Alalath Tiralai

Alalath Tiralai, the Bloodless Sovereign, was a hill-fort physician who became a vampire of the Thorned Choir in 3000 BCE and spent a hundred and sixty years measuring what he had become. He was ended at Sidmorhaon in 2840 BCE by a girl with a good nose and a stake of olive wood.

Melenon Yahtirsidon saw him for the first time from the bottom of an oil pit, through a crack between a pressing-stone and the rim, at the end of a night in 2841 BCE. She never forgot the first thing she noticed, which was that he did not look like a monster. He was a stooped man in a leather coat, and the coat was good; he carried a physician's satchel over one shoulder, and he walked among the bodies in the yard of the caravan stop at Enashhaon slowly, pausing at each, with a knotted cord in his hand. Now and then he stooped to touch a wrist. He moved his lips as he went. She counted him counting, and when he had done he stood at the well and said aloud, to nobody, that there were ten, and that the household had been eleven. This is the man whom the Vampireverse remembers as Alalath Tiralai. He was born in 3040 BCE at Zinalon, a hill fort in the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, and he came into the First Night as a physician and herbalist. It was a respectable trade. He set bones for the garrison and brewed fever bark for the villages below, and he kept a private collection of pressed leaves and little bundles of root which he labeled with notches on strips of wood. He had a very good memory for symptoms and a bad one for people's names. He washed his hands, for a long time, after every patient, a habit that stayed with him for two hundred years and cost him a good deal of water. His want, at that time, was to know. He wanted to know why one man lived and another with the same wound died, and he thought the answer was in the blood. He was turned in 3000 BCE, at forty, and about the circumstances he said nothing then or ever. No maker is named in any account; the Thorned Choir did not speak of it, and he would not. The few stories that exist all begin with a stranger and a bargain, and they do not agree about the bargain. What is clear is that he came out of it hungry and unbelievably curious. He had been given his own body to study and a great deal of time in which to do it. He joined the Thorned Choir, a loose company that worked the caravan roads of the Levant by night, and in time he was the one they sent for when a problem needed patience. He did not rule them. They called him the Bloodless Sovereign mostly because he was unusually pale, even for the Choir, and because he had never been seen to raise his voice. His signature gift was called Red Tide. The blood in a living body would answer to him, and he could pull it, with a motion of the hand as small as a physician's, toward a wound or away from one. As a healer he would have called such a thing impossible; as a vampire he treated it as an instrument. He could close a bleeding cut, or open a vein from across a room, or turn the pull in a stranger's arm until she dropped to her knees. It cost him. His own eyes wept red afterward, and his hands shook, and the hunger that followed was out of all proportion to the effort. Over a hundred and sixty years he measured that cost the way he measured everything, with a cord of knots, a sand-table and a rack of clay tablets on which he pressed his notes in marks that nobody else could read. Among them was a list of the things that hurt him: direct sunlight, and running water at a threshold. He had tested both on himself. The Choir's trade roads ran from Zinalon down to the cedar coast, and by night he kept them in order with the dry manner of a clerk. Merchants who paid were left alone. Those who did not were visited by parties of the Choir who fed, and who were not always careful. He wrote down what happened afterward, since he was interested in the effects, and that was the trouble. A scientist who counts the dead is a scientist who notices when the count is wrong. At Enashhaon in 2841 BCE, after a feeding party had finished with the stop, he returned at dawn and counted ten. He was still working out the arithmetic when something struck the back of his left hand. A length of olive wood had gone through the palm, thrown from forty paces by a girl in a stained shift, with a face that was perfectly composed. Melenon Yahtirsidon, a vampire slayer by the end of that same night, was the first person in two hundred years to wound Alalath Tiralai on purpose. He looked at the stake with real interest. Then he reached for the blood in her arm, as a matter of reflex, and turned it, and watched her nose bleed and her knees fold. It was only the sunrise that stopped him. He left, carrying her stake in his palm, and spent the next hours of daylight in a cellar studying the grain of it. She came after him for a year. The Vampireverse's writers in later centuries thought her single-minded, which is not the word he would have chosen. What he noted was the nose: she followed him through cedar smoke, myrrh, and a hundred strategies of misdirection, and she did it by smell. He changed his washing herbs. She found him anyway. He moved from Zinalon to the coast and rearranged his routes, and she was at the end of every one. In his tablets, in a script nobody has yet fully read, there is a late note that appears to say that the pursuit was no longer a problem but a question, and that he would have liked to ask her about it. In the summer of 2840 BCE, at Sidmorhaon, he took a room in a dye-house built over a stream, a room with one door and a stone threshold above the running water, and he thought the position was strong. She had cut the shutters off the windows in the night. At first gray he came out into the yard because there was no other way, and the stream ran under the sill at his feet. He turned his head and saw her. He said her name, which he had learned from a neighbor at Enashhaon who remembered the girl in the oil pit, and then the sun reached the yard. He was two hundred and had been in the Vampireverse for a hundred and sixty years. The Vigil of Levant, which found his satchel in the dye-house, sorted its contents on the floor of the yard. There were pressed leaves, a washing-bowl, a bundle of knotted cords, and a stake of olive wood with a clay tag tied to its splintered end. The tag was marked with a notch for the year, and next to it, in his hand, a little drawing of a tree.