If anything I have said makes a glimmer of sense to you, I trust that you’ll call them off. Or maybe you could astound me and ask them to do something productive for once.
Kaladin pushed his way into the apothecary’s shop, the door banging shut behind him. As before, the aged man pretended to be feeble, feeling his way with a cane until he recognized Kaladin. Then he stood up straighter. “Oh. It’s you.”
It had been two more long days. Daytime spent working and training—Teft and Rock now practiced with him—evenings spent at the first chasm, retrieving the reeds from their hiding place in a crevice and then milking for hours. Gaz had seen them go down last night, and the bridge sergeant was undoubtedly suspicious. There was no helping that.
Bridge Four had been called out on a bridge run today. Thankfully, they’d arrived before the Parshendi, and none of the bridge crews had lost any men. Things hadn’t gone so well for the regular Alethi troops. The Alethi line had eventually buckled before the Parshendi assault, and the bridge crews had been forced to lead a tired, angry, and defeated troop of soldiers back to the camp.
Kaladin was bleary-eyed with fatigue from staying up late working on the reeds. His stomach growled perpetually from being given a fraction of the food it needed, as he shared his meals with two wounded. That all ended today. The apothecary walked back behind his counter, and Kaladin stepped up to it. Syl darted into the room, her small ribbon of light turning into a woman midtwist. She flipped like an acrobat, landing on the table in a smooth motion.
“What do you need?” the apothecary asked. “More bandages? Well, I might just—”
He cut off as Kaladin slapped a medium-sized liquor bottle down on the table. It had a cracked top, but would still hold a cork. He pulled this free, revealing the milky white knobweed sap inside. He’d used the first of what they’d harvested to treat Leyten, Dabbid, and Hobber.
“What’s this?” the elderly apothecary asked, adjusting his spectacles and leaning down. “Offering me a drink? I don’t take the stuff these days. Unsettles the stomach, you know.”
“It’s not liquor. It’s knobweed sap. You said it was expensive. Well, how much will you give me for this?”
The apothecary blinked, then leaned in closer, giving the contents a whiff. “Where’d you get this?”
“I harvested it from the reeds growing outside of camp.”
The apothecary’s expression darkened. He shrugged. “Worthless, I’m afraid.”
“What?”
“The wild weeds aren’t potent enough.” The apothecary replaced the cork. A strong wind buffeted the building, blowing under the door, stirring the scents of the many powders and tonics he sold. “This is practically useless. I’ll give you two clearmarks for it, which is being generous. I’ll have to distill it, and will be lucky to get a couple of spoonfuls.”
Two marks! Kaladin thought with despair. After three days of work, three of us pushing ourselves, getting only a few hours of sleep each night? All for something worth only a couple days’ wage?
But no. The sap had worked on Leyten’s wound, making the rotspren flee and the infection retreat. Kaladin narrowed his eyes as the apothecary fished two marks out of his money pouch, setting them on the table. Like many spheres, these were flattened slightly on one side to keep them from rolling away.
“Actually,” the apothecary said, rubbing his chin. “I’ll give you three.” He took out one more mark. “Hate to see all of your effort go to waste.”
“Kaladin,” Syl said, studying the apothecary. “He’s nervous about something. I think he’s lying!”
“I know,” Kaladin said.
“What’s that?” the apothecary said. “Well, if you knew it was worthless, why did you spend so much effort on it?” He reached for the bottle.
Kaladin caught his hand. “We got two or more drops from each reed, you know.”
The apothecary frowned.
“Last time,” Kaladin said, “you told me I’d be lucky to get one drop per reed. You said that was why knobweed sap was so expensive. You said nothing about ‘wild’ plants being weaker.”
“Well, I didn’t think you’d go and try gathering them, and…” He trailed off as Kaladin locked eyes with him.
“The army doesn’t know, do they?” Kaladin asked. “They aren’t aware how valuable those plants outside are. You harvest them, you sell the sap, and you make a killing, since the military needs a lot of antiseptic.”
The old apothecary cursed, pulling his hand back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Kaladin took his jar. “And if I go to the healing tent and tell them where I got this?”
“They’d take it from you!” the man said urgently. “Don’t be a fool. You’ve a slave brand, boy. They’ll think you stole it.”
Kaladin moved to walk away.
“I’ll give a skymark,” the apothecary said. “That’s half what I’d charge the military for this much.”
Kaladin turned. “You charge them two skymarks for something that only takes a couple of days to gather?”
“It’s not just me,” the apothecary said, scowling. “Each of the apothecaries charges the same. We got together, decided on a fair price.”
“How is that a fair price?”
“We have to make a living here, in this Almighty-forsaken land! It costs us money to set up shop, to maintain ourselves, to hire guards.”
He fished in his pouch, pulling out a sphere that glowed deep blue. A sapphire sphere was worth about twenty-five times a diamond one. As Kaladin made one diamond mark a day, a skymark was worth as much as Kaladin made in half a month. Of course, a common darkeyed soldier earned five clearmarks a day, which would make this a week’s wages to them.
Once, this wouldn’t have seemed like much money to Kaladin. Now it was a fortune. Still, he hesitated. “I should expose you. Men die because of you.”
“No they don’t,” the apothecary said. “The highprinces have more than enough to pay this, considering what they make on the plateaus. We supply them with bottles of sap as often as they need them. All you’d do by exposing us is let monsters like Sadeas keep a few more spheres in their pockets!”
The apothecary was sweating. Kaladin was threatening to topple his entire business on the Shattered Plains. And so much money was being earned on the sap that this could grow very dangerous. Men killed to keep such secrets.
“Line my pocket or line the brightlords’,” Kaladin said. “I guess I can’t argue with that logic.” He set the bottle back on the counter. “I’ll take the deal, provided you throw in some more bandages.”
“Very well,” the apothecary said, relaxing. “But stay away from those reeds. I’m surprised you found any nearby that hadn’t already been harvested. My workers are having an increasingly difficult time.”
They don’t have a windspren guiding them, Kaladin thought. “Then why would you want to discourage me? I could get more of this for you.”
“Well, yes,” the apothecary said. “But—”
“It’s cheaper if you do it yourself,” Kaladin said, leaning down. “But this way you have a clean trail. I provide the sap, charging one skymark. If the lighteyes ever discover what the apothecaries have been doing, you can claim ignorance—all you know is that some bridgeman was selling you sap, and you resold it to the army at a reasonable markup.”
That seemed to appeal to the old man. “Well, perhaps I won’t ask too many questions about how you harvested this. Your business, young man. Your business indeed….” He shuffled to the back of his store, returning with a box of bandages. Kaladin accepted it and left the shop without a word.
“Aren’t you worried?” Syl said, floating up beside his head as he entered the afternoon sunlight. “If Gaz discovers what you’re doing, you could get into trouble.”
“What more could they do to me?” Kaladin asked. “I doubt they’d consider this a crime worth stringing me up for.”
Syl looked backward, forming into little more
than a cloud with the faint suggestion of a female form. “I can’t decide if it’s dishonest or not.”
“It’s not dishonest; it’s business.” He grimaced. “Lavis grain is sold the same way. Grown by the farmers and sold at a pittance to merchants, who carry it to the cities and sell it to other merchants, who sell it to people for four or five times what it was originally bought for.”
“So why did it bother you?” Syl asked, frowning as they avoided a troop of soldiers, one of whom tossed the pit of a palafruit at Kaladin’s head. The soldiers laughed.
Kaladin rubbed his temple. “I’ve still got some strange scruples about charging for medical care because of my father.”
“He sounds like he’s a very generous man.”
“For all the good it did him.”
Of course, in a way, Kaladin was just as bad. During his early days as a slave, he’d have done almost anything for a chance to walk around unsupervised like this. The army perimeter was guarded, but if he could sneak the knobweed in, he could probably find a way to sneak himself out.
With that sapphire mark, he even had money to aid him. Yes, he had the slave brand, but some quick if painful work with a knife could turn that into a “battle scar” instead. He could talk and fight like a soldier, so it would be plausible. He’d be taken for a deserter, but he could live with that.
That had been his plan for most of the later months of his enslavement, but he’d never had the means. It took money to travel, to get far enough away from the area where his description would be in circulation. Money to buy lodging in a seedy section of town, a place where nobody asked questions, while he healed from his self-inflicted wound.
In addition, there had always been the others. So he’d stayed, trying to get as many out as he could. Failing every time. And he was doing it again.
“Kaladin?” Syl asked from his shoulder. “You look very serious. What are you thinking?”
“I’m wondering if I should run. Escape this storm-cursed camp and find myself a new life.”
Syl fell silent. “Life is hard here,” she finally said. “I don’t know if anyone would blame you.”
Rock would, he thought. And Teft. They’d worked for that knobweed sap. They didn’t know what it was worth; they thought it was only for healing the sick. If he ran, he’d be betraying them. He’d be abandoning the bridgemen.
Shove over, you fool, Kaladin thought to himself. You won’t save these bridgemen. Just like you didn’t save Tien. You should run.
“And then what?” he whispered.
Syl turned to him. “What?”
If he ran, what good would it do? A life working for chips in the underbelly of some rotting city? No.
He couldn’t leave them. Just like he’d never been able to leave anyone who he’d thought needed him. He had to protect them. He had to.
For Tien. And for his own sanity.
“Chasm duty,” Gaz said, spitting to the side. The spittle was colored black from the yamma plant he chewed.
“What?” Kaladin had returned from selling the knobweed to discover that Gaz had changed Bridge Four’s work detail. They weren’t scheduled to be on duty for any bridge runs—their run the day before exempted them. Instead, they were supposed to be assigned to Sadeas’s smithy to help lift ingots and other supplies.
That sounded like difficult work, but it was actually among the easiest jobs bridgemen got. The blacksmiths felt they didn’t need the extra hands. That, or they presumed that clumsy bridgemen would just get in the way. On smithy duty, you usually only worked a few hours of the shift and could spend the rest lounging.
Gaz stood with Kaladin in the early afternoon sunlight. “You see,” Gaz said, “you got me thinking the other day. Nobody cares if Bridge Four is given unfair work details. Everyone hates chasm duty. I figured you wouldn’t care.”
“How much did they pay you?” Kaladin asked, stepping forward.
“Storm off,” Gaz said, spitting again. “The others resent you. It’ll do your crew good to be seen paying for what you did.”
“Surviving?”
Gaz shrugged. “Everyone knows you broke the rules in bringing back those men. If the others do what you did, we’d have each barrack filled with the dying before the leeward side of a month was over!”
“They’re people, Gaz. If we don’t ‘fill the barracks’ with wounded, it’s because we’re leaving them out there to die.”
“They’ll die here anyway.”
“We’ll see.”
Gaz watched him, eyes narrow. It seemed like he suspected that Kaladin had somehow tricked him in taking the stone-gathering duty. Earlier, Gaz had apparently gone down to the chasm, probably trying to figure out what Kaladin and the other two had been doing.
Damnation, Kaladin thought. He’d thought he had Gaz cowed enough to stay in line. “We’ll go,” Kaladin snapped, turning away. “But I’m not taking the blame among my men for this one. They’ll know you did it.”
“Fine,” Gaz called after him. Then, to himself, he continued, “Maybe I’ll get lucky and a chasmfiend will eat the lot of you.”
Chasm duty. Most bridgemen would rather spend all day hauling stones than get assigned to the chasms.
With an unlit oil-soaked torch tied to his back, Kaladin climbed down the precarious rope ladder. The chasm was shallow here, only about fifty feet down, but that was enough to take him into a different world. A world where the only natural light came from the rift high in the sky. A world that stayed damp on even the hottest days, a drowned landscape of moss, fungus, and hardy plants that survived in even dim light.
The chasms were wider at the bottom, perhaps a result of highstorms. They caused enormous floods to crash through the chasms; to be caught in a chasm during a highstorm was death. A sediment of hardened crem smoothed the pathway on the floor of the chasms, though it rose and fell with the varying erosion of the underlying rock. In some few places, the distance from the chasm floor to the edge of the plateau above was only about forty feet. In most places, however, it was closer to a hundred or more.
Kaladin jumped off the ladder, falling a few feet and landing with a splash in a puddle of rainwater. After lighting the torch, he held it high, peering along the caliginous rift. The sides were slick with a dark green moss, and several thin vines he didn’t recognize trailed down from intermediate ledges above. Bits of bone, wood, and torn cloth lay strewn about or wedged into clefts.
Someone splashed to the ground beside him. Teft cursed, looking down at his soaked legs and trousers as he stepped out of the large puddle. “Storms take that cremling Gaz,” the aging bridgeman muttered. “Sending us down here when it isn’t our turn. I’ll have his beans for this.”
“I am certain that he is very scared of you,” Rock said, stepping down off the ladder onto a dry spot. “Is probably back in camp crying in fear.”
“Storm off,” Teft said, shaking the water from his left leg. The two of them carried unlit torches. Kaladin lit his with a flint and steel, but the others did not. They needed to ration the torches.
The other men of Bridge Four began to gather near the bottom of the ladder, staying in a clump. Every fourth man lit his torch, but the light didn’t do much to dispel the gloom; it just allowed Kaladin to see more of the unnatural landscape. Strange, tube-shaped fungi grew in cracks. They were a wan yellow, like the skin of a child with jaundice. Scuttling cremlings moved away from the light. The tiny crustaceans were a translucent reddish color; as one scrambled past on the wall, he realized that he could see its internal organs through its shell.
The light also revealed a twisted, broken figure at the base of the chasm wall a short distance away. Kaladin raised his torch and stepped up to it. It was beginning to stink already. He raised a hand, unconsciously covering his nose and mouth as he knelt down.
It was a bridgeman, or had been, from one of the other crews. He was fresh. If he’d been here longer than a few days, the highstorm would have washed him away to some distant plac
e. Bridge Four gathered behind Kaladin, looking silently at the one who had chosen to throw himself into the chasm.
“May you someday find a place of honor in the Tranquiline Halls, fallen brother,” Kaladin said, his voice echoing. “And may we find a better end than you.” He stood, holding his torch high, and led the way past the dead sentry. His crew followed nervously.
Kaladin had quickly understood the basic tactics of fighting on the Shattered Plains. You wanted to advance forcefully, pressing your enemy to the plateau’s edge. That was why the battles often turned bloody for the Alethi, who usually arrived after the Parshendi.
The Alethi had bridges, while these odd Eastern parshmen could leap most chasms, given a running start. But both had trouble when squeezed toward the cliffs, and that generally resulted in soldiers losing their footing and tumbling into the void. The numbers were significant enough for the Alethi to want to recover lost equipment. And so bridgemen were sent on chasm duty. It was like barrow robbing, only without the barrows.
They carried sacks, and would spend hours walking around, looking for the corpses of the fallen, searching for anything of value. Spheres, breastplates, caps, weapons. Some days, when a plateau run was recent, they could try to make their way all the way out to where it had happened and scavenge from those bodies. But highstorms generally made that futile. Wait even a few days, and the bodies would be washed someplace else.
Beyond that, the chasms were a bewildering maze, and getting to a specific contested plateau and then returning in a reasonable time was near impossible. General wisdom was to wait for a highstorm to push the bodies toward the Alethi side of the Plains—highstorms always came east to west, after all—and then send bridgemen down to search them out.
That meant a lot of random wandering. But over the years, enough bodies had fallen that it wasn’t too difficult to find places to harvest. The crew was required to bring up a specific amount of salvage or face docked pay for the week, but the quota wasn’t onerous. Enough to keep the bridgemen working, but not enough to force them to fully exert themselves. Like most bridgeman work, this was meant to keep them occupied as much as anything else.
The Way of Kings Page 48
