Roran was buried in the gateway of the collapsing castle at the end of the last chapter, and in this chapter Eragon runs through the remaining castle to find him. This is a very short, very pointless chapter.
This chapter has several problems. It's unclear until about halfway through the chapter what Eragon's plan is when there's really no reason for it to be unclear. The suspense should be coming from not knowing whether Roran is alive or dead under that pile of rubble, not from trying to guess what Eragon's doing. The various scenes inside the partially-destroyed castle don't make much sense; the people within are all behaving as if nothing has happened, starting with a trio of what I take for Imperial officers too busy arguing over a map to notice Eragon, and random Imperial soldiers can now recognize Eragon by face now. Eragon displays his violent tendencies again by punching a man to death because he's in the way, and Paolini sacrifices more page space to the altar of Eragon's Suedom by making an entire room of soldiers run away rather than face him, abandoning their lord. Granted, if I were in their shoes and knew what I do about the laws of this universe, I'd run away too, but there's really no point to this scene except to make Eragon look awesome by scaring the tar out of a bunch of Imperial goons.
And that's the real problem with this chapter. It's pointless. This chapter exists for the sole purpose of trying to inject more drama into the narrative, but the problem is that it's the entirely wrong place to do so. Paolini has always struggled with pacing in the past, and this chapter shows that he still does. Simply put, the beginning of the book is not the right time to threaten a major character with actual death, because there is no build up to the character's death. If you go through with it and kill off the character, you're going to make your audience angry because they weren't subconsciously prepared for it to happen. This is why Ajihad and Murtagh's "deaths" at the beginning of Eldest were such a Wall Banger: they came completely out of nowhere and no one was ready for them (well, that and no one actually believed for an instant that Murtagh was really dead. They came across as an Ass Pull, and Roran being buried in a collapsing castle calls right back to them.
On the flip side, threatening a character with death like this and then not following through on it is an equally bad idea, because every time you do it your audience is that much less likely to believe that the character is in real danger of dying the next time you put them in a potentially lethal situation. No matter which way you go, you're only hurting yourself by threatening to kill off a major character for real at the beginning of the book.
Back to the book, it turns out Roran is alive, and we end the chapter in the finest of Inheritance traditions: someone losing consciousness.
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