Wes sang, his voice brighter than the fading dusky sun and more haunting than the wind battering the one remaining tent. Most of the camp carried on oblivious. Only Mandorias and Yethyr watched my maker sing,
It was deathsong, of course, but it was a smith’s rhythm and a smith's meaning. It took me only two phrases to understand what he was doing.
Yethyr figured it out by the fourth.
“All this time,” Yethyr whispered in a pause. “I’ve been trying to get you to create Datrean steelsong through Brinn technique, but this…this is the opposite, isn't it? This is Brinn deathsong using a Datrean technique.”
“Yes,” Wes rasped, rolling the talon of a dead bird through his fingers. “The material calls for deathsong, of course. It is a dead thing. And yet, it occurs to me that I do not have to treat it like something so wholly unlike metal.”
Yethyr gave him a pointed look over the camp fire between them. “Careful. A wrong note in deathsong can kill you.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I am already dead then.” Wes clacked his teeth together, which I took to be a smile. “Perhaps that danger is why you deathsingers are so unimaginative in your songcraft. You always just ask bones to move as they did during life. Even your armor, magnificent workmanship though it is, only ever moves you like a man.”
Yethyr was a little offended. “What else would you ask of bone?”
“What else would you ask of copper?” Wes asked back. “Of silver? Of iron? I have bent them all into shapes that they themselves would never have dreamed of in the vein. I have made tools; I have made beauty; I have taken the bones of the mountain and made them art. You ask what I would do with the bones of a man?” The sun had fallen. The only light was from the campfire between them and Wes’ red burning eyes. “The possibilities are endless.”
Those were my father’s words; I was sure of it. It was like Daened himself was in the shimmering air between them. Even Yethyr, who spoke to the First Steelsinger only once, could feel who he was quoting.
“You sound like a demon.”
“You forget I was to be a demon,” Wes said. “Before you took me from Hell.”
The weight of Wes’ lineage pressed upon the Prince, and he shuddered, not knowing if it was awe or terror.
“What possibilities do you see tonight, master smith?”
Wes looked back down at the talons in his hands; the pride and certainty of him fading just as quickly as they came. “My project goals are small and specific. I want something subtle and suitable to the material’s strengths. These are talons, and they still hold the memory of grip. Perhaps a device that will embed itself into the rock and help us climb?”
“That would be useful,” Yethyr mused thoughtfully.
“If I do it right, adapt the method right, the song will hold, as surely as it would to any steel.” He looked at Yethyr. “Is this…okay? I know it’s not what you asked—”
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“I asked for a solution. I did not stipulate a method,” Yethyr said firmly. His heart was pounding, eager to hear a blacksmith of Datrea work. “Please, continue.”
Wes began to sing again, and Yethyr listened, transfixed. Not even Jaetheiri could persuade him to go to sleep. The rest of their party turned in, but the Prince sat across from Wes for hours. I did not blame him. My maker’s voice was a marvel of the world, even trapped in the frequency of deathsong as it was.
Wes had no control, barely literate in the deathsong language he was trying to communicate in. He jumped from one note to the next sporadically, improvising whole phrases as he went. It was so different from the way Yethyr approached music, and he was fascinated.
The Prince did not want to disturb the process, but this was deathsong and he knew it way better than Wes did. When he figured out what the smith was trying to communicate in deathsong, he forced himself to interrupt.
“The time signature is wrong. That won’t work. Try like this…” Yethyr traced what he meant in the ash of the fire between them. Wes would adjust and sing again; Yethyr would suggest something new and Wes would sing more.
Eventually, though, the limits of the Datrean way reared its head. To work the song the way he wanted, Wes needed a second voice to take up the counter melody. It would be easy if he did it the Brinn way. Yethyr would have written the melody, the counter-melody, and anything else he needed onto the talon itself and make the echo of that dead bird sing it for him.
The Prince opened his mouth to suggest it when I began to sing. I didn’t know why I was helping these bastards, except, of course, I knew why.
I longed to pretend to be a smith again, all troubles forgotten.
At first, I copied Wes mindlessly. I didn’t want Yethyr to pick up just how much I understood the project. I could feel him listening to my music with wonder and alarming intensity. Let him think I was just instinctively responding to the voice of my maker.
But Wes understood the gift I was offering him.
He switched to a call and response format to teach me the countermelody, just as the smiths in the forge would do. It brought to mind memories of my forging. My father had taught many songs then, and the whole forge had echoed him with the force of a torrent. Once I sang as he wanted, Wes switched back to his own part, and we were a duet again, like when we were healing Yethyr’s shoulder together a few nights ago.
Like when we were singing at each other in the Forge a few weeks ago, back when he was trying to destroy me in a pool of lava.
That memory was far away. Wes was still planning on destroying me, of course. That was why he was here after all, but we were both children of Datrea’s Great Forge, and all vendettas could be paused in the name of the craft.
Even mine toward Yethyr, I suppose.
The man who destroyed our home listened as Wes and I sang together, occasionally conducting us to do it differently. It was annoying how right all Yethyr’s suggestions were.
Wes soon needed a third voice and the Prince hesitantly conducted deathsong from his bone armor to complement us. I dropped my pitch to match him and he slowed his rhythm to match me.
It was eerie how well the three of us worked together, perfectly in sync, as if we hadn’t spent our entire acquaintance all trying to dominate and destroy each other.
But in the odd flicker of the campfire light, all that was gone. Wes, Yethyr, and I understood the strange constructive deathsong we were making together without any need to explain it.
And slowly, the deathsong of the talons changed to match us, repeating our song, becoming our song, matching us as surely as Datrean steel.
It was not the grand music of the master smiths. None of us were experienced in what we were doing: Wes with deathsong, Yethyr with creation, and I with…well, everything. Our song was inelegant and rambling and small.
But it was beautiful and earnest. It very well may have been the most sincere act the three of us had ever done in my lifetime.
And when the sun rose, it rose upon what we together had made.
What method of songcraft would you prefer?
