“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.
For Tien. And for his own sanity.
“Chasm duty,” Gaz said, spitting to the side. The spittle was colored black from the yamma plant he chewed.
“What?” Kaladin had returned from selling the knobweed to discover that Gaz had changed Bridge Four’s work detail. They weren’t scheduled to be on duty for any bridge runs—their run the day before exempted them. Instead, they were supposed to be assigned to Sadeas’s smithy to help lift ingots and other supplies.
That sounded like difficult work, but it was actually among the easiest jobs bridgemen got. The blacksmiths felt they didn’t need the extra hands. That, or they presumed that clumsy bridgemen would just get in the way. On smithy duty, you usually only worked a few hours of the shift and could spend the rest lounging.
Gaz stood with Kaladin in the early afternoon sunlight. “You see,” Gaz said, “you got me thinking the other day. Nobody cares if Bridge Four is given unfair work details. Everyone hates chasm duty. I figured you wouldn’t care.”
“How much did they pay you?” Kaladin asked, stepping forward.
“Storm off,” Gaz said, spitting again. “The others resent you. It’ll do your crew good to be seen paying for what you did.”
“Surviving?”
Gaz shrugged. “Everyone knows you broke the rules in bringing back those men. If the others do what you did, we’d have each barrack filled with the dying before the leeward side of a month was over!”
“They’re people, Gaz. If we don’t ‘fill the barracks’ with wounded, it’s because we’re leaving them out there to die.”
“They’ll die here anyway.”
“We’ll see.”
Gaz watched him, eyes narrow. It seemed like he suspected that Kaladin had somehow tricked him in taking the stone-gathering duty. Earlier, Gaz had apparently gone down to the chasm, probably trying to figure out what Kaladin and the other two had been doing.
Damnation, Kaladin thought. He’d thought he had Gaz cowed enough to stay in line. “We’ll go,” Kaladin snapped, turning away. “But I’m not taking the blame among my men for this one. They’ll know you did it.”
“Fine,” Gaz called after him. Then, to himself, he continued, “Maybe I’ll get lucky and a chasmfiend will eat the lot of you.”
Chasm duty. Most bridgemen would rather spend all day hauling stones than get assigned to the chasms.
With an unlit oil-soaked torch tied to his back, Kaladin climbed down the precarious rope ladder. The chasm was shallow here, only about fifty feet down, but that was enough to take him into a different world. A world where the only natural light came from the rift high in the sky. A world that stayed damp on even the hottest days, a drowned landscape of moss, fungus, and hardy plants that survived in even dim light.
The chasms were wider at the bottom, perhaps a result of highstorms. They caused enormous floods to crash through the chasms; to be caught in a chasm during a highstorm was death. A sediment of hardened crem smoothed the pathway on the floor of the chasms, though it rose and fell with the varying erosion of the underlying rock. In some few places, the distance from the chasm floor to the edge of the plateau above was only about forty feet. In most places, however, it was closer to a hundred or more.
Kaladin jumped off the ladder, falling a few feet and landing with a splash in a puddle of rainwater. After lighting the torch, he held it high, peering along the caliginous rift. The sides were slick with a dark green moss, and several thin vines he didn’t recognize trailed down from intermediate ledges above. Bits of bone, wood, and torn cloth lay strewn about or wedged into clefts.
Someone splashed to the ground beside him. Teft cursed, looking down at his soaked legs and trousers as he stepped out of the large puddle. “Storms take that cremling Gaz,” the aging bridgeman muttered. “Sending us down here when it isn’t our turn. I’ll have his beans for this.”