Within minutes, the wagons were rolling again across the uneven ground. Kaladin settled back as the sky cleared, the highstorm a smudge of blackness on the western horizon. The sun brought welcome warmth, and the slaves basked in the light, streams of water dripping from their clothing and running out the back of the rocking wagon.
Presently, a translucent ribbon of light zipped up to Kaladin. He was coming to take the windspren’s presence for granted. She had gone out during the storm, but she’d come back. As always.
“I saw others of your kind,” Kaladin said idly.
“Others?” she asked, taking the form of a young woman. She began to step around him in the air, spinning occasionally, dancing to some unheard beat.
“Windspren,” Kaladin said. “Chasing after the storm. Are you certain you don’t want to go with them?”
She glanced westward, longingly. “No,” she finally said, continuing her dance. “I like it here.”
Kaladin shrugged. She’d ceased playing as many pranks as she once had, and so he’d stopped letting her presence annoy him.
“There are others near,” she said. “Others like you.”
“Slaves?”
“I don’t know. People. Not the ones here. Other ones.”
“Where?”
She turned a translucent white finger, pointing eastward. “There. Many of them. Lots and lots.”
Kaladin stood up. He couldn’t imagine that a spren had a good handle on how to measure distance and numbers.
Should he care? It didn’t matter where he was a slave; he’d still be a slave. He’d accepted this life. That was his way now. Don’t care, don’t bother.
Still, he watched with curiosity as his wagon climbed the side of a hill and gave the slaves inside a good vantage of what was ahead. It wasn’t a city. It was something grander, something larger. An enormous army encampment.
“Great Father of Storms…” Kaladin whispered.
Ten masses of troops bivouacked in familiar Alethi patterns-circular, by company rank, with camp followers on the outskirts, mercenaries in a ring just inside them, citizen soldiers near the middle, lighteyed officers at the very center. They were camped in a series of enormous craterlike rock formations, only the sides were more irregular, more jagged. Like broken eggshells.
Kaladin had left an army much like this eight months ago, though Amaram’s force had been much smaller. This one covered miles of stone, stretching far both north and south. A thousand banners bearing a thousand different family glyphpairs flapped proudly in the air. There were some tents-mainly on the outside of the armies-but most of the troops were housed in large stone barracks. That meant Soulcasters.
That encampment directly ahead of them flew a banner Kaladin had seen in books. Deep blue with white glyphs-
Daunted, Kaladin looked beyond the armies. The landscape to the east was as he’d heard it described in a dozen different stories detailing the king’s campaign against the Parshendi betrayers. It was an enormous riven plain of rock-so wide he couldn’t see the other side-that was split and cut by sheer chasms, crevasses twenty or thirty feet wide. They were so deep that they disappeared into darkness and formed a jagged mosaic of uneven plateaus. Some large, others tiny. The expansive plain looked like a platter that had been broken, its pieces then reassembled with small gaps between the fragments.
“The Shattered Plains,” Kaladin whispered.
“What?” the windspren asked. “What’s wrong?”
Kaladin shook his head, bemused. “I spent years trying to get to this place. It’s what Tien wanted, in the end at least. To come here, fight in the king’s army…”
And now Kaladin was here. Finally.
This place would be subject to Alethi law and rules. He’d expected that Tvlakv would want to avoid such things. But here, he’d probably also find the best prices.
“The Shattered Plains?” one of the slaves said. “Really?”
Others crowded around, peering out. In their sudden excitement, they seemed to forget their fear of Kaladin.
“It
“Perhaps we’ll find justice here,” another said.
“I hear the king’s house hold servants live as well as the finest merchants,” said another. “His slaves have to be better off too. We’ll be in Vorin lands; we’ll even make wages!”
That much was true. When worked, slaves had to be paid a small wage-half what a nonslave would be paid, which was already often less than a full citizen would make for the same work. But it was something, and Alethi law required it. Only ardents-who couldn’t own anything anyway-didn’t have to be paid. Well, them and parshmen. But parshmen were more animal than anything else.
A slave could apply his earnings to his slave debt and, after years of labor, earn his freedom. Theoretically. The others continued to chatter as the wagons rolled down the incline, but Kaladin withdrew to the back of the wagon. He suspected that the option to pay off a slave’s price was a sham, intended to keep slaves docile. The debt was enormous, far more than a slave sold for, and virtually impossible to earn out.
Under previous masters, he’d demanded his wages be given to him. They had always found ways to cheat him-charging him for his housing, his food. That’s how lighteyes were. Roshone, Amaram, Katarotam…Each lighteyes Kaladin had known, whether as a slave or a free man, had shown himself to be corrupt to the core, for all his outward poise and beauty. They were like rotting corpses clothed in beautiful silk.
The other slaves kept talking about the king’s army, and about justice.
If there was one thing he still let himself long for, it was the chance to hold a spear. To fight again, to try and find his way back to the man he had been. A man who had cared.
If he would find that anywhere, he’d find it here.
5
“I have seen the end, and have heard it named. The Night of Sorrows, the True Desolation. The Everstorm.”
Shallan had not expected Jasnah Kholin to be so beautiful.
It was a stately, mature beauty-as one might find in the portrait of some historical scholar. Shallan realized that she’d naively been expecting Jasnah to be an ugly spinster, like the stern matrons who had tutored her years ago. How else could one picture a heretic well into her mid-thirties and still unmarried?
