seemed impossibly distant. He’d been swallowed by the darkness, and the chasm nearby was shadowed, obscure. He put a hand to his head.
I got some Stormlight right at the end, he thought. I survived. But that scream! It haunted him, echoing in his mind. It had sounded too much like the scream he’d heard when touching the duelist’s Shardblade in the arena.
Check for wounds, his father’s teachings whispered from the back of his mind. The body could go into shock with a bad break or wound, and not notice the damage that had been done. He went through the motions of checking his limbs for breaks, and did not reach for any of the spheres in his pouch. He didn’t want to light the gloom, and potentially face the dead around him.
Was Dalinar among them? Adolin had been running toward his father. Had the prince managed to get to Dalinar before the bridge collapsed? He’d been wearing Plate, and had jumped at the end.
Kaladin felt at his legs, then his ribs. He found aches and scrapes, but nothing broken or ripped. That Stormlight he’d held at the end . . . it had protected him, perhaps even healed him, before running out. He finally reached into his pouch and fished out spheres, but found those all drained. He tried his pocket, then froze as he heard something scraping nearby.
He leaped to his feet and spun, wishing he had a weapon. The chasm bottom grew brighter. A steady glow revealed fanlike frillblooms and draping vines on the walls, gathered twigs and moss on the floor in patches. Was that a voice? He felt a surreal moment of confusion as shadows moved on the wall ahead of him.
Then someone wandered around the corner, wearing a silk dress and carrying a pack over her shoulder. Shallan Davar.
She screamed when she saw him, throwing the pack to the ground and stumbling backward, hands to her sides. She even dropped her sphere.
Rolling his arm in its socket, Kaladin stepped closer into the light. “Calm down,” he said. “It’s me.”
“Stormfather!” Shallan said, scrambling to grab the sphere off the ground again. She stepped forward, thrusting the light toward him. “It is you . . . the bridgeman. How . . . ?”
“I don’t know,” he lied, looking upward. “I’ve got a wicked crick in my neck and my elbow hurts like thunder. What happened?”
“Someone threw the emergency latch on the bridge.”
“What emergency latch?”
“It topples the bridge into the chasm.”
“Sounds like a storming stupid thing to have,” Kaladin said, fishing in his pocket for his other spheres. He glanced at them covertly. Also drained. Storms. He’d used them all?
“Depends,” Shallan said. “What if your men have retreated over the bridge and enemies are pouring across it after you? The emergency latch is supposed to have some kind of safety lock so it can’t be thrown by accident, but you can release it in a hurry if you need to.”
He grunted as Shallan shone her sphere past him toward where the two halves of the bridge had smashed into the ground of the chasm. There were the bodies he’d expected.
He looked. He had to. No sign of Dalinar, though several of the officers and lighteyed ladies who had been crossing the bridge lay in twisted, broken heaps on the ground. A drop of two hundred feet or more did not leave survivors.
Except Shallan. Kaladin didn’t remember grabbing her as he fell, but he didn’t remember much of that fall beyond Syl’s scream. That scream . . .
Well, he must have managed to grab Shallan by reflex, infusing her with Stormlight to slow her fall. She looked disheveled, her blue dress scuffed and her hair a mess, but she was apparently otherwise unharmed.
“I woke up down here in the darkness,” Shallan said. “It’s been a while since we fell.”
“How can you tell?”
“It’s almost dark up there,” Shallan said. “It will be night soon. When I woke I heard echoes of yelling. Fighting. I saw something glowing from around that corner. Turned out to be a soldier who had fallen, his sphere pouch ripped.” She shivered visibly. “He’d been killed by something before the fall.”
“Parshendi,” Kaladin said. “Just before the bridge collapsed, I heard horns from the vanguard. We got attacked.” Damnation. That probably meant that Dalinar had retreated, assuming he’d actually survived. There was nothing worth fighting for out here.
“Give me one of those spheres,” Kaladin said.
She handed one over, and Kaladin went searching among the fallen. For pulses,