The Way of Kings

  Teft talked about the Radiants, about ideals and stories. Why couldn’t men actually be like that? Why did they have to rely on dreams and fabrications for inspiration?

  If you flee… you leave all the other bridgemen to be slaughtered, a voice whispered within him. There has to be something you can do for them.

  No! he fought back. If I worry about that, I won’t be able to save Bridge Four. If I find a way out, we’re going.

  If you leave, the voice seemed to say, then who will fight for them? Nobody cares. Nobody….

  What was it his father had said all those years ago? He did what he felt was right because someone had to start. Someone had to take the first step.

  Kaladin’s hand felt warm. He stopped in the chasm, closing his eyes. You couldn’t feel any heat from a sphere, usually, but the one in his hand seemed warm. And then—feeling completely natural about it—Kaladin breathed in deeply. The sphere grew cold and a wave of heat shot up his arm.

  He opened his eyes. The sphere in his hand was dun and his fingers were crispy with frost. Light rose from him like smoke from a fire, white, pure.

  He raised a hand and felt alive with energy. He had no need to breathe— in fact, he held the breath in, trapping the Stormlight. Syl zipped back down the corridor toward him. She twisted around him, then came to rest in the air, taking the form of a woman. “You did it. What happened?”

  Kaladin shook his head, holding his breath. Something was surging within him, like…

  Like a storm. Raging inside his veins, a tempest sweeping about inside his chest cavity. It made him want to run, jump, yell. It almost made him want to burst. He felt as if he could walk on air. Or walls.

  Yes! he thought. He broke into a run, leaping at the side of the chasm. He hit feetfirst.

  Then bounced off and slammed back into the ground. He was so stunned that he cried out, and he felt the storm within dampen as breath escaped.

  He lay on his back as Stormlight rose from him more quickly now that he was breathing. He lay there as the last of it burned away.

  Syl landed on his chest. “Kaladin? What was that?”

  “Me being an idiot,” he replied, sitting up and feeling an ache in his back and a sharp pain in his elbow where he’d hit the ground. “Teft said that the Radiants were able to walk on walls, and I felt so alive….”

  Syl walked on air, stepping as if down a set of stairs. “I don’t think you’re ready for that yet. Don’t be so risky. If you die, I go stupid again, you know.”

  “I’ll try to keep that in mind,” Kaladin said, climbing to his feet. “Maybe I’ll remove dying from my list of tasks to do this week.”

  She snorted, zipping into the air, becoming a ribbon again. “Come on, hurry up.” She shot off down the chasm. Kaladin collected the dun sphere, then dug into the pouch for another one to provide light. Had he drained them all? No. The others still glowed strongly. He selected a ruby mark, then hurried after Syl.

  She led him to a narrow chasm that contained a small group of fresh Parshendi corpses. “This is morbid, Kaladin,” Syl noted, standing above the bodies.

  “I know. Do you know where Lopen went?”

  “I sent him scavenging nearby, fetching the things you asked him for.”

  “Bring him, please.”

  Syl sighed, but zipped away. She always got testy when he made her appear to someone other than him. Kaladin knelt down. Parshendi all looked so similar. That same square face, those blocky—almost rocklike—features. Some had the beards with bits of gemstone tied in them. Those glowed, but not brightly. Cut gemstones held Stormlight better. Why was that?

  Rumors in camp claimed that the Parshendi took the wounded humans away and ate them. Rumors also said they left their dead, not caring for the fallen, never building them proper pyres. But that last part was false. They did care about their dead. They all seemed to have the same sensibility that Shen did; he threw a fit every time one of the bridgemen so much as touched a Parshendi corpse.

  I’d better be right about this, Kaladin thought grimly, slipping a knife off one of the Parshendi bodies. It was beautifully ornamented and forged, the steel lined with glyphs Kaladin didn’t recognize. He began to cut at the strange breastplate armor that grew from the corpse’s chest.

  Kaladin quickly determined that Parshendi physiology was very different from human physiology. Small blue ligaments held the breastplate to the skin underneath. It was attached all the way across. He continued working. There wasn’t much blood; it had pooled at the corpse’s back or leaked away. His knife wasn’t a surgeon’s tool, but it did the job just fine. By the time Syl returned with Lopen, Kaladin had gotten the breastplate free and had moved on to the carapace helm. It was harder to remove; it had grown into the skull in places, and he had to saw with the serrated section of the blade.

  “Ho, gancho,” Lopen said, a sack slung over his shoulder. “You don’t like them at all, do you?”

  Kaladin stood, wiping his hands on the Parshendi man’s skirt. “Did you find what I asked for?”

  “Sure did,” Lopen said, letting down the sack and digging into it. He pulled out an armored leather vest and cap, the type that spearmen used. Then he took out some thin leather straps and a medium-sized wooden spearman’s shield. Finally came a series of deep red bones. Parshendi bones. At the very bottom of the sack was the rope, the one Lopen had bought and tossed into the chasm, then stashed down below.

  “You haven’t lost your wits, have you?” Lopen asked, eyeing the bones. “Because if you have, I’ve got a cousin who makes this drink for people who’ve lost their wits, and it might make you better, sure.”

  “If I’d lost my wits,” Kaladin said, walking over to a pool of still water to wash off the carapace helm, “would I say that I had?”

  “I don’t know,” Lopen said, leaning back. “Maybe. Guess it doesn’t matter if you’re crazy or not.”

  “You’d follow a crazy man into battle?”

  “Sure,” Lopen said. “If you’re crazy, you’re a good type, and I like you. Not a killing-people-in-their-sleep type of crazy.” He smiled. “Besides. We all follow crazies all the time. Do it every day with lighteyes.”

  Kaladin chuckled.

  “So what’s this all for?”

  Kaladin didn’t answer. He brought the breastplate over to the leather vest, then tied it onto the front with some of the leather straps. He did the same with the cap and the helm, though he eventually had to saw some grooves into the helm with his knife to make it stay.

  Once done, Kaladin used the last straps to tie the bones together and attach them to the front of the round wooden shield. The bones rattled as he lifted the shield, but he decided it was good enough.

  He took shield, cap, and breastplate and put them all into Lopen’s sack. They barely fit. “All right,” he said, standing up. “Syl, lead us to the short chasm.” They’d spent some time investigating, finding the best place to launch arrows into the bottom of permanent bridges. One bridge in particular was close to Sadeas’s warcamp—so they often traversed it on the way out on a bridge run—and spanned a particularly shallow chasm. Only about forty feet deep, rather than the usual hundred or more.

  She nodded, then zipped away, leading them there. Kaladin and Lopen followed. Teft had orders to lead the others back and meet Kaladin at the base of the ladder, but Kaladin and Lopen should be far ahead of them. He spent the hike listening with half an ear as Lopen talked about his extended family.

  The more Kaladin thought about what he was planning, the more brazen it seemed. Perhaps Lopen was right to question his sanity. But Kaladin had tried being rational. He’d tried being careful. That had failed; now there wasn’t any more time for logic or care. Hashal obviously intended Bridge Four to be exterminated.

  When clever, careful plans failed, it was time to try something desperate.

  Lopen cut off suddenly. Kaladin hesitated. The Herdazian man had grown pale-faced and frozen in place. What was…

  Scrapi
ng. Kaladin froze as well, a panic rising in him. One of the side corridors echoed with a deep grinding sound. Kaladin turned slowly, just in time to catch sight of something large—no, something enormous— moving down the distant chasm. Shadows in the dim light, the sound of chitinous legs scratching on rock. Kaladin held his breath, sweating, but the beast didn’t come in their direction.

  The scraping grew softer, then eventually faded. He and Lopen stood immobile for a long time after the last sound had vanished.

  Finally, Lopen spoke. “Guess the nearby ones aren’t all dead, eh, gancho?”

  “Yeah,” Kaladin said. He jumped suddenly as Syl zipped back to find them. He unconsciously sucked in Stormlight as he did so, and when she alighted in the air, she found him sheepishly glowing.

  “What is going on?” she demanded, hands on hips.

  “Chasmfiend,” Kaladin said.

  “Really?” She sounded excited. “We should chase after it!”

  “What?”

  “Sure,” she said. “You could fight it, I’ll bet.”

  “Syl…”

  Her eyes were twinkling with amusement. Just a joke. “Come on.” She zipped away.

  He and Lopen stepped more softly now. Eventually Syl landed on the side of the chasm, standing there as if in mockery of when Kaladin had tried to walk up the wall.

  Kaladin looked up at the shadow of a wooden bridge forty feet above. This was the shallowest chasm they’d been able to find; they tended to get deeper and deeper the farther eastward you went. More and more, he was certain that trying to escape to the east was impossible. It was too far, and surviving the highstorm floods was too difficult a challenge. The original plan—fighting or bribing the guards, then running—was the best one.

  But they needed to live long enough to try that. The bridge above offered an opportunity, if Kaladin could reach it. He hefted his small bag of spheres and his slung sack full of armor and bones over his shoulder. He’d originally intended to have Rock shoot an arrow with a rope tied to it over the bridge, then back down into the chasm. With some men holding one end, another could have climbed up and tied the sack to the bridge’s underside.

  But that would risk letting an arrow shoot out of the chasm where scouts could see. They were said to be very keen-eyed, as the armies depended on them to spot chasmfiends making chrysalises.

  Kaladin thought he had a better way than the arrow. Maybe. “We need rocks,” he said. “Fist-size ones. A lot of them.”

  Lopen shrugged and began searching about. Kaladin joined him, fishing them out of puddles and pulling them from crevasses. There was no shortage of stones in the chasms. In a short time, he had a large pile of rocks in a sack.

  He took the pouch of spheres in his hand and tried to think the same way he had earlier, when he’d drawn in the Stormlight. This is our last chance.

  “Life before death,” he whispered. “Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.”

  The First Ideal of the Knights Radiant. He breathed in deeply, and a thick jolt of power shot up his arm. His muscles burned with energy, with the desire to move. The tempest spread within, pushing at his skin, causing his blood to pump in a powerful rhythm. He opened his eyes. Glowing smoke rose around him. He was able to contain much of the Light, holding it in by holding his breath.

  It’s like a storm inside me. It felt as if it would rip him apart.

  He set the sack with the armor on the ground, but wound the rope around his arm and tied the sack of rocks to his belt. He took out a single fist-size stone and hefted it, feeling its storm-smoothed sides. This had better work….

  He infused the stone with Stormlight, frost crystallizing on his arm. He wasn’t sure how he did it, but it felt natural, like pouring liquid into a cup. Light seemed to pool underneath the skin of his hand, then transfer to the rock—as if he were painting it with a vibrant, glowing liquid.

  He pressed the stone to the rock wall. It fixed in place, leaking Stormlight, clinging so strongly that he couldn’t pry it free. He tested his weight on it, and it held. He placed another one a little lower, then another a little higher. Then, wishing he had someone to burn him a prayer for success, he started climbing.

  He tried not to think about what he was doing. Climbing on rocks stuck to the wall by… what? Light? Spren? He kept on going. It was a lot like climbing the stone formations back near Hearthstone with Tien, except that he could make handholds exactly where he wanted.

  Should have found some rock dust to cover my hands, he thought, pulling himself up, then taking another stone from his sack and sticking it into place.

  Syl walked along beside him, her casual stroll seeming to mock the difficulty of his climb. As he shifted his weight to another rock, he heard an ominous click from below. He risked a glance downward. The first of his rocks had fallen free. The ones near it were leaking Stormlight only faintly now.

  The rocks led up toward him like a set of burning footprints. The storm inside him had quieted, though it still blew and raged inside his veins, thrilling and distracting at the same time. What would happen if he ran out of Light before he reached the top?

  The next rock fell free. The one beside it followed a few seconds later. Lopen stood on the other side of the chasm bottom, leaning against the wall, interested but relaxed.

  Keep moving! Kaladin thought, annoyed at himself for getting distracted. He turned back to his work.

  Just as his arms were beginning to burn from the climb, he reached the underside of the bridge. He reached out as two more of his stones fell free. The clatter of each one was louder now, as they fell a much larger distance.

  Steadying himself on the bottom of the bridge with one hand, feet still pushing against the highest rocks, he looped the end of the rope around a wooden bridge support. He pulled it around and threaded it through again to make a makeshift knot. He left plenty of extra rope on the short end.

  He let the rest of the rope slide free of his shoulder and drop to the floor below. “Lopen,” he called. Light steamed from his mouth as he spoke. “Pull it tight.”

  The Herdazian did so, and Kaladin held to his end, making the knot firm. Then he took hold of the long section of rope and let himself swing free, dangling from the bottom of the bridge. The knot held.

  Kaladin relaxed. He was still steaming light, and—save for the call to Lopen—he’d been holding his breath for a good quarter hour. That could be handy, he thought, though his lungs were starting to burn, so he started to breathe normally. The Light didn’t leave him altogether, though it escaped faster.

  “All right,” Kaladin said to Lopen. “Tie the other sack to the bottom of the rope.”

  The rope wiggled, and a few moments later Lopen called up that it was done. Kaladin gripped the rope with his legs to hold himself in place, then used his hands to pull up the length underneath, hoisting up the sack full of armor. Using the rope on the short end of the knot, he slipped his pouch of dun spheres into the sack with the armor, then tied it into place underneath the bridge where—he hoped—Lopen and Dabbid would be able to get to it from above.

  He looked down. The ground looked so much more distant than it would have from the bridge above. From this slightly different perspective, everything changed.

  He didn’t get vertigo from the height. Instead, he felt a little surge of excitement. Something about him had always liked being up high. It felt natural. It was being below—trapped in holes and unable to see the world— that was depressing.

  He considered his next move.

  “What?” Syl asked, stepping up to him, standing on air.

  “If I leave the rope here, someone might spot it while crossing the bridge.”

  “So cut it free.”

  He looked at her, raising an eyebrow. “While dangling from it?”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “That’s a forty-foot drop! I’d break bones at the very least.”

  “No,” Syl said. “I feel right about this, Kaladin. You’ll be fi
ne. Trust me.”

  “Trust you? Syl, you’ve said yourself that your memory is fractured!”

  “You insulted me the other week,” she said, folding her arms. “I think you owe me an apology.”

  “I’m supposed to apologize by cutting a rope and dropping forty feet?”

  “No, you apologize by trusting me. I told you. I feel right about this.”

  He sighed, looking down again. His Stormlight was running out. What else could he do? Leaving the rope would be foolish. Could he tie it in another knot, one he could shake free once at the bottom?

  If that type of knot existed, he didn’t know how to tie it. He clenched his teeth. Then, as the last of his rocks fell off and clattered to the ground, he took a deep breath and pulled out the Parshendi knife he’d taken earlier. He moved swiftly, before he had a chance to reconsider, and sliced the rope free.

  He dropped in a rush, one hand still holding the sliced rope, stomach lurching with the jarring distress of falling. The bridge shot away as if rising, and Kaladin’s panicked mind immediately sent his eyes downward. This wasn’t beautiful. This was terrifying. It was horrible. He was going to die! He—

  It’s all right.

  His emotions calmed in a heartbeat. Somehow, he knew what to do. He twisted in the air, dropping the rope and hitting the ground with both feet down. He came to a crouch, resting one hand on the stone, a jolt of coldness shooting through him. His remaining Stormlight came out in a single burst, flung from his body in a luminescent smoke ring that crashed against the ground before spreading out, vanishing.

  He stood up straight. Lopen gaped. Kaladin felt an ache in his legs from hitting, but it was like that of having leaped four or five feet.

  “Like ten crashes of thunder on the mounts, gancho!” Lopen exclaimed. “That was incredible!”

  “Thank you,” Kaladin said. He raised a hand to his head, glancing at the rocks scattered about the base of the wall, then looking up at the armor tied securely up above.

  “I told you,” Syl said, landing on his shoulder. She sounded triumphant.

  “Lopen,” Kaladin said. “You think you can get that bundle of armor during the next bridge run?”