Amunet Ankhraep

Amunet Ankhraep, the Dawnborn Blade, was a river-guard from Ittau who became a vampire slayer of the Nile Valley in 2447 BCE. She was clumsy, loud and impatient, with a grip that could split a beam, and a vampire named Meni Rameset killed her five years later.

Amunet Ankhraep said freely that she was poor with a bow, which was awkward in a woman whose hunting bow became her signature gear. Her grip was the problem. In her first season as a barge guard she snapped eleven bows by drawing them, and the river-lord's armorer, a patient man with a squint, finally made her one with a reed shaft bound in cord and a limb of horn laminated so thickly that it behaved like a plank. She drew it with a grunt, like a person lifting a door. Nobody who saw it fired thought it elegant. She was bad at waiting. She was born in 2480 BCE at Ittau, a harbor settlement on the Nile in Egypt, in the era the slayers' own chroniclers called the First Night, and she could not stand a still evening on a landing stage. She was bad at secrets, because her face did what she was thinking. She was bad at boats, strange in someone who made her living on them, and she was sick on the first day of every voyage until she was thirty. She was bad at sleeping, bad with money and bad at remembering whose turn it was to fetch water. Her mother, who sold salt fish and had once thrown a basket at a magistrate, said she took after her father in that last respect and in no others. She wanted one thing, which was to take her mother to the Delta, where the river ran into the sea, because her mother had never seen any water that did not have a far bank. She kept a strip of linen in her belt with a knot tied for each night she survived on duty, and by the time she was thirty-three the strip was long enough to wrap around her wrist twice. What she was good at, as it turned out, was holding on. In 2447 BCE, at thirty-three, she was guarding a grain barge tied up at an upriver landing when the crew went quiet one night and she found them, six men, laid out in the hold with their necks open. Something was still in the dark behind the stacked jars. She did not know what, and she did not have a plan. She got her back against the hatch cover, a slab of acacia planking three men had trouble lifting, and when the thing pushed on it from underneath she held it shut with her bare hands for the rest of that night, and for most of the following morning, until the thing gave up. She found afterward that her palms had gone the color of river clay and the hatch had two handprints pressed an inch deep into the wood. That was the calling, and nobody explained it. Amunet Ankhraep was now a vampire slayer of the Slayerverse, whether or not she had asked to be. She was a Soldier from a levy with no tradition of such things, and the barge crews who told the story afterward called her the Dawnborn Blade, because she had come out of that hold at sunrise. The Vigil of Nile Valley took her in only because she turned up at their door. What she could do, which they named Mountain Grip, was concentrate force in her hands and forearms so that whatever they closed on held or broke. She could crack a clay jar with two fingers, bend a copper spear, and lift a chest that two men had given up on. It cost her skin and tendon. Her palms blistered, her hands cramped for hours after, and she dropped things she was fond of, since the grip would not unclench on command. She was a bad person to hand a cup to. She never found a teacher, which suited neither her nor the Vigil. She worked out the craft on her own, mostly by getting things wrong. She learned that silver-tipped arrows hurt vampires in a way that bronze did not, from a trader who sold her four, and she learned to carry a short length of rope and use her grip on it rather than on her enemy. Ten or so river-guards followed her about for a time, and she taught them to tie a hatch down, and none of them took on the mark. Then there was Meni Rameset, the Ashen Shroud, a vampire of The Velvet Throne, a court of long-lived feeders that gathered around a river lord upstream. They met in 2445 BCE at a mud-brick granary above Ittau, where Meni and four spear-bearers had come to take grain and, incidentally, the granary-keeper. Amunet stood in the doorway and held it. Meni drew the heat out of the air until the beams of the door frame went brittle and white, and the breath of everyone in the yard froze and drifted down as grain. Amunet got one hand onto Meni's shoulder, through the cold, and cut a notch pattern into the skin with a flint chip before she was thrown across the yard. The marked skin would not freeze. Meni left by the river with the notches already healing into a scar that did not heal, and the granary-keeper lived. After that it became personal, on both sides. Amunet fired her four silver-tipped arrows on three different nights and hit twice. Meni had worked out the cost of the notches and started to arrive in the flood season, when the water was high and the quays were wet. In 2442 BCE, at the Ittau landing, Meni killed her. Amunet had thirty-eight years, a strip of linen with more knots than she could count at a glance, and one arrow left. She put it in Meni's thigh, from the bow she had never mastered, and Meni drew the warmth out of the river around Amunet's legs until the water locked solid. She held the quay post until it split. When the cold reached her chest she was still holding on. Her mother carried the linen strip to the Delta herself, in the end, and let it go in the sea.