Amunraep Tahoret

Amunraep Tahoret, the Sleepless Regent, was a grain broker of Nefkahoret turned vampire in 1418 BCE, who ran the night market of Mensenep for the Sable Assembly until she was destroyed in 1401 BCE. The vampire slayer Ramenu Kasetu never got her.

"Name your price," she said, "and then name it again, slower, so I can hear what you actually want." The tithe-clerk Pawero repeated that sentence to the end of his life, in a voice that went flat in the middle, because the second answer, he said, was the one that had been true. He had been twenty-two. He had sold the Regent the keys to three storehouses in a single evening and could not afterward say what he had been paid. The woman who said it was Amunraep Tahoret, and in the Vampireverse her evenings at Mensenep were still being counted long after the woman herself was gone. She was born in 1448 BCE at Nefkahoret, a temple town in the Nile Valley of Egypt in the age called the Bronze Vigil, where grain was the only subject at supper and her father kept the scales for the god's own barley. She grew up listening to people lie about weights. What she wanted was never wealth, which bored her; it was to be the person whose word set the price, whose seal a barge captain obeyed, and she began early. At twelve she corrected a priest's sums in front of his own pupils. She kept a basket of clay seals, one for every deal she ever closed, and she could tell you who had pressed what into which lump, in what month, years afterward. In 1418 BCE, thirty years old, she was ambushed on the grain road south of the temple town and left for the crows, with a broken collarbone and her own mule's bridle round her wrist. The wrong person found her. Senet Kamenep, the Sable Choir, who had been old when the temple of her town was built, was walking the road for reasons of his own, and he made her. He made her the way he made all the others, offered a night and a bad dawn, and she lived. She never regretted it enough to say so. He stayed a little while to teach her what she was, and then he left, because his interest in the people he made was that of a man for a seed he has planted in a field he will not see again. He is alive still. She never saw him after the second year. The house she joined was the Sable Assembly, which spent its nights lending money and moving grain for families that preferred their business unseen, and within a season they had sent her to Mensenep to run its night market under the corn-measurers' quay. She ran it for ten years, as a broker, in the old sense: not quite a merchant, not quite a magistrate, someone through whom other people's sins became tidy. She did not sleep, which was how the market came to call her the Sleepless Regent; the vampire body she woke in did not seem to need what hers had needed. She sat at the tithe-table with her back to the wall and the lamps ranged on her left, and counted. Her gift she called Silver Leash. It worked through the eyes, and it took a three-count of steady contact to set, and when it did the person on the other end tasted silver, a copper bead laid on the back of the tongue, and felt a loop settle around the ribs, and thereafter wanted very much to please her. It ran out of range at a lamp's throw. It cost her a bleeding nose and a week's headache for every five people she held at once, which was why she never held more than five. She knew what could kill her, of course. Direct sunlight, which took an hour to do what a hearth fire does in a moment, and a post of ash or hawthorn driven through the heart, both woods imported at some expense from the northern hills, so that carrying one in the valley said something about the carrier. One of her household had bitten a levy soldier on the embankment at Setkhetau in 1415 BCE, and the soldier had not died, and had not turned either. Amunraep had written it off as bad debt. In 1412 BCE the soldier, a vampire slayer by then, turned up at the market with a clay lantern ringed in thorns. Amunraep looked up from a sale, caught the woman's eyes in a three-count, and felt the loop begin to set. Then the lantern swung and the light flicked across her face in a broken star, and her gaze would not hold. She had never met a countermeasure that cost so little. The woman put her palm into the market basin and the water went to glass, and five of the held guards came sliding toward her over it on their knees, and she went down a temple stair with her sleeve alight. She did not kill Ramenu Kasetu. She wanted to know how the glass worked, and by then it was gone. By 1407 BCE she had held Ramenu Kasetu's own levy captain for a month, and she walked him and thirty spearmen up the east wall of Setkhetau. Ramenu would not hurt them. She stood against the mud-brick with her hands bleeding on the stone and froze every spear shaft in the line, and Amunraep, who had spent her life weighing people, understood a thing about the other woman then that she thought the Assembly should have understood sooner. The Thorned Lantern was not going to kill her people. She was going to make them too expensive. It was expensive. A frozen basin, a locked barge, five guards lost, a granary seal broken: the treasurers of the Assembly added the numbers in the manner of their trade, and in 1401 BCE, forty-seven years old, she was called before them. Senet Kamenep was not present. She was put on a barge bound for the first cataract with her wrists bound in her own sale-cord and the hatch tied open, and she did not sleep the last night either. She had time for a small calculation. Sunrise came at the cataract at a quarter past the sixth hour. Nobody ever asked her what her price had been. Pawero stayed on in the market after Amunraep Tahoret was gone, with a lamp and a clay table and a cough, and he told the story to every new clerk who came through. He said that the Regent had been generous with the second answer. At the end of the evening, when the barge bearing her had come back down the river empty with the hatch still unlatched, the market sat quietly for a time with its lamps lit, and then someone, from the back, asked what the grain was going for.