POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin wakes thrashing from another nightmare — friends dying alone in distant places, Rock frozen in the Peaks, Lopen slain in a battle, Teft wasting away to nothing — and Syl streaks around his head in blue-white light to coax him back to the room. Dabbid has left a bag of fresh spheres and a bowl of broth on the stone ledge before going to fetch water. Kaladin runs through his morning routine — stretches, a wash with a damp cloth — then sees to Teft: washes him, repositions him to prevent bedsores, settles down with a syringe of broth and tries to find a few minutes of calm in the act of feeding his friend.
Syl sits girlish on the bench beside Teft and admits she went to Dalinar before he left the tower and asked him to make her able to feel sadness as humans do. Kaladin is appalled — no one should have to feel like he does — but Syl insists she is her own person and can make her own choices. Dalinar refused to Connect her directly to Kaladin, but she thinks he Connected her instead to the spren she used to be: it is in talking to Dalinar that she has started remembering her old knight, hurting again, knowing she has changed. Spren say spren do not change because pieces of them are eternal — but pieces of humans are eternal too. If she can change, she chose to come here for him. She tells him to let her know when he is at his worst, and then asks him to do the same for her. He nods, and they sit silent.
He sits for too long, exhaustionspren swirling around him though he has slept half the day. He cannot ignore the signs any longer: he is deep in battle shock, and the tower being under occupation has made it worse, not better. Killing, loneliness and stress, an unholy triumvirate cornering him with knives. Dabbid comes back, salutes, and lays a bundle on Teft's bench. Inside is a leather bracer crusted with ten dun rubies, a metal bar across the palm, straps that run all the way up the arm. Navani's engineer must have sent it. Syl tells him it is half an hour to his scheduled check-in; he tells Dabbid he will need a way to put the dun spheres outside in time for the next storm. Dabbid pats his chest — he will do it.
At the wall Navani's voice arrives. She confirms the device: a personal lift, meant to carry Kaladin up and down the tower. He will need to swap its rubies with the corrupted ones from the spanreeds he stole — twelve pairs — and install matching halves on a stack of weights in a shaft on the twentieth floor. He grumbles at being asked to learn fabrials, then follows her coaching and finds the work no harder than replacing buckles on a leather jerkin.
He and Syl sneak up nine floors to the location on Tomor's map, find the shaft and its weights, and Navani walks him through installing the conjoined rubies. The principle clarifies as he works: five rubies bind the bracer to five heavy weights; the remaining seven control which weight he is currently dropping and how fast. Each fall should lift him hundreds of feet up the tower; once all five have fallen, a winch in the corner is the only way to reset them. Navani admits the engineer is full of grand ideas and short on practical sense, but it is the best she can do — and lift-by-falling-weight is, regardless, a small wonder. Kaladin apologises for sounding ungrateful, and signs off to practise.
In an empty hallway away from the atrium he sets out amethysts to mark his path, points the bracer down the corridor, takes in a little Stormlight as insurance, and engages the mechanism. The first squeeze of the bar sends him skidding forward; he tries to stop with old Lashing instincts when he sees the far wall coming, and slams into it hand-first, crunching his knuckles and bleeding onto the leather. The Stormlight heals him slowly, agonisingly. Syl admits her promise that this would be funny was premature.
He pushes on. Over the next half hour or so he crashes a few more times — never as badly as the first — and learns the device's quirks: he must aim straight down the centre of the hallway or skid sideways, and the activation switch is easy to flip by accident. When his first weight runs out he lurches midflight, drops his feet to the ground, and considers what he has. Not enough to soar; enough for short bursts of speed in a fight, or an unexpected angle of attack — and certainly enough to climb the tower at need. He picks up where he left off. Syl asks how long they are going to keep crashing into walls. *Until we don't crash, obviously.* He had months to train with his Lashings before he was put to use. He suspects this time he will have days. He needs to be ready.