Baa Elashbaon

Baa Elashbaon, the Bloodless Judge, was a long-lived stormer of the Ashen Concord who held lawful-seeming hearings on the Levant coast for six and a half centuries. He lost a cheekbone and a debt to a harbor soldier in 2819 BCE and never quite stopped thinking about it.

People along the coast of Lebanon said that the Bloodless Judge had no blood of his own. They said he was a dead king's magistrate who had refused to stay dead, that he sat in empty storehouses with a lamp that gave no heat, and that anyone he judged was found afterward as dry as a fish on a rack. Some of this was close. The hearings were real, and so were the dry bodies. But the man had blood, as every vampire does, and he spent a great deal of effort to keep it in himself, and he was not a king's anything. He was Baa Elashbaon, born in 3022 BCE at Melraa, a caravan stop where the northern road met the coast, and in the Vampireverse's own records of The First Night he is filed under stormer: a man whose trade was to go first through a breach. The caravan houses of Melraa hired stormers to run at the gate of any town that refused to pay its tolls. Baa was good at it, and he was not careful, and at twenty-two he took a wound in a river town he had been hired to break. A coven kept the town. They had a child, a trader's daughter, and they offered to trade her for a fighter of his sort. He bargained, as he always would, and in the end paid with himself. In 3000 BCE he was turned, in a cellar that smelled of onions and old rope. Who made him is something the Concord never recorded and Baa never discussed; asked, he said only that the maker had been an unreliable witness to the arrangement. The girl lived. He never learned what became of her, and for the next six centuries he made a point of not asking. The Ashen Concord gave him a use. Its covens needed someone to collect from towns that would not pay, and a man who could do it with a hearing and a deadline, rather than a raid, saved them a great deal of trouble. Baa gave the debtors days. He sat on a stool, rarely raised his voice, and recited what was owed in grain and cedar and silver. When the days ran out he came to the door himself. His gift was Heartbeat Step, and it was exactly what it sounded like: a rush of such speed that he could cross a courtyard in the space of one pulse, leaving the air behind him in a smear. It cost him dearly. His vision swam for a count of ten afterward, and he had to feed within the hour or the muscles of his legs began to shake. Nothing in his body let him pass a threshold with iron nails in the sill, and silver, driven into him by any hand, burned worse than fire. He kept those two facts to himself with great care. He made four childer, and they are the only part of his life he was ever sentimental about. Amunra Ankhtau came in 2975 BCE, a scribe of the Nile Valley who spoke three languages and was sent back there as the Concord's envoy; he was destroyed in 2945 BCE, thirty years later, and Baa sent his scrolls home in a cedar box. Tira Ashkamelai followed in 2909 BCE, in the Levant, and outlasted most of the rest, until she was destroyed in 2381 BCE. Tiwaus Arsharuus was made in 2900 BCE in Anatolia, a gifted singer who did not last, destroyed in 2871 BCE. Baai Tirelsidai came last, in 2771 BCE, after the war with the harbor soldier had cooled to a habit. She was destroyed in 2733 BCE. Baa kept their letters in a locked jar and read them on the night of each anniversary, aloud, in the voices he remembered. The harbor soldier arrived in his ledger in 2819 BCE. The reeve of Tirsida, a man named Ushu, had borrowed barley from the Concord and not repaid it, and Baa went to the harbor to hold a hearing, as Baa Elashbaon always did. He came by barge at the last lamp. A ring of shields stood on the quay, eleven men around a door, and in the middle of it a limping soldier named Yahela Hakaai was counting his own pulse aloud. Baa stepped, and the soldier, who should not have known the length of that gap, put a sling stone into his cheekbone. Baa took the man's forearm in his teeth for what felt like a very long moment, and let go, and found that the reeve had hammered four iron nails into the sill of the salt store. He had seen the glint of them from the water and told himself it was a coincidence of lamps. He said, "Tomorrow, then," to the door, which was the best he could do under the circumstances, and went home with a face that did not close properly for a month. He met the soldier three more times. In 2814 BCE, among the drying sheds of Nahrabu, a coven of the Concord was cut down by the same stubborn ring, and Baa stood by with a silvered pellet lodged in his shoulder that took him a week to dig out. In 2807 BCE, in the wadi below the cedar road, he stood outside the shields for most of an afternoon and watched the wall move against his rhythm as though the men had read his mind. In 2805 BCE he came to Tirsida alone at evening and sat on a bollard. Yahela sat on another. Baa offered him a place as the door of his house, which was a joke only partly; Yahela said he already had a door and pointed at the nails. Neither of them could kill the other, and Baa's view, expressed with great politeness, was that the soldier was a stubborn, tiring man with a bad knee and he did not intend to be bored by him for long. The soldier, a human with no gift but nerve, was dead in a year; the Vampireverse had its own name for that sort of enemy, and it was vampire slayer, said with a sigh. Baa learned of it in 2804 BCE from a fishmonger and did not go to the harbor, and then did, a week afterward, and stood in the road outside the house with the four fresh nails in its sill. He did not cross. He told himself he was observing the custom of the place. Over the following centuries the Ashen Concord grew careless and then grew small, and Baa became the sort of old judge who sits through a hearing for its own sake. He spent the years in Egypt, which had a long river, many debts and few soldiers who counted aloud. He was destroyed in 2358 BCE, in the Delta, at a ferry landing, by a hunter whose name nobody kept. He had been a vampire for six hundred and forty-two years and had lived 664 years. The Concord's clerks found his possessions in a storehouse near the landing. There was the jar of letters, and a ledger of the sums owed to him, every line struck through as paid. One line near the bottom had been written in his own hand and left alone: Tirsida, one wall, unpaid.