Ashraai Morzinyaha

Ashraai Morzinyaha, called The Crimson Hand, was a human hunter from a mountain shrine in Lebanon who became a vampire slayer in 2234 BCE. He fought for twenty years with a reed-shafted bow and a trained nose, and the Ivory Tyrant finished him.

In the house at Alenasha the bowstrings lived in the same crock as the mutton fat, and nobody who ate at Ashraai Morzinyaha's table ever forgot it. The fat kept the cords supple in the dry mountain air. The crock sat beside the bread, because there was only one shelf that stayed cool, and the one neighbour who left an opinion on the matter said that every meal in that house tasted faintly of the man's trade. Ashraai was born in 2267 BCE at Alenasha, a mountain shrine in the Levant, in the high country of Lebanon, during The First Night, when the war between vampires and the people who hunted them was already more than seven centuries old. The shrine kept few flocks. It paid a hunter to bring in ibex and partridge for the offering days, and the post had belonged to his mother's family for three generations. He was a good hunter and an unlovable one. He did not talk while working, he did not share his routes, and he tied a fresh knot in the bowstring after every season, so that by middle life the cord looked like a rope for measuring fields. His bow was a reed-shafted hunting bow, light and quick, with shafts cut from marsh reed bought down at the lakes and straightened over the kitchen fire. It would never have stopped a man in a leather coat at fifty paces, and he knew it. What he had instead was his nose. Scent-Reading was not a gift of the body, whatever the shrine servants liked to say; it was thirty years of lying downwind of animals and learning to read what they had touched. Standing in a doorway he could say who had been in a room, in what order, and how long ago. It had a cost. A tanner's yard or a festival full of incense left him dull and headachy for a day, and on feast days he went up the mountain with a bag of barley and was not seen until the smoke had cleared. In the winter of 2234 BCE, when he was thirty-three, the water in the shrine cistern grew a rust-coloured skin and then froze in rust-coloured plates. The priests blamed the iron in the rock. Ashraai put his face to the water and smelled cold copper, something sweet like fruit going over, and under both a faint absence where a living person's sweat should have been. He walked to two hamlets below and found the same in their wells. Something that fed on blood had been throwing away what it did not need into the nearest cold water. He said so in the shrine yard and was told to go back to his partridges. That was the year he was called, though nobody called him anything. He simply stopped hunting for the shrine, and the Slayerverse gained one more vampire slayer, a sour man with a bow who would later be known along the coast as The Crimson Hand. The man who gave the calling a shape came up the pass when the snow cleared. Shatias Mushaili, the Ashen Wall, was a slayer from Anatolia, a broad grey person in a grey cloak who had followed a broken trail south from his own country. He had destroyed a maker in the Anatolian hills that same year and learned from what he found that the maker had left a child on the Levantine coast. It was a month's hard walking, and he had heard in a roadside village that a hunter at Alenasha had been complaining about the wells. Ashraai answered to no vigil, house or order, then or later, and Shatias did not try to change that. For two years, from 2234 BCE to 2232 BCE, he taught him what had been learned the hard way: how to lay a salt line across a threshold and keep it dry, how long a cellar stayed dark after sunrise, where a vampire's weight sat when it hurried. He never sat with his back to a door, and Ashraai picked up the habit and kept it for life. In 2232 BCE Shatias went north again. Ashraai heard nothing from him afterwards and preferred not to guess why. His first meeting with Yahashon Eltiron, the Ivory Tyrant, came the same year. It happened on the cedar wharf at Zibakhai, on the coast, where a night-thief had been emptying the timber merchants' strongrooms without disturbing a single lock. Ashraai smelled him from the breakwater: stale grain, tallow, and the cold. He put three arrows into the thief's back at twenty paces. Two glanced off the skin like thrown pebbles. The third stuck a finger deep and stayed, and Yahashon pulled it out, looked at the shaft, and laid it down on the planks as if it had been a borrowed tool. The gift was called Unbowed, and Ashraai noticed what it cost only because he was the one watching afterwards. The vampire's skin went hard as a drumhead and his neck would not turn. He walked away stiffly in the first grey light, and Ashraai understood that the armor and the stiffness were the same thing, and that an hour was the whole of his edge. Twenty years followed, and the bowstring of Ashraai Morzinyaha got many knots. Across that time Ashraai burned out ten nests, in cellars, in a tomb at Ushanu, in the dry cisterns of Dur-Kemmesh, and each one was cut into the cord. He wanted to retire to the shrine, to hang the bow in the rafters and keep goats, and he told himself every autumn that this was the last winter. But Yahashon was never part of any nest. He refused every coven and worked alone, and so he could not be burned out with the others. Three times Ashraai tracked him to a lair. Three times he laid salt and set wards on the doorway, and three times Yahashon stepped around them like a man avoiding puddles, leaving a mark in the dust where the line had been smudged by the wind. The mantle gave him a pupil late in life. In 2217 BCE the news reached Alenasha that a thief of Tirhaai, one Yahmora Bahaai, had been left for dead in a burned granary and had risen at sunrise with the strength of two men. Ashraai walked there, six days, and did not like what he found: a broad, clever, careless young man with no patience at all. He took him back to the mountains all the same. From 2216 BCE to 2214 BCE he taught Yahmora the things Shatias had taught him, and one thing Shatias had not, which was to wait. Yahmora had no nose and would never have one, but he learned to sit still for a night and listen. The old hunter's chief complaint was that the young man laughed at his own jokes. His chief private pleasure was that he did not mind. Yahashon came to Alenasha in the winter of 2214 BCE. Ashraai had laid a salt line across the shrine door, and rain on the stone sill had washed a gap in it no wider than a hand. He smelled the thief come over the gap in the dark. It was a fight of arm's length, because there was no room to draw the bow, and he used the knife he skinned ibex with. Yahashon took the blade in the shoulder and did not stop. Ashraai was fifty-three, and he had been a slayer for twenty years, and when it was over he was lying against the lip of the cistern whose water had first turned red. The vampire left before the sun cleared the ridge, as he always did, and was never caught by it. Yahmora came up the track the next morning and found the shrine door open. The bow went to him, and he carried it for the rest of his life without ever learning to shoot it. A boy from the shrine swept the salt off the sill the following day, thinking someone had spilled a spice. The bowstring with its knots hung on a nail by the kitchen shelf, and the woman who inherited the house used the crock for lentils. She said they tasted of nothing.