When Acad stepped out in front of the Palace door and swung me at the nearest Brinn I realized I had never before been wielded by a true swordsman. In every fight, I had been spending my strength on restraining my amateur wielder’s instinct to flinch when they should strike or strike where they should defend.
Acad was a warrior. He moved with me, our instincts in tandem and effortless. Even before he spilled blood with my edge, we were already more dangerous than Satad, Mona, Wes or Erjed had ever been. And once blood began to bind us closer…
The exchanges between each Brinn who charged the palace door grew shorter and shorter. Suddenly, so much was open to me, techniques that the muscles I controlled were already trained to do. A new arsenal of skill was at my beck and call, different from the sword styles I had absorbed from Brinn I had slain.
No doubt Deathsinger Zasha reanimated Acad precisely because of great deeds when he was alive. He was exquisite and now, with me, a sword designed to make any ordinary man great, he was unstoppable.
The Brinn warband realized it. Through Acad’s eyes, I could see their archers notch their bows. They would fire upon their own, but it was clearly a worthy sacrifice if we fell as well.
“They’re going to shoot us down!” I warned. “Deathsinger Zasha, is the Hellgate prepared? We can’t hold much longer.”
I wanted to go back inside. There was an irony in that. At last, I found the chokepoint I had asked of Mona. At last, I was doing what I had vowed to do the moment an arrow skewered my father’s head.
And yet, now it felt hollow.
The city was already a ruin not worth protecting. The only people that mattered were inside and I wanted to be with them.
“We are almost prepared,” the Deathsinger said from behind the door. “Infred, Bonesong is concerned with arrows.”
The First Firesinger started to laugh. When the archers fired, his laughter turned to a musical lilting, a firesong commanding wood to burn.
The arrows snapped and ignited mid-flight; their burning wreckage fell upon the crowd surging up the stairs. His song grew louder and as the sound of his singing spread, bows in their archer’s hands burst into flames.
There was fire everywhere amidst the Brinn ranks, momentarily pausing their advance up the stairs.
“Come back inside,” Deathsinger Zasha said. “We are ready.”
Acad used the temporary distraction to slip back inside. There now sat a massive burning ring at the center of the receiving hall. It was made of intertwined stone, steel, and bone. It smelled of brimstone and ash.
“I take it that’s the Hellgate?”
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The choirs of the three remaining orders held hands around its perimeter.
“Son of Daened, do your best to sing in harmony. Do not worry if you do not match us. The important thing is the participation of a steelsinger. Your skill is less important.”
That was good. I had never tried to control my wielder’s voice before. I had not even conceived it possible. But I had to try.
I looked at the crowd of the survivors, watching with hope off to the side. I couldn’t fail them. Malinda was clutching the hand of her father’s fellow coal shoveler.
I couldn’t fail her.
“We have precious time before Yethyr realizes we stopped singing the counter to his Death Circle,” Zasha said. “Let us begin. Fastest tempo we can.”
All at once they began to sing. In that acoustically perfect room, it was divine, something that humans or their bloody swords were not made to hear. I felt ashamed to have Acad mar it. He opened his mouth and I tried my best to join them.
I thought of the songs that gave birth to me. Steelsongs, music of making. They made up the only childhood I had ever known. Acad’s voice croaked at the first note. I didn’t deserve to sing the songs of my family when their blood soaked my steel. I didn’t deserve to use the memories I had stolen from them.
No. I put my shame aside. It didn’t matter what I deserved. Malinda was going to die if I did not sing.
I belted out whatever I could remember, discordant to the heavenly chorus I accompanied though it was. I tried not to care. All that mattered was the rough phrases of steelsong spilling from Acad’s throat.
The choir shifted down an octave and slowed their tempo to better meld with me and I relaxed. Of course. They knew what they were doing. I could trust them to lessen my mistakes. My song grew freer. I could hear Zunad and Frida and Thured and all the others in Acad’s throat, and I so wished I could weep.
It was almost as if they lived again, for just a measure of a phrase.
Then the Hellgate opened. There was a terrible grating sound like an iron gate screeching open.
“Thank you Bonesong,” Deathsinger Zasha shouted over the din. “Your cooperation will not be forgotten.”
For a moment, the space within the ring seemed to fold in on itself. A monstrous winged shape flew out from the ring and then disappeared into the shadows of the room.
Everything was suddenly still. The ring of bone, stone, and steel shattered; its flames extinguished, and all the gathered spellsingers around it were gone.
Every stonesinger, every firesinger, every deathsinger had been drawn into the Hellgate and were now probably far from the dangers of the siege.
But Acad and I had not gone through the Hellgate. The civilians that had come to the Council of Songs for protection had not either. We all stood bewildered in the hall.
“What happened?” Malinda tugged on someone’s sleeve. “Did we go anywhere?”
Her eyeless face was blind to the naked treachery before us, before me. Deathsinger Zasha had promised me…
Wrath. I felt wrath, and for the first time, not the wrath of my makers or my wielders.
This fury was all my own.
And then it all crystallized into fear.
These people that I had charged myself to protect were cornered in the palace of a fallen city and…and…
Fear morphed again into horror. People around me began to wail as the truth sank in.
Deathsinger Zasha’s choir had been preventing the activation of Prince Yethyr’s Death Circle.
And I had just helped them all abandon the city.
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