The Way of Kings sa-1

by Brandon Sanderson

  “What are you doing?” Kaladin demanded.

  Teft was smiling. He stepped back, pulling his fist free. “Kelek,” he said, shaking his hand. “That’s some grip you’ve got.”

  “Why did you try to strike me?”

  “I wanted to see something,” Teft said. “You’re holding that pouch of spheres Lopen gave you, you see, and your own pouch with what we’ve gathered lately. More Stormlight than you’ve probably ever carried, at least recently.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Kaladin demanded. What was that heat inside of him, that burning in his veins?

  “Gancho,” Lopen said, his voice awed. “You’re glowing.”

  Kaladin frowned. What is he-

  And then he noticed it. It was very faint, but it was there, wisps of luminescent smoke curling up from his skin. Like steam coming off a bowl of hot water on a cold winter night.

  Shaking, Kaladin put the medical pack on the broad rim of the water barrel. He felt a moment of coldness on his skin. What was that? Shocked, he raised his other hand, looking at the wisps streaming off of it.

  “What did you do to me?” he demanded, looking up at Teft.

  The older bridgeman was still smiling.

  “Answer me!” Kaladin said, stepping forward, grabbing the front of Teft’s shirt. Stormfather, but I feel strong!

  “I didn’t do anything, lad,” Teft said. “You’ve been doing this for a while now. I caught you feeding off Stormlight when you were sick.”

  Stormlight. Kaladin hastily released Teft, fishing at the pouch of spheres in his pocket. He yanked it free and pulled it open.

  It was dark inside. All five gemstones had been drained. The white light streaming from Kaladin’s skin faintly illuminated the inside of the bag.

  “Now that’s something,” Lopen said from the side. Kaladin spun to find the Herdazian man bending down and looking at the medical pack. Why was that so important?

  Then Kaladin saw it. He thought he’d set the pack on the rim of the barrel, but in his haste he’d just pressed it against the side of the barrel. The pack now clung to the wood. Stuck there, hanging as if from an invisible hook. Faintly streaming light, just like Kaladin. As Kaladin watched, the light faded, and the pack slumped free and fell to the ground.

  Kaladin raised a hand to his forehead, looking from the surprised Lopen to the curious Teft. Then he glanced around the lumberyard, frantic. Nobody else was looking at them; in the sunlight, the vapors were too faint to see from a distance.

  Stormfather…what…how…

  He caught sight of a familiar shape above. Syl moved like a blown leaf, tossed this way and that, leisurely, faint.

  She did it! Kaladin thought. What has she done to me?

  He stumbled away from Lopen and Teft, running toward Syl. His footsteps propelling him forward with too much speed. “Syl!” he bellowed, stopping beneath her.

  She zipped down to hover before him, changing from a leaf to a young woman standing in the air. “Yes?”

  Kaladin glanced around. “Come with me,” he said, hurrying to one of the alleys between barracks. He pressed himself up against a wall, standing in the shade, breathing in and out. Nobody could see him here.

  Syl alighted in the air before him, hands behind her back, looking closely at him. “You’re glowing.”

  “What have you done to me?”

  She cocked her head, then shrugged.

  “Syl…” he said threateningly, though he wasn’t certain what harm he could do a spren.

  “I don’t know, Kaladin,” she said frankly, sitting down, her legs hanging over the side of the invisible platform. “I can…I can only faintly remember things I used to know so well. This world, interacting with men.”

  “But you did do something.”

  “We have done something. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t you. But together…” She shrugged again.

  “That isn’t very helpful.”

  She grimaced. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Kaladin raised a hand. In the shade, the light streaming off of him was more obvious. If someone walked by…“How do I get rid of it?”

  “Why do you want to get rid of it?”

  “Well, because…I…Because.”

  Syl didn’t respond.

  Something occurred to Kaladin. Something, perhaps, he should have asked long ago. “You’re not a windspren, are you?”

  She hesitated, then shook her head. “No.”

  “What are you, then?”

  “I don’t know. I bind things.”

  Bind things. When she played pranks, she made items stick together. Shoes stuck to the ground and made men trip. People reached for their jackets hanging on hooks and couldn’t pull them free. Kaladin reached down, picking a stone up off the ground. It was as big as his palm, weathered smooth by highstorm winds and rain. He pressed it against the wall of the barrack and willed his Light into the stone.

  He felt a chill. The rock began to stream with luminescent vapors. When Kaladin pulled his hand away, the stone remained where it was, clinging to the side of the building.

  Kaladin leaned close, squinting. He thought he could faintly make out tiny spren, dark blue and shaped like little splashes of ink, clustering around the place where the rock met the wall.

  “Bindspren,” Syl said, walking up beside his head; she was still standing in the air.

  “They’re holding the rock in place.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe they’re attracted to what you’ve done in affixing the stone there.”

  “That’s not how it works. Is it?”

  “Do rotspren cause sickness,” Syl said idly, “or are they attracted to it?”

  “Everyone knows they cause it.”

  “And do windspren cause the wind? Rainspren cause the rain? Flamespren cause fires?”

  He hesitated. No, they didn’t. Did they? “This is pointless. I need to find out how to get rid of this light, not study it.”

  “And why,” Syl repeated, “must you get rid of it? Kaladin, you’ve heard the stories. Men who walked on walls, men who bound the storms to them. Windrunners. Why would you want to be rid of something like this?”

  Kaladin struggled to define it. The healing, the way he never got hit, running at the front of the bridge…Yes, he’d known something odd was happening. Why did it frighten him so? Was it because he feared being set apart, like his father always was as the surgeon in Hearthstone? Or was it something greater?

  “I’m doing what the Radiants did,” he said.

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “I’ve been wondering if I’m bad luck, or if I’ve run afoul of something like the Old Magic. Maybe this explains it! The Almighty cursed the Lost Radiants for betraying mankind. What if I’m cursed too, because of what I’m doing?”

  “Kaladin,” she said, “you are not cursed.”

  “You just said you don’t know what’s happening.” He paced in the alleyway. To the side, the rock finally plopped free and clattered to the ground. “Can you say, with all certainty, that what I’m doing might not have drawn bad luck down upon me? Do you know enough to deny it completely, Syl?”

  She stood in the air, her arms folded, saying nothing.

  “This…thing,” Kaladin said, gesturing toward the stone. “It isn’t natural. The Radiants betrayed mankind. Their powers left them, and they were cursed. Everyone knows the legends.” He looked down at his hands, still glowing, though more faintly than before. “Whatever we’ve done, whatever has happened to me, I’ve somehow brought upon myself their same curse. That’s why everyone around me dies when I try to help them.”

  “And you think I’m a curse?” she asked him.

  “I…Well, you said you’re part of it, and…”

  She strode forward, pointing at him, a tiny, irate woman hanging in the air. “So you think I’ve caused all of this? Your failures? The deaths?”

  Kaladin didn’t respond. He realized almost immediately that silence might be the wor
st response. Syl-surprisingly human in her emotions-spun in the air with a wounded look and zipped away, forming a ribbon of light.

  I’m overreacting, he told himself. He was just so unsettled. He leaned back against the wall, hand to head. Before he had time to collect his thoughts, shadows darkened the entry to the alleyway. Teft and Lopen.

  “Rock talkers!” Lopen said. “You really shine in shade, gancho!”

  Teft gripped Lopen’s shoulder. “He’s not going to tell anyone, lad. I’ll make certain of it.”

  “Yeah, gancho,” Lopen said. “I swore I’d say nothing. You can trust a Herdazian.”

  Kaladin looked at the two, overwhelmed. He pushed past them, running out of the alley and across the lumberyard, fleeing from watching eyes.

  By the time night drew close, the light had long since stopped streaming from Kaladin’s body. It had faded like a fire going out, and had only taken a few minutes to vanish.

  Kaladin walked southward along the edge of the Shattered Plains, in that transitional area between the warcamps and the Plains themselves. In some areas-like at the staging area near Sadeas’s lumbercamp-there was a soft slope leading down between the two. At other points, there was a short ridge, eight or so feet tall. He passed one of these now, rocks to his right, open Plains to his left.

  Hollows, crevasses, and nooks scored the rock. Some shadowed sections here still hid pools of water from the highstorms days ago. Creatures still scuttled around the rocks, though the cooling evening air would soon drive them to hide. He passed a place pocked with small, water-filled holes; cremlings-multilegged, bearing tiny claws, their elongated bodies plated with carapace-lapped and fed at the edges. A small tentacle snapped out, yanking one down into the hole. Probably a grasper.

  Grass grew up the side of the ridge beside him, and the blades peeked from their holes. Bunches of fingermoss sprouted like flowers amid the green. The bright pink and purple fingermoss tendrils were reminiscent of tentacles themselves, waving at him in the wind. When he passed, the timid grass pulled back, but the fingermoss was bolder. The clumps would only pull into their shells if he tapped the rock near them.

  Above him, on the ridge, a few scouts stood watch over the Shattered Plains. This area beneath the ridge belonged to no specific highprince, and the scouts ignored Kaladin. He would only be stopped if he tried to leave the warcamps at the southern or northern sides.

  None of the bridgemen had come after him. He wasn’t certain what Teft had told them. Perhaps he’d said Kaladin was distraught following Maps’s death.

  It felt odd to be alone. Ever since he’d been betrayed by Amaram and made a slave, he had been in the company of others. Slaves with whom he’d plotted. Bridgemen with whom he’d worked. Soldiers to guard him, slavemasters to beat him, friends to depend on him. The last time he’d been alone had been that night when he’d been tied up for the highstorm to kill him.

  No, he thought. I wasn’t alone that night. Syl was there. He lowered his head, passing small cracks in the ground to his left. Those lines eventually grew into chasms as they moved eastward.

  What was happening to him? He wasn’t delusional. Teft and Lopen had seen it too. Teft had actually seemed to expect it.

  Kaladin should have died during that highstorm. And yet, he had been up and walking shortly afterward. His ribs should still be tender, but they hadn’t ached in weeks. His spheres, and those of the other bridgemen near him, had consistently run out of Stormlight.

  Had it been the highstorm that had changed him? But no, he’d discovered drained spheres before being hung out to die. And Syl…she’d as much as admitted responsibility for some of what had happened. This had been going on a long time.

  He stopped beside a rock outcropping, resting against it, causing grass to shrink away. He looked eastward, over the Shattered Plains. His home. His sepulcher. This life on them was ripping him apart. The bridgemen looked up to him, thought him their leader, their savior. But he had cracks in him, like the cracks in the stone here at the edges of the Plains.

  Those cracks were growing larger. He kept making promises to himself, like a man running a long distance with no energy left. Just a little farther. Run just to that next hill. Then you can give up. Tiny fractures, fissures in the stone.

  It’s right that I came here, he thought. We belong together, you and I. I’m like you. What had made the Plains break in the first place? Some kind of great weight?

  A melody began playing distantly, carrying over the Plains. Kaladin jumped at the sound. It was so unexpected, so out of place, that it was startling despite its softness.

  The sounds were coming from the Plains. Hesitant, yet unable to resist, he walked forward. Eastward, onto the flat, windswept rock. The sounds grew louder as he walked, but they were still haunting, elusive. A flute, though one lower in pitch than most he’d heard.

  As he grew closer, Kaladin smelled smoke. A light was burning out there. A tiny campfire.

  Kaladin walked out to the edge of this particular peninsula, a chasm growing from the cracks until it plunged down into darkness. At the very tip of the peninsula-surrounded on three sides by chasm-Kaladin found a man sitting on a boulder, wearing a lighteyes’s black uniform. A small fire of rockbud shell burned in front of him. The man’s hair was short and black, his face angular. He wore a thin, black-sheathed sword at his waist.

  The man’s eyes were a pale blue. Kaladin had never heard of a lighteyed man playing a flute. Didn’t they consider music a feminine pursuit? Lighteyed men sang, but they didn’t play instruments unless they were ardents.

  This man was extremely talented. The odd melody he played was alien, almost unreal, like something from another place and time. It echoed down the chasm and came back; it almost sounded like the man was playing a duet with himself.

  Kaladin stopped a short distance away, realizing that the last thing he wanted to do now was deal with a brightlord, particularly one who was eccentric enough to dress in black and wander out onto the Shattered Plains to practice his flute. Kaladin turned to go.

  The music cut off. Kaladin paused.

  “I always worry that I’ll forget how to play her,” a soft voice said from behind. “It’s silly, I know, considering how long I’ve practiced. But these days I rarely give her the attention she deserves.”

  Kaladin turned toward the stranger. His flute was carved from a dark wood that was almost black. The instrument seemed too ordinary to belong to a lighteyes, yet the man held it reverently.

  “What are you doing here?” Kaladin asked.

  “Sitting. Occasionally playing.”

  “I mean, why are you here?”

  “Why am I here?” the man asked, lowering his flute, leaning back and relaxing. “Why are any of us here? That’s a rather deep question for a first meeting, young bridgeman. I generally prefer introductions before theology. Lunch too, if it can be found. Perhaps a nice nap. Actually, practically anything should come before theology. But especially introductions.”

  “All right,” Kaladin said. “And you are…?”

  “Sitting. Occasionally playing… with the minds of bridgemen.”

  Kaladin reddened, turning again to go. Let the fool lighteyes say, and do, what he wished. Kaladin had difficult decisions to think about.

  “Well, off with you then,” the lighteyes said from behind. “Glad you are going. Wouldn’t want you too close. I’m rather attached to my Stormlight.”

  Kaladin froze. Then he spun. “What?”

  “My spheres,” the strange man said, holding up what appeared to be a fully infused emerald broam. “Everyone knows that bridgemen are thieves, or at least beggars.”

  Of course. He had been talking about spheres. He didn’t know about Kaladin’s… affliction. Did he? The man’s eyes twinkled as if at a grand joke.

  “Don’t be insulted at being called a thief,” the man said, raising a finger. Kaladin frowned. Where had the sphere gone? He had been holding it in that hand. “I meant it as a compliment.�
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  “A compliment? Calling someone a thief?”

  “Of course. I myself am a thief.”

  “You are? What do you steal?”

  “Pride,” the man said, leaning forward. “And occasionally boredom, if I may take the pride unto myself. I am the King’s Wit. Or I was until recently. I think I shall probably lose the title soon.”

  “The king’s what?”

  “Wit. It was my job to be witty.”

  “Saying confusing things isn’t the same as being witty.”

  “Ah,” the man said, eyes twinkling. “Already you prove yourself more wise than most who have been my acquaintance lately. What is it to be witty, then?”

  “To say clever things.”

  “And what is cleverness?”

  “I…” Why was he having this conversation? “I guess it’s the ability to say and do the right things at the right time.”

  The King’s Wit cocked his head, then smiled. Finally, he held out his hand to Kaladin. “And what is your name, my thoughtful bridgeman?”

  Kaladin hesitantly raised his own hand. “Kaladin. And yours?”

  “I’ve many.” The man shook Kaladin’s hand. “I began life as a thought, a concept, words on a page. That was another thing I stole. Myself. Another time, I was named for a rock.”

  “A pretty one, I hope.”

  “A beautiful one,” the man said. “And one that became completely worthless for my wearing it.”

  “Well, what do men call you now?”

  “Many a thing, and only some of them polite. Almost all are true, unfortunately. You, however, you may call me Hoid.”

  “Your name?”

  “No. The name of someone I should have loved. Once again, this is a thing I stole. It is something we thieves do.” He glanced eastward, over the rapidly darkening Plains. The little fire burning beside Hoid’s boulder shed a fugitive light, red from glimmering coals.

  “Well, it was pleasant to meet you,” Kaladin said. “I will be on my way….”

  “Not before I give you something.” Hoid picked up his flute. “Wait, please.”

  Kaladin sighed. He had a feeling that this odd man was not going to let him escape until he was done.