“My husband does not intend to run the bridge crews with his predecessor’s laxness. My husband is a well-respected and honored associate of Highprince Sadeas himself, not some near-darkeyed mongrel like Lamaril.”
“Is that so?” Kaladin said. “Then how did he end up in this latrine pit of a job?”
Hashal didn’t display a hint of anger at the comment. She flicked her fingers to the side, and one of the soldiers stepped forward and rammed the butt of his spear toward Kaladin’s stomach.
Kaladin caught it, old reflexes still too keen. Possibilities flashed through his mind, and he could see the fight before it took place.
Yank on the spear, throw the soldier off guard.
Step forward and ram an elbow into his forearm, making him drop the weapon.
Take control, spin the spear up and slam the soldier on the side of the head.
Spin into a sweep to drop the two who came to help their companion.
Raise the spear for the—
No. That would only get Kaladin killed.
Kaladin released the butt of the spear. The soldier blinked in surprise that a mere bridgeman had blocked his blow. Scowling, the soldier jerked the butt up and slammed it into the side of Kaladin’s head.
Kaladin let it hit him, rolling with it, allowing it to toss him to the ground. His head rang from the shock, but his eyesight stopped spinning after a moment. He’d have a headache, but probably no concussion.
He took in a few deep breaths, lying on the ground, hands forming fists. His fingers seemed to burn where he had touched the spear. The soldier stepped back into position beside the palanquin.
“No laxness,” Hashal said calmly. “If you must know, my husband requested this assignment. The bridge crews are essential to Brightlord Sadeas’s advantage in the War of Reckoning. Their mismanagement under Lamaril was disgraceful.”
Rock knelt down, helping Kaladin to his feet while scowling at the lighteyes and their soldiers. Kaladin stumbled up, holding his hand to the side of his head. His fingers felt slick and wet, and a trickle of warm blood ran down his neck to his shoulder.
“From now on,” Hashal said, “aside from doing normal bridge duty, each crew will be assigned only one type of work duty. Gaz!”
The short bridge sergeant poked out from behind the palanquin. Kaladin hadn’t noticed him there, behind the porters and the soldiers. “Yes, Brightness?” Gaz bowed several times.
“My husband wishes Bridge Four to be assigned chasm duty permanently. Whenever they are not needed for bridge duty, I want them working in those chasms. This will be far more efficient. They will know which sections have been scoured recently, and will not cover the same ground. You see? Efficiency. They will start immediately.”
She rapped on the side of her palanquin, and the porters turned, bearing her away. Her husband continued to walk alongside her without saying a word, and Gaz hurried to keep up. Kaladin stared after them, holding his hand to his head. Dunny ran and fetched him a bandage.
“Chasm duty,” Moash grumbled. “Great job, lordling. She’d see us dead from a chasmfiend if the Parshendi arrows don’t take us.”
“What are we going to do?” asked lean, balding Peet, his voice edged with worry.
“We get to work,” Kaladin said, taking the bandage from Dunny.
He walked away, leaving them in a frightened clump.
A short time later, Kaladin stood at the edge of the chasm, looking down. The hot light of the noon sun burned the back of his neck and cast his shadow downward into the rift, to join with those below. I could fly, he thought. Step off and fall, wind blowing against me. Fly for a few moments. A few, beautiful moments.
He knelt and grabbed the rope ladder, then climbed down into the darkness. The other bridgemen followed in a silent group. They’d been infected by his mood.
Kaladin knew what was happening to him. Step by step, he was turning back into the wretch he had been. He’d always known it was a danger. He’d clung to the bridgemen as a lifeline. But he was letting go now.
As he stepped down the rungs, a faint translucent figure of blue and white dropped beside him, sitting on a swinglike seat. Its ropes disappeared a few inches above Syl’s head.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked softly.
Kaladin just kept climbing down.
“You should be happy. You survived the storms. The other bridgemen were so excited.”
“I itched to fight that soldier,” Kaladin whispered.
Syl cocked her head.
“I could have beaten him,” Kaladin continued. “I probably could have beaten all four of them. I’ve always been good with the spear. No, not good. Durk called me amazing. A natural born soldier, an artist with the spear.”
“Maybe you should have fought them, then.”
“I thought you didn’t like killing.”
“I hate it,” she said, growing more translucent. “But I’ve helped men kill before.”
Kaladin froze on the ladder. “What?”
“It’s true,” she said. “I can remember it, just faintly.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” She grew paler. “I don’t want to talk about it. But it was right to do. I feel it.”
Kaladin hung for a moment longer. Teft called down, asking if something was wrong. He started to descend again.
“I didn’t fight the soldiers today,” Kaladin said, eyes toward the chasm wall, “because it wouldn’t work. My father told me that it is impossible to protect by killing. Well, he was wrong.”
“But—”
“He was wrong,” Kaladin said, “because he implied that you could protect people in other ways. You can’t. This world wants them dead, and trying to save them is pointless.” He reached the bottom of the chasm, stepping into darkness. Teft reached the bottom next and lit his torch, bathing the moss-covered stone walls in flickering orange light.
“Is that why you didn’t accept it?” Syl whispered, flitting over and landing on Kaladin’s shoulder. “The glory. All those months ago?”
Kaladin shook his head. “No. That was something else.”
“What did you say, Kaladin?” Teft raised the torch. The aging bridgeman’s face looked older than usual in the flickering light, the shadows it created emphasizing the furrows in his skin.
“Nothing, Teft,” Kaladin said. “Nothing important.”
Syl sniffed at that. Kaladin ignored her, lighting his torch from Teft’s as the other bridgemen arrived. When they were all down, Kaladin led the way out into the dark rift. The pale sky seemed distant here, like a far-off scream. This place was a tomb, with rotting wood and stagnant pools of water, good only for growing cremling larvae.
The bridgemen clustered together unconsciously as they always did in this fell place. Kaladin walked in front, and Syl fell silent. He gave Teft the chalk to mark directions, and didn’t pause to pick up salvage. But neither did he walk too quickly. The other bridgemen were hushed behind them, speaking in occasional whispers too low to echo. As if their words were strangled by the gloom.
Rock eventually moved up to walk beside Kaladin. “Is difficult job, we have been given. But we are bridgemen! Life, it is difficult, eh? Is nothing new. We must have plan. How do we fight next?”
“There is no next fight, Rock.”
“But we have won grand victory! Look, not days ago, you were delirious. You should have died. I know this thing. But instead, you walk, strong as any other man. Ha! Stronger. Is miracle. The Uli’tekanaki guide you.”
“It’s not a miracle, Rock,” Kaladin said. “It’s more of a curse.”
“How is that a curse, my friend?” Rock asked, chuckling. He jumped up and into a puddle and laughed louder as it splashed Teft, who was walking just behind. The large Horneater could be remarkably childlike at times. “Living, this thing is no curse!”
“It is if it brings me back to watch you all die,” Kaladin said. “Better I shouldn’t have survived that storm. I’m just going to end
up dead from a Parshendi arrow. We all are.”
Rock looked troubled. When Kaladin offered nothing more, he withdrew. They continued, uncomfortably passing sections of scarred wall where chasmfiends had left their marks. Eventually they stumbled across a heap of bodies deposited by the highstorms. Kaladin stopped, holding up his torch, the other bridgemen peeking around him. Some fifty people had been washed into a recess in the rock, a small dead-end side passage in the stone.
The bodies were piled there, a wall of the dead, arms hanging out, reeds and flotsam stuck between them. Kaladin saw at a glance that the corpses were old enough to begin bloating and rotting. Behind him, one of the men retched, which caused a few of the others to do so as well. The scent was terrible, the corpses slashed and ripped into by cremlings and larger carrion beasts, many of which scuttled away from the light. A disembodied hand lay nearby, and a trail of blood led away. There were also fresh scrapes in the lichen as high as fifteen feet up the wall. A chasmfiend had ripped one of the bodies loose to devour. It might come back for the others.
Kaladin didn’t retch. He shoved his half-burned torch between two large stones, then got to work, pulling bodies from the pile. At least they weren’t rotted enough to come apart. The bridgemen slowly filled in around him, working. Kaladin let his mind grow numb, not thinking.
Once the bodies were down, the bridgemen laid them in a line. Then they began pulling off their armor, searching their pockets, taking knives from belts. Kaladin left gathering the spears to the others, working by himself off to the side.
Teft knelt beside Kaladin, rolling over a body with a head smashed by the fall. The shorter man began to undo the straps on the fallen man’s breastplate. “Do you want to talk?”
Kaladin didn’t say anything. He just kept working. Don’t think about the future. Don’t think about what will happen. Just survive.
Don’t care, but don’t despair. Just be.
“Kaladin.” Teft’s voice was like a knife, digging into Kaladin’s shell, making him squirm.
“If I wanted to talk,” Kaladin grumbled, “would I be working here by myself?”
“Fair enough,” Teft said. He finally got the breastplate strap undone. “The other men are confused, son. They want to know what we’re going to do next.”
Kaladin sighed, then stood, turning to look at the bridgemen. “I don’t know what to do! If we try to protect ourselves, Sadeas will have us punished! We’re bait, and we’re going to die. There’s nothing I can do about it! It’s hopeless.”
The bridgemen regarded him with shock.
Kaladin turned from them and went back to work, kneeling beside Teft. “There,” he said. “I explained it to them.”
“Idiot,” Teft said under his breath. “After all you’ve done, you’re abandoning us now?”
To the side, the bridgemen turned back to work. Kaladin caught a few of them grumbling. “Bastard,” Moash said. “I said this would happen.”
“Abandoning you?” Kaladin hissed to Teft. Just let me be. Let me go back to apathy. At least then there’s no pain. “Teft, I’ve spent hours and hours trying to find a way out, but there isn’t one! Sadeas wants us dead. Lighteyes get what they want; that’s the way the world works.”
“So?”
Kaladin ignored him, turning back to his work, pulling at the boot on a soldier whose fibula looked to have been shattered in three different places. That made it storming awkward to get the boot off.
“Well, maybe we will die,” Teft said. “But maybe this isn’t about surviving.”
Why was Teft—of all people—trying to cheer him up? “If survival isn’t the point, Teft, then what is?” Kaladin finally got the boot off. He turned to the next body in line, then froze.
It was a bridgeman. Kaladin didn’t recognize him, but that vest and those sandals were unmistakable. He lay slumped against the wall, arms at his sides, mouth slightly open and eyelids sunken. The skin on one of the hands had slipped free and pulled away.
“I don’t know what the point is,” Teft grumbled. “But it seems pathetic to give up. We should keep fighting. Right until those arrows take us. You know, ‘journey before destination.’”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Teft said, looking down quickly. “Just something I heard once.”
“It’s something the Lost Radiants used to say,” Sigzil said, walking past.
Kaladin glanced to the side. The soft-spoken Azish man set a shield on a pile. He looked up, brown skin dark in the torchlight. “It was their motto. Part of it, at least. ‘Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.’”
“Lost Radiants?” Skar said, carrying an armful of boots. “Who’s bringing them up?”
“Teft did,” Moash said.
“I did not! That was just something I heard once.”
“What does it even mean?” Dunny asked.
“I said I don’t know!” Teft said.
“It was supposedly one of their creeds,” Sigzil said. “In Yulay, there are groups of people who talk of the Radiants. And wish for their return.”
“Who’d want them to return?” Skar said, leaning back against the wall, folding his arms. “They betrayed us to the Voidbringers.”
“Ha!” Rock said. “Voidbringers! Lowlander nonsense. Is campfire tale told by children.”
“They were real,” Skar said defensively. “Everyone knows that.”
“Everyone who listens to campfire stories!” Rock said with a laugh. “Too much air! Makes your minds soft. Is all right, though—you are still my family. Just the dumb ones!”
Teft scowled as the others continued to talk about the Lost Radiants.
“Journey before destination,” Syl whispered on Kaladin’s shoulder. “I like that.”
“Why?” Kaladin asked, kneeling down to untie the dead bridgeman’s sandals.
“Because,” she replied, as if that were explanation enough. “Teft is right, Kaladin. I know you want to give up. But you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t.”
“We’re assigned to chasm duty from now on,” Kaladin said. “We won’t be able to collect any more reeds to make money. That means no more bandages, antiseptic, or food for the nightly meals. With all of these bodies, we’re bound to run into rotspren, and the men will grow sick—assuming chasmfiends don’t eat us or a surprise highstorm doesn’t drown us. And we’ll have to keep running those bridges until Damnation ends, losing man after man. It’s hopeless.”
The men were still talking. “The Lost Radiants helped the other side,” Skar argued. “They were tarnished all along.”
Teft took offense at that. The wiry man stood up straight, pointing at Skar. “You don’t know anything! It was too long ago. Nobody knows what really happened.”
“Then why do all the stories say the same thing?” Skar demanded. “They abandoned us. Just like the lighteyes are abandoning us right now. Maybe Kaladin’s right. Maybe there is no hope.”
Kaladin looked down. Those words haunted him. Maybe Kaladin is right…maybe there is no hope….
He’d done this before. Under his last own er, before being sold to Tvlakv and being made a bridgeman. He’d given up on a quiet night after leading Goshel and the other slaves in rebellion. They’d been slaughtered. But somehow he’d survived. Storm it all, why did he always survive? I can’t do it again, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut. I can’t help them.
Tien. Tukks. Goshel. Dallet. The nameless slave he’d tried to heal in Tvlakv’s slave wagons. All had ended up the same. Kaladin had the touch of failure. Sometimes he gave them hope, but what was hope except another opportunity for failure? How many times could a man fall before he no longer stood back up?
“I just think we’re ignorant,” Teft grumbled. “I don’t like listening to what the lighteyes say about the past. Their women write all the histories, you know.”
“I can’t believe you’re arguing about this,
Teft,” Skar said, exasperated. “What next? Should we let the Voidbringers steal our hearts? Maybe they’re just misunderstood. Or the Parshendi. Maybe we should just let them kill our king whenever they want.”
“Would you two just storm off?” Moash snapped. “It doesn’t matter. You heard Kaladin. Even he thinks we’re as good as dead.”
Kaladin couldn’t take their voices anymore. He stumbled away, into the darkness, away from the torchlight. None of the men followed him. He entered a place of dark shadows, with only the distant ribbon of sky above for light.
Here, Kaladin escaped their eyes. In the darkness he ran into a boulder, stumbling to a stop. It was slick with moss and lichen. He stood with his hands pressed against it, then groaned and turned around to lean back against it. Syl alighted in front of him, still visible, despite the darkness. She sat down in the air, arranging her dress around her legs.
“I can’t save them, Syl,” Kaladin whispered, anguished.
“Are you certain?”
“I’ve failed every time before.”
“And so you’ll fail this time too?”
“Yes.”
She fell silent. “Well then,” she eventually said. “Let’s say that you’re right.”
“So why fight? I told myself that I would try one last time. But I failed before I began. There’s no saving them.”
“Doesn’t the fight itself mean anything?”
“Not if you’re destined to die.” He hung his head.
Sigzil’s words echoed in his head. Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination. Kaladin looked up at the crack of sky. Like a faraway river of pure, blue water.
Life before death.
What did the saying mean? That men should seek life before seeking death? That was obvious. Or did it mean something else? That life came before death? Again, obvious. And yet the simple words spoke to him. Death comes, they whispered. Death comes to all. But life comes first. Cherish it.
The Way of Kings Page 75
