The Way of Kings - By Brandon Sanderson Page 0,336

to the center of the Plains. They’d failed. Chasmfiends had killed some groups. Others had been caught in the chasms during highstorms, despite precautions. It was impossible to predict the storms perfectly.

Other scouting parties had avoided those two fates. They’d used enormous extensible ladders to climb atop plateaus during highstorms. They’d lost many men, though, as the plateau tops provided poor cover during storms, and you couldn’t bring wagons or other shelter with you into the chasms. The bigger problem, he’d heard, had been the Parshendi patrols. They’d found and killed dozens of scouting parties.

“Kaladin?” Teft asked, hustling up, splashing through a puddle where bits of empty cremling carapace floated. “You all right?”

“Fine.”

“You look thoughtful.”

“More breakfast-full,” Kaladin said. “That gruel was particularly dense this morning.”

Teft smiled. “I never took you for the glib type.”

“I used to be more so. I get it from my mother. You could rarely say anything to her without getting it twisted about and tossed back to you.”

Teft nodded. They walked in silence for a time, the bridgemen behind laughing as Dunny told a story about the first girl he’d ever kissed.

“Son,” Teft said, “have you felt anything strange lately?”

“Strange? What kind of strange?”

“I don’t know. Just…anything odd?” He coughed. “You know, like odd surges of strength? The…er, feeling that you’re light?”

“The feeling that I’m what?”

“Light. Er, maybe, like your head is light. Light-headed. That sort of thing. Storm it, boy, I’m just checking to see if you’re still sick. You were beat up pretty badly by that highstorm.”

“I’m fine,” Kaladin said. “Remarkably so, actually.”

“Odd, eh?”

It was odd. It fed his nagging worry that he was subject to some kind of supernatural curse of the type that were supposed to happen to people who sought the Old Magic. There were stories of evil men made immortal, then tortured over and over again—like Extes, who had his arms torn off each day for sacrificing his son to the Voidbringers in exchange for knowledge of the day of his death. It was just a tale, but tales came from somewhere.

Kaladin lived when everyone else died. Was that the work of some spren from Damnation, toying with him like a windspren, but infinitely more nefarious? Letting him think that he might be able to do some good, then killing everyone he tried to help? There were supposed to be thousands of kinds of spren, many that people never saw or didn’t know about. Syl followed him. Could some kind of evil spren be doing the same?

A very disturbing thought.

Superstition is useless, he told himself forcefully. Think on it too much, and you’ll end up like Durk, insisting that you need to wear your lucky boots into every battle.

They reached a section where the chasm forked, splitting around a plateau high above. Kaladin turned to face the bridgemen. “This is as good a place as any.” The bridgemen stopped, bunching up. He could see the anticipation in their eyes, the excitement.

He’d felt that once, back before he’d known the soreness and the pain of practice. Oddly, Kaladin felt he was now both more in awe of and more disappointed in the spear than he’d been as a youth. He loved the focus, the feeling of certainty that he felt when he fought. But that hadn’t saved those who followed him.

“This is where I’m supposed to tell you what a sorry group you are,” Kaladin said to the men. “It’s the way I’ve always seen it done. The training sergeant tells the recruits that they are pathetic. He points out their weakness, perhaps spars with a few of them, tossing them on their backsides to teach them humility. I did that a few times myself when training new spearmen.”

Kaladin shook his head. “Today, that’s not how we’ll begin. You men don’t need humbling. You don’t dream of glory. You dream of survival. Most of all, you aren’t the sad, unprepared group of recruits most sergeants have to deal with. You’re tough. I’ve seen you run for miles carrying a bridge. You’re brave. I’ve seen you charge straight at a line of archers. You’re determined. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, right now, with me.”

Kaladin walked to the side of the chasm and extracted a discarded spear from some flood-strewn rubble. Once he had it, however, he realized that the spearhead had been knocked off. He almost tossed it aside, then reconsidered.

Spears were dangerous for him to hold. They made him want to fight, and might lead him to think he was who