The Way of Kings - By Brandon Sanderson Page 0,67

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