The Way of Kings (Stormlight Archive, The)

by Brandon Sanderson

  His face grew redder. He finished packing his things, then nodded curtly to Shallan and walked hastily from the room.

  “If I may say so, Brightness,” Shallan said, “that was exceptionally rude of you.”

  “I’m prone to such bouts of incivility,” Jasnah said. “I’m certain he has heard what I’m like. I simply wanted to make sure he got what he expected.”

  “You haven’t acted that way toward other ardents in the Palanaeum.”

  “The other ardents in the Palanaeum haven’t been working to turn my ward against me.”

  “He wasn’t…” Shallan trailed off. “He was simply worried about my soul.”

  “Has he asked you to try to steal my Soulcaster yet?”

  Shallan felt a sudden spike of shock. Her hand went to the pouch at her waist. Did Jasnah know? No, Shallan told herself. No, listen to the question. “He didn’t.”

  “Watch,” Jasnah said, opening a book. “He will eventually. I’ve experience with his type.” She looked at Shallan, and her expression softened. “He’s not interested in you. Not in any of the ways you think. In particular, this isn’t about your soul. It’s about me.”

  “That is somewhat arrogant of you,” Shallan said, “don’t you think?”

  “Only if I’m wrong, child,” Jasnah said, turning back to her book. “And I rarely am.”

  “I walked from Abamabar to Urithiru.”

  —This quote from the Eighth Parable of The Way of Kings seems to contradict Varala and Sinbian, who both claim the city was inaccessible by foot. Perhaps there was a way constructed, or perhaps Nohadon was being metaphorical.

  Bridgemen aren’t supposed to survive….

  Kaladin’s mind felt fuzzy. He knew that he hurt, but other than that, he floated. As if his head were detached from his body and bouncing off the walls and ceilings.

  “Kaladin!” a concerned voice whispered. “Kaladin, please. Please don’t be hurt anymore.”

  Bridgemen aren’t supposed to survive. Why did those words bother him so much? He remembered what had happened, using the bridge as a shield, throwing the army off, dooming the assault. Stormfather, he thought, I’m an idiot!

  “Kaladin?”

  It was Syl’s voice. He risked opening his eyes and looked out on an upside-down world, sky extending below him, familiar lumberyard in the air above him.

  No. He was upside down. Hanging against the side of Bridge Four’s barrack. The Soulcast building was fifteen feet tall at its peak, with a shallowly slanted roof. Kaladin was tied by his ankles to a rope, which would—in turn—be affixed to a ring set into the slanted roof. He’d seen it happen to other bridgemen. One who had committed a murder in camp, another who had been caught stealing for the fifth time.

  His back was to the wall so that he faced eastward. His arms were free, hanging down at his sides, and they almost touched the ground. He groaned again, hurting everywhere.

  As his father had trained him, he began to prod his side to check for broken ribs. He winced as he found several that were tender, at least cracked. Probably broken. He felt at his shoulder too, where he feared that his collarbone was broken. One of his eyes was swollen. Time would show if he’d sustained any serious internal damage.

  He rubbed his face, and flakes of dried blood cracked free and fluttered toward the ground. Gash on his head, bloodied nose, split lip. Syl landed on his chest, feet planted on his sternum, hands clasped before her. “Kaladin?”

  “I’m alive,” he mumbled, words slurred by his swollen lip. “What happened?”

  “You were beaten by those soldiers,” she said, seeming to grow smaller. “I’ve gotten back at them. I made one of them trip three times today.” She looked concerned.

  He found himself smiling. How long could a man hang like this, blood going to his head?

  “There was a lot of yelling,” Syl said softly. “I think several men were demoted. The soldier, Lamaril, he…”

  “What?”

  “He was executed,” Syl said, even more quietly. “Highprince Sadeas did it himself, the hour the army got back from the plateau. He said something about the ultimate responsibility falling on the lighteyes. Lamaril kept screaming that you had promised to absolve him, and that Gaz should be punished instead.”

  Kaladin smirked ruefully. “He shouldn’t have had me beaten senseless. Gaz?”

  “They left him in his position. I don’t know why.”

  “Right of responsibility. In a disaster like this, the lighteyes are supposed to take most of the blame. They like to make a show of obeying old precepts like that, when it suits them. Why am I still alive?”

  “Something about an example,” Syl said, wrapping her translucent arms around herself. “Kaladin, I feel cold.”

  “You can feel temperature?” Kaladin said, coughing.

  “Not usually. I can now. I don’t understand it. I…I don’t like it.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “You shouldn’t lie.”

  “Sometimes it’s all right to lie, Syl.”

  “And this is one of those times?”

  He blinked, trying to ignore his wounds, the pressure in his head, trying to clear his mind. He failed on all counts. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “I think I understand.”

  “So,” Kaladin said, resting his head back, the parietal knob of his skull resting against the wall, “I’m to be judged by the highstorm. They’ll let the storm kill me.”

  Hanging here, Kaladin would be exposed directly to the winds and everything they would throw at him. If you were prudent and took appropriate action, it was possible to survive outside in a highstorm, though it was a miserable experience. Kaladin had done it on several occasions, hunkered down, taking shelter in the lee of a rock formation. But hanging on a wall facing directly stormward? He’d be cut to ribbons and crushed by stones.

  “I’ll be right back,” Syl said, dropping off his chest, taking the form of a falling stone, then changing into windblown leaves near the ground and fluttering away, curving to the right. The lumberyard was empty. Kaladin could smell the crisp, chill air, the land bracing for a highstorm. The lull, it was called, when the wind fell still, the air cold, the pressure dropping, the humidity rising right before a storm.

  A few seconds later, Rock poked his head around the wall, Syl on his shoulder. He crept up to Kaladin, a nervous Teft following. They were joined by Moash; despite the latter’s protests that he didn’t trust Kaladin, he looked almost as concerned as the other two.

  “Lordling?” Moash said. “You awake?”

  “I’m conscious,” Kaladin croaked. “Everyone get back from the battle all right?”

  “All of our men, sure enough,” Teft said, scratching at his beard. “But we lost the battle. It was a disaster. Over two hundred bridgemen dead. Those who survived were only enough to carry eleven bridges.”

  Two hundred men, Kaladin thought. That’s my fault. I protected my own at the cost of others. I was too hasty.

  Bridgemen aren’t supposed to survive. There’s something about that. He wouldn’t be able to ask Lamaril. That man had gotten what he deserved, though. If Kaladin had the ability to choose, such would be the end of all lighteyes, the king included.

  “We wanted to say something,” Rock said. “Is from all of the men. Most wouldn’t come out. Highstorm coming, and—”

  “It’s all right,” Kaladin whispered.

  Teft nudged Rock to continue.

  “Well, is this. We will remember you. Bridge Four, we won’t go back to how we were. Maybe all of us will die, but we’ll show the new ones. Fires at night. Laughter. Living. We’ll make a tradition out of it. For you.” Rock and Teft knew about the knobweed. They could keep earning extra money to pay for things.

  “You did this for us,” Moash put in. “We’d have died on that field. Perhaps as many as died in the other bridge crews. This way, we’re only going to lose one.”

  “I say it isn’t right, what they’re doing,” Teft
said with a scowl. “We talked about cutting you down….”

  “No,” Kaladin said. “That would only earn you a similar punishment.”

  The three men shared glances. It seemed they’d come to the same conclusion.

  “What did Sadeas say?” Kaladin asked. “About me.”

  “That he understood how a bridgeman would want to save his life,” Teft said, “even at others’ expense. He called you a selfish coward, but acted like that was all that could be expected.”

  “He says he’s letting the Stormfather judge you,” Moash added. “Jezerezeh, king of Heralds. He says that if you deserve to live, you will….” He trailed off. He knew as well as the others that unprotected men didn’t survive highstorms, not like this.

  “I want you three to do something for me,” Kaladin said, closing his eyes against the blood trickling down his face from his lip, which he’d cracked open by speaking.

  “Anything, Kaladin,” Rock said.

  “I want you to go back into the barrack and tell the men to come out after the storm. Tell them to look up at me tied here. Tell them I’ll open my eyes and look back at them, and they’ll know that I survived.”

  The three bridgemen fell silent.

  “Yes, of course, Kaladin,” Teft said. “We’ll do it.”

  “Tell them,” Kaladin continued, voice firmer, “that it won’t end here. Tell them I chose not to take my own life, and so there’s no way in Damnation I’m going to give it up to Sadeas.”

  Rock smiled one of those broad smiles of his. “By the uli’tekanaki, Kaladin. I almost believe you’ll do it.”

  “Here,” Teft said, handing him something. “For luck.”

  Kaladin took the object in a weak, bloodstained hand. It was a sphere, a full skymark. It was dun, the Stormlight gone from it. Carry a sphere with you into the storm, the old saying said, and at least you’ll have light by which to see.

  “It’s all we were able to save from your pouch,” Teft said. “Gaz and Lamaril got the rest. We complained, but what were we to do?”

  “Thank you,” Kaladin said.

  Moash and Rock retreated to the safety of the barrack, Syl leaving Rock’s shoulder to stay with Kaladin. Teft lingered too, as if thinking to spend the storm with Kaladin. He eventually shook his head, muttering, and joined the others. Kaladin thought he heard the man calling himself a coward.

  The door to the barrack shut. Kaladin fingered the smooth glass sphere. The sky was darkening, and not just because the sun was setting. Blackness gathered. The highstorm.

  Syl walked up the side of the wall, then sat down on it, looking at him, tiny face somber. “You told them you’d survive. What happens if you don’t?”

  Kaladin’s head was pounding with his pulse. “My mother would cringe if she knew how quickly the other soldiers taught me to gamble. First night in Amaram’s army, and they had me playing for spheres.”

  “Kaladin?” Syl said.

  “Sorry,” Kaladin said, rocking his head from side to side. “What you said, it reminded me of that night. There’s a term in gambling, you see. ‘In for all,’ they say. It’s when you put all of your money on one bet.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m putting it all on the long bet,” Kaladin whispered. “If I die, then they’ll come out, shake their heads, and tell themselves they knew it would happen. But if I live, they’ll remember it. And it will give them hope. They might see it as a miracle.”

  Syl was silent for a moment. “Do you want to be a miracle?”

  “No,” Kaladin whispered. “But for them, I will be.”

  It was a desperate, foolish hope. The eastern horizon, inverted in his sight, was growing darker. From this perspective, the storm was like the shadow of some enormous beast lumbering across the ground. He felt the disturbing fuzziness of a person who had been hit too hard on the head. Concussion. That was what it was called. He was having trouble thinking, but he didn’t want to fall unconscious. He wanted to stare at the highstorm straight on, though it terrified him. He felt the same panic he’d felt looking down into the black chasm, back when he’d nearly killed himself. It was the fear of what he could not see, what he could not know.

  The stormwall approached, the visible curtain of rain and wind at the advent of a highstorm. It was a massive wave of water, dirt, and rocks, hundreds of feet high, thousands upon thousands of windspren zipping before it.

  In battle, he’d been able to fight his way to safety with the skill of his spear. When he’d stepped to the edge of the chasm, there had been a line of retreat. This time, there was nothing. No way to fight or avoid that black beast, that shadow spanning the entirety of the horizon, plunging the world into an early night. The eastern edge of the crater that made the warcamp had been worn away, and Bridge Four’s barrack was first in its row. There was nothing between him and the Plains. Nothing between him and the storm.

  Staring at that raging, blustering, churning wave of wind-pushed water and debris, Kaladin felt as if he were watching the end of the world descend upon him.

  He took a deep breath, the pain of his ribs forgotten, as the stormwall crossed the lumberyard in a flash and slammed into him.

  “Though many wished Urithiru to be built in Alethela, it was obvious that it could not be. And so it was that we asked for it to be placed westward, in the place nearest to Honor.”

  —Perhaps the oldest surviving original source mentioning the city, requoted in The Vavibrar, line 1804. What I wouldn’t give for a way to translate the Dawnchant.

  The force of the stormwall nearly knocked him unconscious, but the sudden chill of it shocked him lucid.

  For a moment, Kaladin couldn’t feel anything but that coldness. He was pressed against the side of the barrack by the extended blast of water. Rocks and bits of branch crashed against the stone around him; he was already too numb to tell how many slashed or beat against his skin.

  He bore it, dazed, eyes pressed shut and breath held. Then the stormwall passed, crashing onward. The next blast of wind came in from the side—the air was swirling and gusting from all directions now. The wind flung him sideways—his back scraping against stone—and up into the air. The wind stabilized, blowing out of the east again. Kaladin hung in darkness, and his feet yanked against the rope. In a panic, he realized that he was now flapping in the wind like a kite, tied to the ring in the barrack’s slanted roof.

  Only that rope kept him from being blown along with the other debris to be tumbled and tossed before the storm across the entirety of Roshar. For those few heartbeats, he could not think. He could only feel the panic and the cold—one boiling out of his chest, the other trying to freeze him from the skin inward. He screamed, clutching his single sphere as if it were a lifeline. The scream was a mistake, as it let that coldness course into his mouth. Like a spirit forcing its arm down his throat.

  The wind was like a maelstrom, chaotic, moving in different directions. One buffet ripped at him, then passed, and he fell to the roof of the barrack with a thud. Almost immediately, the terrible winds tried to lift him again, pounding his skin with waves of icy water. Thunder crashed, the heartbeat of the beast that had swallowed him. Lighting split the darkness like white teeth in the night. The wind was so loud it nearly drowned out the thunder; howling and moaning.

  “Grab the roof, Kaladin!”

  Syl’s voice. So soft, so small. How could he hear it at all?

  Numbly, he realized he was lying facedown on the sloped roof. It wasn’t so steeply peaked that he was immediately pitched off, and the wind was generally blowing him backward. He did as Syl said, grabbing the lip of the roof with cold, slick fingers. Then he lay facedown, head tucked between his arms. He still had the sphere in his hand, pressed against the stone rooftop. His fingers started to slip. The wind was blowing so hard, trying to push him to the west. If he let go, he’d end up dangling in the air again. His rope tether was not long enough for him to get to the other side of the shallow-peaked rooftop, where he�
�d be sheltered.

  A boulder hit the roof beside him—he couldn’t hear its impact or see it in the tempest’s darkness, but he could feel the building vibrate. The boulder rolled forward and crashed down to the ground. The entire storm didn’t have such force, but occasional gusts could pick up and toss large objects, hurling them hundreds of feet.

  His fingers slipped further.

  “The ring,” Syl whispered.

  The ring. The rope tied his legs to a steel ring on the side of the roof behind him. Kaladin let go, then snatched the ring as he was blown backward. He clutched to it. The rope continued down to his ankles, about the length of his body. He thought for a moment of untying the ropes, but he didn’t dare let go of the ring. He clung there, like a pennant flapping in the wind, holding the ring in both hands, sphere cupped inside one of them and pressed against the steel.

  Each moment was a struggle. The wind yanked him left, then hurled him right. He couldn’t know how long it lasted; time had no meaning in this place of fury and tumult. His numbed, battered mind started to think he was in a nightmare. A terrible dream inside his head, full of black, living winds. Screams in the air, bright and white, the flash of lightning revealing a terrible, twisted world of chaos and terror. The very buildings seemed blown sideways, the entire world askew, warped by the storm’s terrible power.

  In those brief moments of light when he dared to look, he thought he saw Syl standing in front of him, her face to the wind, tiny hands forward. As if she were trying to hold back the storm and split the winds as a stone divided the waters of a swift stream.

  The cold of the rainwater numbed the scrapes and bruises. But it also numbed his fingers. He didn’t feel them slipping. The next he knew, he was whipping in the air again, tossed to the side, being slammed down against the roof of the barrack.

  He hit hard. His vision flashed with sparkling lights that melded together and were followed by blackness.

  Not unconsciousness, blackness.