Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
Shallan snapped her pencil against the page. “You really are a hateful man, aren’t you? Underneath the mock boredom, the dangerous glares, the growls—you just hate people, is that it?”
“What? No, I—”
“Adolin is trying. He feels bad for what happened to you, and he’s doing what he can to make up for it. He is a good man. Is it too much for you to stop provoking him?”
“He calls me bridgeboy,” Kaladin said, feeling stubborn. “He’s been provoking me.”
“Yes, because he is the one storming around with alternating scowls and insults,” Shallan said. “Adolin Kholin, the most difficult man to get along with on the Shattered Plains. I mean look at him! He’s so unlikable!”
She gestured with the pencil toward where Adolin was laughing with the darkeyed water boys. The groom walked up with Adolin’s horse, and Adolin took his Shardplate helm off the carrying post, handing it over, letting one of the water boys try it on. It was ridiculously large on the lad.
Kaladin flushed as the boy took a Shardbearer’s pose, and they all laughed again. Kaladin looked back to Shallan, who folded her arms, drawing pad resting on the flat-topped cut rock before her. She smirked at him.
Insufferable woman. Bah!
Kaladin left her and hiked across the rough ground to join Bridge Four, where he insisted on taking a turn hauling the bridge, despite Teft’s protests that he was “above that sort of thing” now. He was no storming lighteyes. He’d never be above doing an honest day’s work.
The familiar weight of the bridge settled onto his shoulders. Rock was right. It did feel lighter than it once had. He smiled as he heard cursing from Lopen’s cousins, who—like Renarin—were being initiated on this run into their first bridge carry.
They hiked the bridge over a chasm—crossing on one of Dalinar’s larger, less mobile ones—and started across the plateau. For a time, marching at the front of Bridge Four, Kaladin could imagine that his life was simple. No plateau assaults, no arrows, no assassins or bodyguarding. Just him, his team, and a bridge.
Unfortunately, as they neared the other side of the large plateau, he started to feel weary and—by reflex—tried to suck in some Stormlight to bolster him. It wouldn’t come.
Life was not simple. It never had been, certainly not while running bridges. To pretend otherwise was to paint over the past.
He helped set the bridge down, then—noticing the vanguard moving out in front of the army—he and the bridgemen shoved their bridge into place across the chasm. The vanguard cheerfully welcomed the chance to get ahead, marching over the bridge and securing the next plateau.
Kaladin and the others followed, then—a half hour later—they let the vanguard onto the next plateau. They continued like that for a time, waiting for Dalinar’s bridge to arrive before crossing, then leading the vanguard onto the next plateau. Hours passed—sweaty, muscle-straining hours. Good hours. Kaladin didn’t come to any realizations about the king, or his place in the man’s potential assassination. But for the moment, he carried his bridge and enjoyed the progress of an army moving toward their goal beneath an open sky.
As the day grew long, they approached the target plateau, where the hollowed-out chrysalis awaited Shallan’s study. Kaladin and Bridge Four let the vanguard across as they’d been doing, then settled in to wait. Eventually, the bulk of the army approached, and Dalinar’s lumbering bridges moved into position, ratcheting down to span the chasm.
Kaladin gulped deeply of warm water as he watched. He washed his face with the water, then wiped his brow. They were getting close. This plateau was far out onto the Plains, almost to the Tower itself. Getting back would take hours, assuming they moved at the same relaxed speed they had taken getting out here. It would be well after dark when they returned to the warcamps.
If Dalinar does want to assault the center of the Shattered Plains, Kaladin thought, it will take days of marching, all the while exposed on the plateaus, with the potential of being surrounded and cut off from the warcamps.
The Weeping would make a great chance for that. Four straight weeks of rain, but no highstorms. This was the off year, when there wouldn’t even be a highstorm on Lightday in the middle—part of the thousand-day cycle of two years that made up a full storm rotation. Still, he knew that many Alethi patrols had tried exploring eastward before. They’d all been destroyed by highstorms, chasmfiends, or Parshendi assault teams.
Nothing short of an all-out, full-on movement of resources toward the center would work. An assault that would leave Dalinar, and whoever came with him, isolated.
Dalinar’s bridge thumped down into place. Kaladin’s men traversed their own bridge and prepared to pull it across to go move the vanguard. Kaladin crossed, then waved them on ahead of him. He walked over to where the larger bridge had settled down.
Dalinar was crossing it while walking with some of his scouts, all vaulters, with servants behind carrying long poles. “I want you to spread out,” the highprince said to them. “We won’t have much time before we need to head back. I want a survey of as many plateaus as you can see from here. The more of our route we can plan now, the less time we’ll have to waste during the actual assault.”
The scouts nodded, saluting as he dismissed them. He stepped off the bridge and nodded to Kaladin. Behind them, Dalinar’s generals, scribes, and engineers crossed the bridge. They’d be followed by the bulk of the army, and finally the rearguard.
“I hear you’ve been building mobile bridges, sir,” Kaladin said. “You realize those mechanical ones are too slow for your assault, I assume.”
Dalinar nodded. “But I will have soldiers carry them. No need for your men to do so.”
“Sir, that is thoughtful of you, but I don’t think you have to worry. The bridge crews will carry for you, if ordered. Many of them will probably welcome the familiarity.”
“I thought you and your men considered assignment to those bridge crews a death sentence, soldier,” Dalinar said.
“The way Sadeas ran them, it was. You could do a better job. Armored men, trained in formations, running the bridges. Soldiers marching in front with shields. Archers with instructions to defend the bridge crews. Besides, the danger is only for an assault.”
Dalinar nodded. “Prepare the crews, then. Having your men on the bridges will free the soldiers in case we get attacked.” He started to walk across the plateau, but one of the carpenters on the other side of the chasm called to him. Dalinar turned and started to cross the bridge again.
He passed officers and scribes crossing the bridge, including Adolin and Shallan, who walked side by side. She’d given up on the palanquin and he had given up on his horse, and she seemed to be explaining to him about the hidden remnants of a structure she’d found inside that rock earlier.
Behind them, on the other side of the chasm, stood the worker who had called Dalinar back across.
It’s that same carpenter, Kaladin thought. The stout man with the cap and the birthmark. Where have I seen him . . . ?
It clicked. Sadeas’s lumberyards. The man had been one of the carpenters there, overseeing the construction of bridges.
Kaladin started running.
He was charging toward the bridge before the connection fully solidified in his mind. Ahead of him, Adolin spun immediately and started running, searching for whatever danger Kaladin had spotted. He left a bewildered Shallan standing in the bridge’s center. Kaladin approached her in a rush.
The carpenter grabbed a lever on the side of the bridge contraption.
“The carpenter, Adolin!” Kaladin screamed. “Stop that man!”
Dalinar still stood on the bridge. The highprince had been distracted by something else. What? Kaladin realized he had heard something too. Horns, the call that the enemy had been spotted.
It happened all in an instant. Dalinar turning toward the horns. The carpenter pulling the lever, Adolin in his glimmering Shardplate reaching Dalinar.
The bridge lurched.
&nbs
Rayse is captive. He cannot leave the system he now inhabits. His destructive potential is, therefore, inhibited.
As the bridge fell out from beneath him, Kaladin reached for Stormlight.
Nothing.
Panic surged through him. His stomach dropped and he tumbled into the air.
The fall into the darkness of the chasm was a brief moment, but also an eternity. He caught a glimpse of Shallan and several men in blue uniforms falling and flailing in terror.
Like a drowning man struggling toward the surface, Kaladin thrashed for the Stormlight. He would not die this way! The sky was his! The winds were his. The chasms were his.
He would not!
Syl screamed, a terrified, painful sound that vibrated Kaladin’s very bones. In that moment, he got a breath of Stormlight, life itself.
He crashed into the ground at the bottom of the chasm and all went black.
* * *
Swimming through pain.
The pain washed over him, a liquid, but did not get inside. His skin kept it out.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? The distant voice sounded like rumbling thunder.
Kaladin gasped and opened his eyes, and the pain crawled inside. Suddenly, his entire body hurt.
He lay on his back, staring upward at a streak of light in the air. Syl? No . . . no, that was sunlight. The opening at the top of the chasm, high above him. This far out onto the Shattered Plains, the chasms here were hundreds of feet deep.
Kaladin groaned and sat up. That strip of light seemed impossibly distant. He’d been swallowed by the darkness, and the chasm nearby was shadowed, obscure. He put a hand to his head.
I got some Stormlight right at the end, he thought. I survived. But that scream! It haunted him, echoing in his mind. It had sounded too much like the scream he’d heard when touching the duelist’s Shardblade in the arena.
Check for wounds, his father’s teachings whispered from the back of his mind. The body could go into shock with a bad break or wound, and not notice the damage that had been done. He went through the motions of checking his limbs for breaks, and did not reach for any of the spheres in his pouch. He didn’t want to light the gloom, and potentially face the dead around him.
Was Dalinar among them? Adolin had been running toward his father. Had the prince managed to get to Dalinar before the bridge collapsed? He’d been wearing Plate, and had jumped at the end.
Kaladin felt at his legs, then his ribs. He found aches and scrapes, but nothing broken or ripped. That Stormlight he’d held at the end . . . it had protected him, perhaps even healed him, before running out. He finally reached into his pouch and fished out spheres, but found those all drained. He tried his pocket, then froze as he heard something scraping nearby.
He leaped to his feet and spun, wishing he had a weapon. The chasm bottom grew brighter. A steady glow revealed fanlike frillblooms and draping vines on the walls, gathered twigs and moss on the floor in patches. Was that a voice? He felt a surreal moment of confusion as shadows moved on the wall ahead of him.
Then someone wandered around the corner, wearing a silk dress and carrying a pack over her shoulder. Shallan Davar.
She screamed when she saw him, throwing the pack to the ground and stumbling backward, hands to her sides. She even dropped her sphere.
Rolling his arm in its socket, Kaladin stepped closer into the light. “Calm down,” he said. “It’s me.”
“Stormfather!” Shallan said, scrambling to grab the sphere off the ground again. She stepped forward, thrusting the light toward him. “It is you . . . the bridgeman. How . . . ?”
“I don’t know,” he lied, looking upward. “I’ve got a wicked crick in my neck and my elbow hurts like thunder. What happened?”
“Someone threw the emergency latch on the bridge.”
“What emergency latch?”
“It topples the bridge into the chasm.”
“Sounds like a storming stupid thing to have,” Kaladin said, fishing in his pocket for his other spheres. He glanced at them covertly. Also drained. Storms. He’d used them all?
“Depends,” Shallan said. “What if your men have retreated over the bridge and enemies are pouring across it after you? The emergency latch is supposed to have some kind of safety lock so it can’t be thrown by accident, but you can release it in a hurry if you need to.”
He grunted as Shallan shone her sphere past him toward where the two halves of the bridge had smashed into the ground of the chasm. There were the bodies he’d expected.
He looked. He had to. No sign of Dalinar, though several of the officers and lighteyed ladies who had been crossing the bridge lay in twisted, broken heaps on the ground. A drop of two hundred feet or more did not leave survivors.
Except Shallan. Kaladin didn’t remember grabbing her as he fell, but he didn’t remember much of that fall beyond Syl’s scream. That scream . . .
Well, he must have managed to grab Shallan by reflex, infusing her with Stormlight to slow her fall. She looked disheveled, her blue dress scuffed and her hair a mess, but she was apparently otherwise unharmed.
“I woke up down here in the darkness,” Shallan said. “It’s been a while since we fell.”
“How can you tell?”
“It’s almost dark up there,” Shallan said. “It will be night soon. When I woke I heard echoes of yelling. Fighting. I saw something glowing from around that corner. Turned out to be a soldier who had fallen, his sphere pouch ripped.” She shivered visibly. “He’d been killed by something before the fall.”
“Parshendi,” Kaladin said. “Just before the bridge collapsed, I heard horns from the vanguard. We got attacked.” Damnation. That probably meant that Dalinar had retreated, assuming he’d actually survived. There was nothing worth fighting for out here.
“Give me one of those spheres,” Kaladin said.
She handed one over, and Kaladin went searching among the fallen. For pulses, ostensibly, but really for any equipment or spheres.
“You think any of these might be alive?” Shallan asked, voice sounding small in the otherwise silent chasm.
“Well, we survived somehow.”
“How do you think that happened?” Shallan said, looking upward toward the gap far, far above.
“I saw some windspren just before we fell,” Kaladin said. “I’ve heard folktales of them protecting a person as he falls. Perhaps that’s what happened.”
Shallan went silent as he searched the bodies. “Yes,” she finally said. “That sounds logical.”
She seemed convinced. Good. So long as she didn’t start wondering about the stories told of “Kaladin Stormblessed.”
Nobody else was alive, but he verified for certain that neither Dalinar nor Adolin were among the corpses.
I was a fool not to spot that an assassination attempt was coming, Kaladin thought. Sadeas had tried hard to undermine Dalinar at the feast a few days back, with the revelation of the visions. It was a classic ploy. Discredit your enemy, then kill him, to make certain he didn’t become a martyr.
The corpses had little of value. A handful of spheres, some writing implements that Shallan greedily snatched up and stuffed into her satchel. No maps. Kaladin had no specific idea where they were. And with night imminent . . .
“What do we do?” Shallan asked softly, staring at the darkened realm, with its unexpected shadows, its gently moving frills, vines, polyplike staccatos, their tendrils out and wafting in the air.
Kaladin remembered his first times down in this place, which always felt too green, too muggy, too alien. Nearby, two skulls peeked out from beneath the moss, watching. Splashing sounded from a distant pool, which made Shallan spin wildly. Though the chasms were a home to Kaladin now, he did not deny that at times they were distinctly unnerving.
“It’s safer down here than it seems,” Kaladin said. “During my time in Sadeas’s army, I spent days upon days in the chasms, gathering salvage from the fallen. Just watch for rotspren.”
“And the chasmfiends?” Shallan asked, spinning to look in another direction as a cremling scuttled along the wall.
“I never saw one.” Which was true, though he had seen a shadow of one once, scraping its way down a distant chasm. Even thinking of that day gave him chills. “They aren’t as common as people claim. The real danger is highstorms. You see, if it rains, even far away from here—”
“Yes, flash flooding,” Shallan said. “Very dangerous in a slot canyon. I’ve read about them.”
“I’m sure that will be very helpful,” Kaladin said. “You mentioned some dead soldiers nearby?”
She pointed, and he strode in that direction. She followed, sticking close to his light. He found a few dead spearmen who had been shoved off the plateau above. The wounds were fresh. Just beyond them was a dead Parshendi, also fresh.
The Parshendi man had uncut gems in his beard. Kaladin touched one, hesitated, then tried to draw the Stormlight out. Nothing happened. He sighed, then bowed his head for the fallen, before finally pulling a spear from underneath one of the bodies and standing up. The light above had faded to a deep blue. Night.
“So, we wait?” Shallan asked.
“For what?” Kaladin asked, raising the spear to his shoulder.
“For them to come back . . .” She trailed off. “They’re not coming back for us, are they?”
“They’ll assume we’re dead. Storms, we should be dead. We’re too far out for a corpse-recovery operation, I’d guess. That’s doubly true since the Parshendi attacked.” He rubbed his chin. “I suppose we could wait for Dalinar’s major expedition. He was indicating he’d come this way, searching for the center. It’s only a few days away, right?”
Shallan paled. Well, she paled further. That light skin of hers was so strange. It and the red hair made her look like a very small Horneater. “Dalinar is planning to march just after the final highstorm before the Weeping. That storm is close. And it will involve lots, and lots, and lots of rain.”
“Bad idea, then.”
“You could say so.”