What the Ash Eats

A frontier smith's bitter working notes from an Emberwaste contract on what fire-mountain ash does to steel, bronze, and leather — and a direct, uncharitable reply to A Smith's Primer.

I took the Emberwaste contract because the coin was good and I had shod horses through two hard winters and thought I knew what iron could take. I did not know what iron could take. Nobody who has not stood a season under the Emberthrone knows, and I am setting this down so the next fool who reads a fat contract and thinks 'ash is ash' has one less excuse than I did. Vale ash is soft stuff. It sits on a blade like flour, and Harvald's primer has it right for that country — oil nightly, or bury clean, and a blade will winter fine. I read that primer years before I ever signed the Emberwaste paper, and I believed it, because it was true where I learned my trade. It is not true out here. Harvald never had to work fire-mountain ash, and I do not say that to shame him — I say it because a man who trusts Vale rules in Emberwaste country will lose a blade in a week and may lose worse. Fumarole ash carries sulfur the way river water carries silt, and it does not sit dead on a blade the way Vale ash does — it works. Leave a good edge out overnight anywhere near the vent-fields and by morning you will have a bloom of rust-black pitting along the whole length, not spots you can stone out but a texture, as if the metal itself went soft and set again wrong. Oiling nightly, which is gospel everywhere else I have worked, is not enough here. I oil at midday too, before the afternoon fall starts drifting off the caldera, because a blade coated before the ash lands fares better than one cleaned after it has. Never — and I mean never, not for a night, not propped against a wall you mean to fetch it from at dawn — leave a blade out under open sky in this country. Bury it. Clean, dry sand, a hand's depth, well away from anywhere the fall settles thick, because damp ash and buried ash are two different graves and only one gives your steel back to you whole. I learned this watching a garrison quartermaster's whole rack go to ruin in a season because he buried his stock in a low corner of the yard where every rain — such rain as falls here — pooled first. Dry ground or no ground at all. Leather fares no better and nobody warns you about that part. Straps, sheaths, the wrap on a good grip — the ash gets into the oil in the leather and turns it brittle from the inside before it ever looks wrong from the outside. I lost three good sheaths to sudden cracking, all at once, all within the same week, and I still don't fully understand why they went together rather than gradually. My best guess is a hard, dry spell that pulled the last moisture out of leather already half-eaten. I offer the guess for what it's worth, which may not be much. The Bonesung camps out past the vent-fields build in fired brick and ash-render, and their walls take the same fall I am describing and simply darken with it, season on season, and nobody re-lays a course. I asked an old woman there once why her walls didn't crumble the way my steel did, and she looked at me the way you look at a man asking why water is wet. Their brick has already been through the fire once, she said, before anyone laid a course with it. My steel hasn't. The ash is still trying to finish it. I did not have an answer to that and still don't; I only wrote it down, because it is the only explanation I heard in that country that actually accounted for what I was seeing. Steel does not survive this country the way it survives anywhere I have worked before. What does survive — and I did not expect to write this sentence when I took the contract — is the old bronze the salvors dig up. I have handled Old Work fittings pulled from vault country half a day's ride from the caldera, green with age and four centuries in the ground, and they come up sound where a fresh-forged blade would have gone to lace in a season. I cannot tell you why the dead empire's alloy holds against this ash when nothing I can forge does. No living smith can. I only know a salvor who trades me scrap bronze for repair work is handing me better stock than I can make him, and there is something bitter in that trade I have not made peace with, and probably won't. If you must work Emberwaste iron, budget for loss. Budget more than seems reasonable, and then add to it, because I did the arithmetic honestly before I signed and was still short by half. If you can equip with Old Work bronze instead, do it, and pay whatever the salvor asks — it is cheaper than replacing steel every season. And if a merchant tells you the ash out here is no different from home, do not believe him. I did, once. I will not again.

This world ships in Valenfeld. Wishlist on Steam →