(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Kaladin leads the descent down a freshly built rope ladder into a chasm that is no Sadeas chasm — untouched, no paths cut through the stormleavings, no scratched messages in the lichen on the walls, the floor swelling out wider at the bottom than the cracked-sky narrowness above. The new ladder is sturdy and properly made, like everything else Dalinar's quartermaster now builds him. Rock and Teft follow him down, then the forty bridgemen Teft is grooming as future sergeants — two pulled from each of the reorganized crews. While Moash and Skar are upstairs watching over Dalinar and his sons at a lighteyed feast Kaladin is grateful to have skipped, Kaladin gives the new men to Teft and walks the unfamiliar branches.

The floor is the usual chasm tangle — vines knotted into themselves like discarded yarn, broken trees and rockbud husks blown in from across the Plains, and bones, far too many bones, since when one side loses a plateau battle the dead wash westward into the chasms with the next highstorm. Rock mutters something in his own tongue that might be a prayer or a curse; Teft calls it the messiest grave he's ever stood in. Syl settles on a stick and stares uneasily at a femur poking up through the moss. She still does not really understand death.

Teft begins the recruits' first lesson — the order of bone — with practice spears from Rock, staying close to the exit and reassuring them about Dalinar's stormwardens. Kaladin watches him take charge and, for the first time in years, finds himself ringed by a small flock of gloryspren. Teft is a leader; not because Kaladin gave him the rank, but because he took it. Syl giggles through the gloryspren and walks on air at his pace, complaining that it's unfair other spren don't attract any of her own. He needles her about natural laws; she calls them an agreement among friends, made for the sake of not breaking human brains.

He probes harder. Could a spren have scratched the countdown glyphs on Dalinar's wall? Syl, careful, admits that she has glimpsed dangerous spren in the distance she does not recognise — like red lightning, possibly stormspren — and that something is coming, and the glyphs are right about that much. Kaladin makes himself ask the harder question: are there others like him? Syl goes solemn. There are, she says; she does not know them by name, but other kinds of spren are each trying to reclaim what was lost. She herself is the only honorspren who has crossed over, and she crossed in defiance of the Stormfather whose face Kaladin saw in the storm — at the risk of dissolving into being just another windspren until she could find a mortal mind to bond with. She hadn't known who Kaladin would be when she came, only that she would find him. She wandered with her windspren cousins, searching.

She tries to pull a clump of her own translucent hair sideways in each hand the way she once saw a woman in the market do it: a frustration gesture she doesn't quite know how to feel. She does not, she admits, even know what a Cryptic is — she just knew she wasn't one. Kaladin walks deeper through stagnant pools, past a patch crawling with rotspren alongside frillblooms haloed by lifespren, the chasms shaking life and death's hand in the same place. He explores a few branches and marks the walls.

They reach a wide chamber where a pool glows deep violet in the dim. Kaladin closes his hand over his single sapphire broam and lets the room sink almost to darkness; the shadows give the heaped bones the semblance of limp arms and corpses piled again, and for a moment he is back charging Parshendi archers, hearing the chant in an alien tongue and the dying of his friends. The memories recede. Syl steps onto the shore of the pool and her face, briefly, looks wrong — subtly other-shaped — before it is hers again. She tells him he is going to have to become what Dalinar Kholin is looking for; do not let him search in vain. Kaladin argues that the lighteyes will contrive to take her from him the moment he becomes anything worth keeping. Syl reminds him of the day after Sadeas's betrayal — that day she had seen a hero — and stands on his upraised finger with her hands behind her back until he promises her, softly, that he will try.

Rock arrives down the chasm and reports. The recruits in the chamber Kaladin marked are opening up under Teft — exactly as Kaladin had hoped: the new men had needed not just to be told but to be invited into the place Bridge Four had been forged. They had watched the original Bridge Four do this in Sadeas's camp from the outside, and could not become part of it until they had been walked down here themselves. Rock also bows to Syl in his Horneater way, calls her *mafah'liki*, and promises her a shrine; she is delighted, Kaladin is not. Sigzil is ready, Rock tells him, to begin the long-delayed measurements of Kaladin's abilities. Kaladin glances at Syl and tells him to bring Sigzil down. They will do it here.