“Ten people, with Shardblades alight, standing before a wall of black and white and red.”
—Collected: Jesachev, 1173, 12 seconds pre-death. Subject: one of our own ardents, overheard during his last moments.
Kaladin had not been assigned to Bridge Four by chance. Out of all the bridge crews, Bridge Four had the highest casualty rate. That was particularly notable, considering that average bridge crews often lost one- third to one-half of their number on a single run.
Kaladin sat outside, back to the barrack wall, a sprinkle of rain falling on him. It wasn’t a highstorm. Just an ordinary spring rain. Soft. A timid cousin to the great storms.
Syl sat on Kaladin’s shoulder. Or hovered on it. Whatever. She didn’t seem to have any weight. Kaladin sat slumped, chin against his chest, staring at a dip in the stone, which was slowly collecting rainwater.
He should have moved inside Bridge Four’s barrack. It was cold and unfurnished, but it would keep off the rain. But he just…couldn’t care. How long had he been with Bridge Four now? Two weeks? Three? An eternity?
Of the twenty-five men who had survived his first bridge deployment, twenty-three were now dead. Two had been moved to other bridge crews
because they’d done something to please Gaz, but they’d died there. Only one other man and Kaladin remained. Two out of nearly forty.
The bridge crew’s numbers had been replenished with more unfortunates, and most of those had died too. They had been replaced. Many of those had died. Bridgeleader after bridgeleader had been chosen. It was supposed to be a favored position on a bridge crew, always getting to run in the best places. It didn’t matter for Bridge Four.
Some bridge runs weren’t as bad. If the Alethi arrived before the Parshendi, no bridgemen died. And if they arrived too late, sometimes another highprince was already there. Sadeas wouldn’t help in that case; he’d take his army and go back to camp. Even in a bad run, the Parshendi would often choose to focus their arrows on certain crews, trying to bring them down one at a time. Sometimes, dozens of bridgemen would fall, but not a single one from Bridge Four.
That was rare. For some reason, Bridge Four always seemed to get targeted. Kaladin didn’t bother to learn the names of his companions. None of the bridgemen did. What was the point? Learn a man’s name, and one of you would be dead before the week was out. Odds were, you’d both be dead. Maybe he should learn names. Then he’d have someone to talk to in Damnation. They could reminisce about how terrible Bridge Four had been, and agree that eternal fires were much more pleasant.
He smirked dully, still staring at the rock in front of him. Gaz would come for them soon, send them to work. Scrubbing latrines, cleaning streets, mucking stables, gathering rocks. Something to keep their minds off their fate.
He still didn’t know why they fought on those blustering plateaus. Something about those large chrysalises. They had gemstones at their hearts, apparently. But what did that have to do with the Vengeance Pact?
Another bridgeman—a youthful Veden with reddish-blond hair—lay nearby, staring up into the spitting sky. Rainwater pooled in the corners of his brown eyes, then ran down his face. He didn’t blink.
They couldn’t run. The warcamp might as well have been a prison. The bridgemen could go to the merchants and spend their meager earnings on cheap wine or whores, but they couldn’t leave the warcamp. The perimeter was secure. Partially, this was to keep out soldiers from the other camps—there was always rivalry where armies met. But mostly it was so bridgemen and slaves could not flee.
Why? Why did this all have to be so horrible? None of it made sense. Why not let a few bridgemen run out in front of the bridges with shields to block arrows? He’d asked, and had been told that would slow them down too much. He’d asked again, and had been told he’d be strung up if he didn’t shut his mouth.
The lighteyes acted as if this entire mess were some kind of grand game. If it was, the rules were hidden from bridgemen, just as pieces on a board had no inkling what the player’s strategy might be.
“Kaladin?” Syl asked, floating down and landing on his leg, holding the girlish form with the long dress flowing into mist. “Kaladin? You haven’t spoken in days.”
He kept staring, slumped. There was a way out. Bridgemen could visit the chasm nearest the camp. There were rules forbidding it, but the sentries ignored them. It was seen as the one mercy that could be given the bridgemen.
Bridgemen who took that path never returned. “Kaladin?” Syl said, voice soft, worried.
“My father used to say that there are two kinds of people in the world,” Kaladin whispered, voice raspy. “He said there are those who take lives. And there are those who save lives.”
Syl frowned, cocking her head. This kind of conversation confused her; she wasn’t good with abstractions.
“I used to think he was wrong. I thought there was a third group. People who killed in order to save.” He shook his head. “I was a fool. There is a third group, a big one, but it isn’t what I thought.”
“What group?” she said, sitting down on his knee, brow scrunched up. “The people who exist to be saved or to be killed. The group in the
middle. The ones who can’t do anything but die or be protected. The victims. That’s all I am.”
He looked up across the wet lumberyard. The carpenters had retreated, throwing tarps over untreated wood and bearing away tools that could rust. The bridgeman barracks ran around the west and north sides of the yard. Bridge Four’s was set off a little from the others, as if bad luck were a disease that could be caught. Contagious by proximity, as Kaladin’s father would say.
“We exist to be killed,” Kaladin said. He blinked, glancing at the other few members of Bridge Four sitting apathetically in the rain. “If we’re not
dead already.”
 |
“I hate seeing you like this,” Syl said, buzzing about Kaladin’s head as his team of bridgemen dragged a log down into the lumberyard. The Parshendi often set fire to the outermost permanent bridges, so Highprince Sadeas’s engineers and carpenters were always busy.
The old Kaladin might have wondered why the armies didn’t work harder to defend the bridges. There’s something wrong here! a voice inside him said. You’re missing part of the puzzle. They waste resources and bridgeman lives. They don’t seem to care about pushing inward and assaulting the Parshendi. They just fight pitched battles on plateaus, then come back to the camps and celebrate. Why? WHY?
He ignored that voice. It belonged to the man he had been.
“You used to be vibrant,” Syl said. “So many looked up to you, Kaladin. Your squad of soldiers. The enemies you fought. The other slaves. Even some lighteyes.”
Lunch would come soon. Then he could sleep until their bridgeleader kicked him awake for afternoon duty.
“I used to watch you fight,” Syl said. “I can barely remember it. My memories of then are fuzzy. Like looking at you through a rainstorm.”
Wait. That was odd. Syl hadn’t started following him until after his fall from the army. And she’d acted just like a regular windspren back then. He hesitated, earning a curse and a lash on his back from a taskmaster’s whip.
He started pulling again. Bridgemen who were laggard in work were whipped, and bridgemen who were laggard on runs were executed. The army was very serious about that. Refuse to charge the Parshendi, try to lag behind the other bridges, and you’d be beheaded. They reserved that fate for that specific crime, in fact.
There were lots of ways to get punished as a bridgeman. You could earn extra work detail, get whipped, have your pay docked. If you did something really bad, they’d string you up for the Stormfather’s judgment,
leaving you tied to a post or a wall to face a highstorm. But the only thing you could do to be executed directly was refuse to run at the Parshendi.
The message was clear. Charging with your bridge might get you killed, but refusing to do so would get you killed.
Kaladin and his crew lifted their log into a pile with others, then unhooked their dragging lines. They walked back toward the edge of the lumberyard, where more logs waited.
“Gaz!” a voice called. A tall, yellow-and-black-haired soldier stood at the edge of the bridge grounds, a group of miserable men huddled behind him. That was Laresh, one of the soldiers who worked the duty tent. He brought new bridgemen to replace those who’d been killed.
The day was bright, without a hint of clouds, and the sun was hot on Kaladin’s back. Gaz hustled up to meet the new recruits, and Kaladin and the others happened to be walking in that direction to pick up a log.
“What a sorry lot,” Gaz said, looking over the recruits. “Of course, if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be sent here.”
“That’s the truth,” Laresh said. “These ten at the front were caught smuggling. You know what to do.”
New bridgemen were constantly needed, but there were always enough bodies. Slaves were common, but so were thieves or other lawbreakers from among the camp followers. Never parshmen. They were too valuable, and besides, the Parshendi were some kind of cousins to the parshmen. Better not to give the parshman workers in camp the sight of their kind fighting.
Sometimes a soldier would be thrown into a bridge crew. That only happened if he’d done something extremely bad, like striking an officer. Acts that would earn a hanging in many armies meant being sent to the bridge crews here. Supposedly, if you survived a hundred bridge runs, you’d be released. It had happened once or twice, the stories said. It was probably just a myth, intended to give the bridgemen some tiny hope for survival.
Kaladin and the others walked past the newcomers, gazes down, and began hooking their ropes to the next log.
“Bridge Four needs some men,” Gaz said, rubbing his chin.
“Four always needs men,” Laresh said. “Don’t worry. I brought a special batch for it.” He nodded toward a second group of recruits, much more ragtag, walking up behind.
Kaladin slowly stood upright. One of the prisoners in that group was a boy of barely fourteen or fifteen. Short, spindly, with a round face. “Tien?” he whispered, taking a step forward.
He stopped, shaking himself. Tien was dead. But this newcomer looked so familiar, with those frightened black eyes. It made Kaladin want to shelter the boy. Protect him.
But…he’d failed. Everyone he’d tried to protect—from Tien to Cenn
—had ended up dead. What was the point?
He turned back to dragging the log.
“Kaladin,” Syl said, landing on the log, “I’m going to leave.”
He blinked in shock. Syl. Leave? But…she was the last thing he had left. “No,” he whispered. It came out as a croak.
“I’ll try to come back,” she said. “But I don’t know what will happen when I leave you. Things are strange. I have odd memories. No, most of them aren’t even memories. Instincts. One of those tells me that if I leave you, I might lose myself.”
“Then don’t go,” he said, growing terrified.
“I have to,” she said, cringing. “I can’t watch this anymore. I’ll try to return.” She looked sorrowful. “Goodbye.” And with that, she zipped away into the air, adopting the form of a tiny group of tumbling, translucent leaves.
Kaladin watched her go, numb.
Then he turned back to hauling the log. What else could he do?
|
The youth, the one that reminded him of Tien, died during the very next bridge run.
It was a bad one. The Parshendi were in position, waiting for Sadeas. Kaladin charged the chasm, not even flinching as men were slaughtered around him. It wasn’t bravery that drove him; it wasn’t even a wish that those arrows would take him and end it all. He ran. That was what he did. Like a boulder rolled down a hill, or like rain fell from the sky. They didn’t
have a choice. Neither did he. He wasn’t a man; he was a thing, and things just did what they did.
The bridgemen laid their bridges in a tight line. Four crews had fallen.
Kaladin’s own team had lost nearly enough stop them.
Bridge placed, Kaladin turned away, the army charging across the wood to start the real battle. He stumbled back across the plateau. After a few moments, he found what he was looking for. The boy’s body.
Kaladin stood, wind whipping at his hair, looking down at the corpse. It lay faceup in a small hollow in the stone. Kaladin remembered lying in a similar hollow, holding a similar corpse.
Another bridgeman had fallen nearby, bristling with arrows. It was the man who’d lived through Kaladin’s first bridge run all those weeks back. His body slumped to the side, lying on a stone outcropping a foot or so above the corpse of the boy. Blood dripped from the tip of an arrow sticking out his back. It fell, one ruby drop at a time, splattering on the boy’s open, lifeless eye. A little trail of red ran from the eye down the side of his face. Like crimson tears.
That night, Kaladin huddled in the barrack, listening to a highstorm buff et the wall. He curled against the cold stone. Thunder shattered the sky outside.
I can’t keep going like this, he thought. I’m dead inside, as sure as if I’d taken a spear through the neck.
The storm continued its tirade. And for the first time in a year, Kaladin found himself crying.
