The pumping house at Morhaai was his best building, and he knew it was his last when the roof beams began to smoke. Baai Tirelsidai, called The Bloodless Whisper in the villages along the Levant coast, stood on the stone floor with the water he had piped in rising around his ankles, and the girl who had come to kill him was not even looking at him. She was looking at the joinery. He took some comfort in that. In 2733 BCE, at fifty-eight years of age, he was destroyed by a vampire slayer named Baraim Sidyahath, and the thing he noticed in the last moment was that she had found the one place in the roof where the timber was not doubled. He had left it that way on purpose, years before, to vent the heat from his own gift. He had never imagined anyone would think to burn it.
The beginning of him was in Melelath, a mountain shrine in the country that is now Lebanon, where he was born in 2791 BCE to a family that cut and fitted stone for the priests. He learned to plumb a wall with a cord and a lump of lead, to read a hillside for where water would run, and to keep his mouth shut when a master mason was wrong. By twenty he was drawing the terraces for the pilgrims' stair. Then a terrace he had drawn gave way in a spring storm, because a foreman had skimped the footing, and forty people went down the slope with it. The shrine's judge named Baai in the record because the foreman was a nephew. His father was dismissed from the work and died within the season, and the young engineer sat in the ruins of his own drawing and wanted, with a flat, patient intensity, someone to pay.
Someone offered. In 2771 BCE, at twenty, he was made into a vampire by Baa Elashbaon, known as The Bloodless Judge, who sat in judgment over a faction called The Silent House and had a standing interest in anyone who could build. The bargain was spoken plainly, and what it did not say was the price: a long life lived by the Judge's rules, and a body that needed blood to stay upright. Baai never got his revenge on the foreman, who died of a bad tooth. He found, to his own irritation, that he did not mind. He had been given the work he was best at, and the grievance turned into a way of seeing, in which every wall he met was either a weakness or a hiding place.
The Silent House used him as an engineer. In thirty-eight years of The First Night he put second chambers into cisterns, cellars under granary floors, a sluice that could drown a road, and a chain of vents so that the House's members could move beneath three towns without once passing a door. He ran three informants in the town watch, ordinary men who owed him for small kindnesses, and paid them in salt-fish rather than tin so that nobody would ever see them spending. He had a habit of tapping every wall he passed with one knuckle, listening for the hollow, and he did it in strangers' houses, which is how two of his informants first suspected something was wrong with him.
The gift that made him dangerous he called, privately, a nuisance. Stormheart stored charge in his body the way a bog stores heat, built through the day, and let go as arcs that crawled across his skin and leapt from his fingers in white threads. It made his hair stand and the air taste of hot copper. It could stop a mule. It could also stop him, because holding it in left him slow and sweating, and letting it out left him weak and trembling for an hour. A vampire who understood his own body as well as he understood a footing learned to spend the gift only where he could rest after.
He met Baraim Sidyahath in 2735 BCE, in a dry valley above the coast, at a cistern he had rigged to empty itself just before a caravan reached it. He had killed eleven people there and was feeling pleased with the work when the youngest of the guards, a girl of seventeen with a stone-tipped spear, put the point through his shoulder. The spear head was glowing. He had expected anything but that, and he had no word ready for the blister it left on his arm. For two years after, he rebuilt more carefully, and he kept finding her fingerprints in the places he had abandoned. She burned two of his cellars. She turned one of his informants with a gift of tin. She was learning masonry, he realized, from the damage he left behind.
It is fair to say he respected her. A mind like his respected anyone who found the real weakness in a plan, and she had found two: fire, and the silver-tipped points that the Vigil of Levant had started carrying after she showed them how a vampire's skin took a metal edge. He told one remaining informant that she was the first opponent he had had who did not argue with the building. The informant repeated it. It reached the girl by autumn.
At Morhaai, in the end, he spent everything he had stored and still the roof held longer than he wanted it to. That was his last bit of professional pride, and he kept it through the fire. She outlived him by six years and died at twenty-five of a winter sickness. The Vampireverse remembers him mostly as a name on its plans, since the House kept few records and Baa Elashbaon, who had made him, never said what he thought of the loss. Baai Tirelsidai had no students and no childer, only his three informants, who vanished from the watch rolls within the year. A cistern near the old coast road still has a second chamber that no one ordered, and the people who draw water there tap the wall once with a knuckle before they lower the jar, though none of them can say why.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
