You don't have to have the voice of an Ainu to make the magic work, no. I'm glad it works for you! So I can teach you the song and then you can sing it as you go if you need to move carefully.

Cool. I don't know how to read sheet music in the first place so the fact that you undoubtedly have different notation won't in its own right slow me down, although learning the lyrics by rote will be difficult.

I assume they are written down somewhere and I can have that somewhere copied for you, or if you teach me your alphabet I can write it out in that. I'll tell the royal libraries to get us a copy of that and to look for precedent in snake-monsters, though I'm not optimistic on the latter front. I wonder if you could get some of the benefits just by humming it as you go?

What, nobody tested that? Presumably people who start out more graceful than me can go fast enough with the song that they'd have to worry about swallowing a bug or something and might want to consider humming if it does work.

No, they have, and the answer is it works sometimes, generally diminished, depending on the talent of the singer and possibly their experience with the particular song. So I just don't know if you will be able to do it.

Ah. Well, I think I'm about average for my world and on my world you could draw crowds, I might not be able to get it to work at all, but I would certainly like to try. If it works without lyrics maybe it could go in a hurdy-gurdy and an automaton could play it for me all the time.

Sorry, what?

Do you not have hurdy-gurdies? They're cylinders with little - He attempts to send a mental image. Pick things arranged on them, and you set them next to a series of differently tuned pick-able musical pokey bits, and then the cylinder turns and as long as it does it at a constant rate it'll play the song on it in a loop.

We do not have that. I will suggest it to someone as something to attempt.

I don't know how to make hurdy-gurdies but I could probably figure it out given materials and tools and whatnot and maybe somebody with good ears to tune it, I was learning metalwork on the side.

He looks at Kib with considerable delight, at that. Oh, excellent. Metalwork and tools and people with good ears should all be plentiful. 'on the side' of what?

My main apprenticeship is servantmaking but I'm focusing on golems and you need to actually, you know, make, those, and I picked metal as my medium, I get along decently with the smith.

Servantmaking?

Golems and automata and shines and -? Do you not have this here?

We do not.

Kib looks around for a patch of light or a little shadow or something.

The light is streaming in through the ceiling pretty evenly, but there are definitely shadows.

It's really not hard, but if you don't have it here you might not be able to. Kib makes another one from the same source shadow, thoughtfully, and has them both scoot up onto his hand from the floor and wind up on his face. Should've thought of this before. Dark glasses. Since it's tolerable indoors he hides them in his hair. The thing you really ought to have noticed if people can do it is the version with animals.

What's that?

It's not as comprehensive as puppeting shines, which is good because then to get anywhere with a pet you'd need to know how to fly or walk on four legs or whatever and they're more complicated than mechanicals, they just take verbal instructions after a while of being imprinted on their servantmaker. I mentioned this earlier when those other people were talking about horses, I could probably ride a horse I could give instructions to but it would be rude to make a pet out of a borrowed horse.

Oh, I do have a brother who can talk to animals.

Okay, so maybe you can learn servantmaking. Do you want to try making a shade like I just did?

I'd love to. How does it go?