The last thing anyone saw of the woman the Vampireverse knew as the Bloodless Duelist was a ferryman's complaint. In the flood season of 1998 BCE, at the landing below Rataitet, a woman in a plain wool cloak asked to be carried across at dusk and paid with a bead of blue glass, and she asked him to take the slow route, along the bank, against the current. He thought she was ill. When the boat grounded on the far side, the cloak was folded on the thwart and the passenger was gone. No one at Rataitet ever found a body, and no one in The Velvet Throne ever found her. She was seven hundred and twenty-two years old, and she had been a vampire for six hundred and seventy-eight of them, in an age that the Velvet Throne's scribes still called The First Night.
Amunra Menmenu had been born in 2720 BCE in that same caravan stop, a patch of beaten ground and wells on the Nile Valley's western edge in what is now Egypt, where donkey trains rested before the haul to the river. Her mother ran a stall that sold beer and mended sandals. Amunra grew into a loud, heavy-boned child who liked to settle arguments with her fists, and by her twenties she was working for the caravan masters as a line-breaker, the person who held a stampeding string of animals by being in front of it. She liked the fear of it, which is a thing she admitted in later life and which explains the archetype. By any plain definition she was a stormer, a person who moved toward trouble to see what it was made of. She also owed money. The debtors came for her in 2676 BCE, when she was forty-four, and she ran into the nearest empty cellar she could find.
It was not empty. Senet Kamenep, the Sable Choir, who is said to be living still, was there, and the debt was cancelled. Senet made her a vampire that night, in a cellar that smelled of old grain, and handed her to The Velvet Throne, the house that held the middle river. Six years later, in 2670 BCE, Amunra made a childe of her own, a young scribe named Khera Menamunu. Khera was clever, gentle and a poor fighter, and Amunra spent the next eighty years half teaching her and half shielding her. Khera was destroyed in 2590 BCE. Amunra did not speak of it, but she kept a scribe's reed in her belt for the rest of her life, and the ferryman's passenger of 1998 BCE, it is said, still carried it.
The gift she was known for was The Long Shiver, a form of fear that came off her body in a slow tide. It was not an act of the mind. It was something in her breath and pulse that other bodies recognized, a trembling that started in the thighs and climbed until knees buckled and a crowd of strong men could not stand up. She used it to clear market squares, to empty doorways, and in the early centuries to hold whole caravans still while she chose. It cost her sleep, and after a long day of it she shook herself, for hours, with a cold that came from nowhere. The Throne's records list seven towns whose wells she fouled, in the first century of her service, to cover feeding. She called it housekeeping. The Velvet Throne preferred its stormers to be loud and its feeding to be quiet, and she managed both for a long while.
Her weaknesses were known and she handled them fussily. Running water at a threshold repelled her, and salt laid in a line across a doorway turned her back with a sharp cough. Over the centuries she came to treat these as an engineer treats load limits, never going near a house with a channel under its sill. This is why the Hollow Wall mattered. Taes Tahorush, a non-binary canal engineer from the walled city of Baartaad on the Persian Plateau, in what is now Iran, was the first slayer to build a trap around exactly those two facts.
The Throne sent her east in 2097 BCE, the first of two long journeys, with a tin caravan and an order to find a new feeding ground on the plateau. It took her the better part of a year to cross the lands between. At the canal town of Kharsat she met a slayer on a lock walk at dusk, a thin, tidy vampire slayer with a plumb-line and a half-built mirror rig. She used the Long Shiver. The crew bolted, and Taes did not. A sheet of noon light struck her from a copper plate, and she went into the canal with her shoulder smoking. It was the first time in nearly six hundred years that she had been made to look foolish by a person with no gift at all, and she did not forget it. She also did not hold it against the engineer, whom she thought of afterward, a little to her own surprise, as the most honest opponent she had.
She returned in 2083 BCE, fourteen years later, in a dry season, having learned that patience beat anger. She waited for the canals to fall and the water at the sluice to stop crossing the threshold, then walked in and killed Taes in the rig room at Baartaad. The foreman was forty-six. Amunra took nothing from the body but the olive-wood stake, which she kept in a leather roll beside the reed, and went home with a cut across the shoulder that did not close for a month. A younger vampire at the Throne said she looked like a person who had won an argument she wished she had lost.
For the next eighty-five years she held to the old work, lifeless and professional, until the winter her records stop. She had a rank, a house, and no one left who had known her at forty-four. Whether Amunra Menmenu crossed the river that evening in 1998 BCE to meet a rival, to avoid one, or simply to stop, nobody knows, and her sire, who could say, has never said. The Throne kept her seat at its table empty for a generation, laying out a cup of water for the place setting, which she would have hated.
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