The Way of Kings (66 page)

Just like that, the creature was dead. Now the Shardblade could cut it, and Adolin carved away sections of flesh. Purple ichor spurted out as he reached in, questing for the gemheart. The soldiers cheered as he pulled it free, gloryspren hovering above the entire army like hundreds of spheres of light.

Dalinar found himself walking away, helm held in his left hand. He crossed the battlefield, passing surgeons tending the wounded and teams who were carrying his dead back to the bridges. There were sleds behind the chull carts for them, so they could be burned properly back at camp.

There were a lot of Parshendi corpses. Looking at them now, he was neither disgusted nor excited. Just exhausted.

He’d gone to battle dozens, perhaps hundreds of times. Never before had he felt as he had this day. That revulsion had distracted him, and that could have gotten him killed. Battle was no time for reflection; you had to keep your mind on what you were doing.

The Thrill had seemed subdued the entire battle, and he hadn’t fought nearly as well as he once had. This battle should have brought him clarity. Instead, his troubles seemed magnified.
Blood of my fathers,
he thought, stepping up to the top of a small rock hill.
What is happening to me?

His weakness today seemed the latest, and most potent, argument to fuel what Adolin—and, indeed, what many others—said about him. He stood atop the hill, looking eastward, toward the Origin. His eyes went that direction so often. Why? What was—

He froze, noticing a group of Parshendi on a nearby plateau. His scouts watched them warily; it was the army that Dalinar’s people had driven off. Though they’d killed a lot of Parshendi today, the vast majority had still escaped, retreating when they realized the battle was lost to them. That was one of the reasons the war was lasting so long. The Parshendi understood strategic retreat.

This army stood in ranks, grouped in warpairs. A commanding figure stood at their head, a large Parshendi in glittering armor. Shardplate. Even at a distance, it was easy to tell the difference between it and something more mundane.

That Shardbearer hadn’t been here during the battle itself. Why come now? Had he arrived too late?

The armored figure and the rest of the Parshendi turned and left, leaping across the chasm behind them and fleeing back toward their unseen haven at the center of the Plains.

If anything I have said makes a glimmer of sense to you, I trust that you’ll call them off. Or maybe you could astound me and ask them to do something productive for once.

Kaladin pushed his way into the apothecary’s shop, the door banging shut behind him. As before, the aged man pretended to be feeble, feeling his way with a cane until he recognized Kaladin. Then he stood up straighter. “Oh. It’s you.”

It had been two more long days. Daytime spent working and training—Teft and Rock now practiced with him—evenings spent at the first chasm, retrieving the reeds from their hiding place in a crevice and then milking for hours. Gaz had seen them go down last night, and the bridge sergeant was undoubtedly suspicious. There was no helping that.

Bridge Four had been called out on a bridge run today. Thankfully, they’d arrived before the Parshendi, and none of the bridge crews had lost any men. Things hadn’t gone so well for the regular Alethi troops. The Alethi line had eventually buckled before the Parshendi assault, and the bridge crews had been forced to lead a tired, angry, and defeated troop of soldiers back to the camp.

Kaladin was bleary-eyed with fatigue from staying up late working on the reeds. His stomach growled perpetually from being given a fraction of the food it needed, as he shared his meals with two wounded. That all ended today. The apothecary walked back behind his counter, and Kaladin stepped up to it. Syl darted into the room, her small ribbon of light turning into a woman midtwist. She flipped like an acrobat, landing on the table in a smooth motion.

“What do you need?” the apothecary asked. “More bandages? Well, I might just—”

He cut off as Kaladin slapped a medium-sized liquor bottle down on the table. It had a cracked top, but would still hold a cork. He pulled this free, revealing the milky white knobweed sap inside. He’d used the first of what they’d harvested to treat Leyten, Dabbid, and Hobber.

“What’s this?” the elderly apothecary asked, adjusting his spectacles and leaning down. “Offering me a drink? I don’t take the stuff these days. Unsettles the stomach, you know.”

“It’s not liquor. It’s knobweed sap. You said it was expensive. Well, how much will you give me for this?”

The apothecary blinked, then leaned in closer, giving the contents a whiff. “Where’d you get this?”

“I harvested it from the reeds growing outside of camp.”

The apothecary’s expression darkened. He shrugged. “Worthless, I’m afraid.”

“What?”

“The wild weeds aren’t potent enough.” The apothecary replaced the cork. A strong wind buffeted the building, blowing under the door, stirring the scents of the many powders and tonics he sold. “This is practically useless. I’ll give you two clearmarks for it, which is being generous. I’ll have to distill it, and will be lucky to get a couple of spoonfuls.”

Two marks!
Kaladin thought with despair.
After three days of work, three of us pushing ourselves, getting only a few hours of sleep each night? All for something worth only a couple days’ wage?

But no. The sap had
worked
on Leyten’s wound, making the rotspren flee and the infection retreat. Kaladin narrowed his eyes as the apothecary fished two marks out of his money pouch, setting them on the table. Like many spheres, these were flattened slightly on one side to keep them from rolling away.

“Actually,” the apothecary said, rubbing his chin. “I’ll give you three.” He took out one more mark. “Hate to see all of your effort go to waste.”

“Kaladin,” Syl said, studying the apothecary. “He’s nervous about something. I think he’s lying!”

“I know,” Kaladin said.

“What’s that?” the apothecary said. “Well, if you knew it was worthless, why did you spend so much effort on it?” He reached for the bottle.

Kaladin caught his hand. “We got two or more drops from each reed, you know.”

The apothecary frowned.

“Last time,” Kaladin said, “you told me I’d be lucky to get one drop per reed. You said that was why knobweed sap was so expensive. You said nothing about ‘wild’ plants being weaker.”

“Well, I didn’t think you’d go and try gathering them, and…” He trailed off as Kaladin locked eyes with him.

“The army doesn’t know, do they?” Kaladin asked. “They aren’t aware how valuable those plants outside are. You harvest them, you sell the sap, and you make a killing, since the military needs a
lot
of antiseptic.”

The old apothecary cursed, pulling his hand back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Kaladin took his jar. “And if I go to the healing tent and tell them where I got this?”

“They’d take it from you!” the man said urgently. “Don’t be a fool. You’ve a slave brand, boy. They’ll think you stole it.”

Kaladin moved to walk away.

“I’ll give a skymark,” the apothecary said. “That’s half what I’d charge the military for this much.”

Kaladin turned. “You charge them
two skymarks
for something that only takes a couple of days to gather?”

“It’s not just me,” the apothecary said, scowling. “Each of the apothecaries charges the same. We got together, decided on a fair price.”

“How is
that
a fair price?”

“We have to make a living here, in this Almighty-forsaken land! It costs us money to set up shop, to maintain ourselves, to hire guards.”

He fished in his pouch, pulling out a sphere that glowed deep blue. A sapphire sphere was worth about twenty-five times a diamond one. As Kaladin made one diamond mark a day, a skymark was worth as much as Kaladin made in half a month. Of course, a common darkeyed soldier earned five clearmarks a day, which would make this a week’s wages to them.

Once, this wouldn’t have seemed like much money to Kaladin. Now it was a fortune. Still, he hesitated. “I should expose you. Men die because of you.”

“No they don’t,” the apothecary said. “The highprinces have more than enough to pay this, considering what they make on the plateaus. We supply them with bottles of sap as often as they need them. All you’d do by exposing us is let monsters like Sadeas keep a few more spheres in their pockets!”

The apothecary was sweating. Kaladin was threatening to topple his entire business on the Shattered Plains. And so much money was being earned on the sap that this could grow
very
dangerous. Men killed to keep such secrets.

“Line my pocket or line the brightlords’,” Kaladin said. “I guess I can’t argue with that logic.” He set the bottle back on the counter. “I’ll take the deal, provided you throw in some more bandages.”

“Very well,” the apothecary said, relaxing. “But stay away from those reeds. I’m surprised you found any nearby that hadn’t already been harvested. My workers are having an increasingly difficult time.”

They don’t have a windspren guiding them,
Kaladin thought. “Then why would you want to discourage me? I could get more of this for you.”

“Well, yes,” the apothecary said. “But—”

“It’s cheaper if you do it yourself,” Kaladin said, leaning down. “But this way you have a clean trail. I provide the sap, charging one skymark. If the lighteyes ever discover what the apothecaries have been doing, you can claim ignorance—all you know is that some bridgeman was selling you sap, and you resold it to the army at a reasonable markup.”

That seemed to appeal to the old man. “Well, perhaps I won’t ask too many questions about how you harvested this. Your business, young man. Your business indeed….” He shuffled to the back of his store, returning with a box of bandages. Kaladin accepted it and left the shop without a word.

“Aren’t you worried?” Syl said, floating up beside his head as he entered the afternoon sunlight. “If Gaz discovers what you’re doing, you could get into trouble.”

“What more could they do to me?” Kaladin asked. “I doubt they’d consider this a crime worth stringing me up for.”

Syl looked backward, forming into little more than a cloud with the faint suggestion of a female form. “I can’t decide if it’s dishonest or not.”

“It’s not dishonest; it’s business.” He grimaced. “Lavis grain is sold the same way. Grown by the farmers and sold at a pittance to merchants, who carry it to the cities and sell it to other merchants, who sell it to people for four or five times what it was originally bought for.”

“So why did it bother you?” Syl asked, frowning as they avoided a troop of soldiers, one of whom tossed the pit of a palafruit at Kaladin’s head. The soldiers laughed.

Kaladin rubbed his temple. “I’ve still got some strange scruples about charging for medical care because of my father.”

“He sounds like he’s a very generous man.”

“For all the good it did him.”

Of course, in a way, Kaladin was just as bad. During his early days as a slave, he’d have done almost anything for a chance to walk around unsupervised like this. The army perimeter was guarded, but if he could sneak the knobweed in, he could probably find a way to sneak himself out.

With that sapphire mark, he even had money to aid him. Yes, he had the slave brand, but some quick if painful work with a knife could turn that into a “battle scar” instead. He could talk and fight like a soldier, so it would be plausible. He’d be taken for a deserter, but he could live with that.

That had been his plan for most of the later months of his enslavement, but he’d never had the means. It took money to travel, to get far enough away from the area where his description would be in circulation. Money to buy lodging in a seedy section of town, a place where nobody asked questions, while he healed from his self-inflicted wound.

In addition, there had always been the others. So he’d stayed, trying to get as many out as he could. Failing every time. And he was doing it again.

“Kaladin?” Syl asked from his shoulder. “You look very serious. What are you thinking?”

“I’m wondering if I should run. Escape this storm-cursed camp and find myself a new life.”

Syl fell silent. “Life is hard here,” she finally said. “I don’t know if anyone would blame you.”

Rock would,
he thought.
And Teft.
They’d worked for that knobweed sap. They didn’t know what it was worth; they thought it was only for healing the sick. If he ran, he’d be betraying them. He’d be abandoning the bridgemen.

Shove over, you fool,
Kaladin thought to himself.
You won’t save these bridgemen. Just like you didn’t save Tien. You should run.

“And then what?” he whispered.

Syl turned to him. “What?”

If he ran, what good would it do? A life working for chips in the underbelly of some rotting city? No.

He couldn’t leave them. Just like he’d never been able to leave anyone who he’d thought needed him. He had to protect them. He
had
to.