POV: kaladin
Summary
The bridge falls. Kaladin reaches for Stormlight and finds nothing. He drops into the dark with Shallan and several blue-uniformed officers flailing beside him, clawing for Stormlight as if it were air — thrashing for the Light he has always claimed, refusing to die in the dark — and at the last moment Syl screams a sound that shakes his bones and one breath of Light enters him. Then black.
He swims through pain. A distant voice like rumbling thunder asks *what have you done?* He opens his eyes on a strip of daylight high above and the patch of jungle-life that grows on the chasm floor. He runs his father's checks for breaks and finds none — just scrapes. The Stormlight he held at the end protected him, maybe healed him, before running out; his spheres are drained, every one. A scrape, a moving shadow on the wall — and Shallan rounds the corner with her own sphere and screams when she sees him. He calms her, says only that the windspren of folktale must have saved them. He hides that he cannot pull Light from her sphere either. The bridge, she tells him, had an emergency latch a bridge crew could throw to dump it into the chasm if enemies overran them: someone threw it on purpose.
They check the dead. No Dalinar, no Adolin among the broken officers and scribes — no one survives a two-hundred-foot fall. Just beyond them, fresh-killed Kholin spearmen and one fresh Parshendi body with uncut gems still set in its beard. Kaladin tries to draw from one and gets nothing. He bows briefly to the dead, lifts a salvaged spear, and ties their spheres into a handkerchief lantern at the top of it. Horns earlier — the Parshendi attacked. They will not be coming back for two who should be dead. Dalinar's major expedition is days off — and on that schedule, after one specific highstorm. Shallan flips through her loose papers and gives him the answer: tomorrow night, just after first moonset. Then the Weeping begins, four weeks of rain. They walk.
The POV shifts to Shallan. The bridgeman has not even given her a chance to argue route; she follows. Pattern rides her skirts. Before the bridgeman appeared he had been telling her that the Stormlight kept her alive through the fall. Alive after two hundred feet. She knows so little of her abilities. And — she realises, walking — she did it twice: she saved this man as well, falling next to her. *How?* She is, at least, glad of his Alethi superstition. Let him keep his windspren.
The chasm is alive. Vines, frillblooms, haspers opening and closing like lungs, lifespren drifting toward a wall of tube-plants whose feelers retract in a wave as she passes. She takes a Memory. The bridgeman keeps walking. She catches up at a stumpweight log over a pool — a tree of the cold coast, which has no business growing four hundred miles inland; could a highstorm really have carried it? — and crosses gamely in the army boots she has been wearing under her dress. He takes her pack without a word and walks on. They reach a crossroads. He picks one.
She tries to lighten the trip. He does not lighten. *Companionship is pleasant.* For me, she adds, when he eyes her. She lists out the other registers — blathering, nattering, gibbering — and notes she has been practising her burble in private. He grunts. They reach a second intersection; he takes longer over this one. Down here it would be very, very easy to get lost — twisted paths between plateaus that vary from long thin walls to almost circular knobs, and west itself a guess. She asks if he is picking at random. He is not. She presses: *because the gloomy atmosphere matches your disposition, I assume.* He walks on. She asks what it would take to make him relax, bridgeboy. He answers with what she once called him on the plateau — a hateful man.
The fight escalates. He says lighteyes treat everyone beneath them as toys; cites his imprisonment as proof. She demands when she has done such a thing. He immediately answers: when she stole his boots, pretending to be someone she was not and bullying a darkeyed guard she had barely met. She stops in the dark. It cuts. He looks back and softens — she has acquitted herself better than most lighteyes since; let it go. She tells him a backhanded compliment of that quality is hardly an absolution, and that he is downright mean. He shrugs and says he is what the lighteyes made him. She tells him then that his life must be lonely.
His face goes red in her spherelight. He says, in return, that he watches her because she lies through her smile at everyone she meets, and that the only time she sounds honest is when she insults someone. She replies, dryly, that in that case insults are the only honest things she can say to him. He throws his hands up and asks what it is about her that makes him want to tear at his own face. She admits, half-thinking aloud, that she has training — that she collects faces — and immediately wonders why she said that out loud.
Then it is on top of them — the scraping, growing louder, echoing through the connected chasms. Carapace on rock. Kaladin kills the lantern and they go to dark. Shallan whispers that arguing in a labyrinth of echoing chasms may have been an error. The scraping is just beyond the next bend. He uncovers the spheres and they run.