbuilding wise, it feels like a completely different world than we got in Eragon and Eldest. And I mean that quite emphatically, it’s not merely a more mature perspective on the same world, but a completely different world with different rules and foundations. Magic gems, underground gardens, potions and philtres, dungeon crawling… it simply doesn’t fit in with the “magic is tied to the Ancient Language and that’s that” story about dragon-riding and uncle-avenging that we started with.

Which is a problem of progressive worldbuilding. Paolini did not stick with the worldbuilding he established in the first books, but continued to develop and change the fundamentals of how his world works in each book, until the magic presented in Murtagh is basically incompatible with the magic introduced in Eragon.

That can be fine between drafts of one book, or between separate unconnected books. But for a series that is supposed to act as a single narrative within one consistent world, it’s really sloppy and poor form.

Next up: Part 2 Chapter 12: Pathways Into Darkness, with the one and only Epistler.

Murtagh, part 2 chapter 11: The Door of Stone

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