The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive 1)

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.