The Way of Kings

“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.