Baes Ardbaush

Baes Ardbaush, the Sworn Shield, was a harbor-born hunter of the Persian Plateau who carried the sun in her skin and spent twenty-three years breaking covens in the Bronze Vigil. A thief of the Hollow Line cost her two fingertips in 1728 BCE and, in the end, her life.

The fog came off the brine pans at the third watch, and it was cold, which was wrong. The pans at Tarshaan had baked all day and ought to have breathed out warmth. Baes Ardbaush lay flat on the roof of the weigh-house with a reed-shafted hunting bow across her knees and a full day of sunlight stored in her skin like a coal banked in ash. She had been on that roof four nights, waiting for a thief who took one jar, one ingot, one bundle of dyed wool from each caravan station on the salt road and left a knotted cord on the shelf where the thing had been. The station keepers had started calling the cords receipts. Nobody found it funny anymore. She heard nothing. That was the first thing she remembered afterward, that the fog arrived with no footstep in it, and that when the shape stood up out of the white at the foot of the ladder, the breath went out of her in a cloud that did not rise. The thief reached for the rung and the rung frosted under his hand. She turned her face to him and let the day out. It was a flat, hot, white pulse, the thing that later earned her the name the Sworn Shield, and it threw his shadow thirty paces up the road. He made a sound, low and almost courteous, and was gone, fog and all, down the brine channel. She lost the feeling in two fingertips of her left hand where he had touched her wrist. She never got it back. In the morning there was a cord knotted on the weigh-house scale. That was the year 1728 BCE, and it was the first time she met Mibaan Kaararad, though she did not have the name yet. The roof at Tarshaan was a long way from where she began. Baes Ardbaush was born in 1761 BCE at Mihorad, a harbor settlement on a salt lagoon at the southern edge of the Persian Plateau in what is now Iran, where the temple paid in barley for waterfowl and gazelle, and a girl who could put an arrow through a teal at eighty paces ate well. She grew into a hunter before she grew into anything else. She hunted the reed beds with a bow her uncle cut for her and she had one habit nobody understood: she would not sleep under a roof that had no hole in it. A smoke vent, a gap in the thatch, anything, so long as she could see the sky. Her mother put it down to a bad birth. She wanted very little, and most of it was a quiet season on the lagoon with no one asking her for anything. What changed that was a fever that went through Mihorad in the spring of 1735 BCE. The healer pronounced her dead on the third day. She was carried out to the burial reeds, and she woke at dawn when the first sun crossed her face and it felt, she said, like drinking. She was twenty-six. The Vigil of Persian Plateau heard about the dead girl who sat up, and an old trader who worked for it came to look at her. He told her what he knew, which was a short list: the gift of the body that had woken in her, the vampires it was good against, and the fact that he had nobody to teach her. She taught herself, mostly by being burned. In the Slayerverse that kind of vampire slayer was called Exo-Human, and the word meant no more than that the body had gone past the usual limits and sent a bill for it. The gift was a trait of the skin, the way some people's blood runs hot. Baes took in daylight and held it, and a day of clear sun filled her the way a day of rain fills a cistern. The Lantern of the First Day was that fullness let go all at once, a flash of such force that a vampire caught in it staggered as if struck, and she herself was blind in patches for an hour afterward. On cloudy days she was only a good archer. She came to read the sky the way a farmer reads it, and she planned campaigns around dust and overcast. Over twenty-three years of the Bronze Vigil she broke three covens across the plateau. The first was in 1731 BCE at the gypsum quarries of Dashtirun, where the workings made a maze that suited the vampires and nobody else. She waited eleven days for a clear noon, then walked into the main gallery at the hour the sun stood straight over the shaft. The second was on the tin road in 1722 BCE, a house of six who had been bleeding caravans and burying the drivers under cairns. She counted the cairns before she fought them, and when she had finished she went back and opened every one. She kept a strict habit of tapping the nock of each arrow twice before she loosed it, and she said the second tap was for the one she had not yet counted. After Tarshaan the thief became the work. Mibaan Kaararad belonged to the Hollow Line, and the people who watched him said he had pitted eight rival houses against one another and taken a share of every ruin. He could go to fog and come back, and the cold that rode in with him killed fingers and slowed hearts. Over four years she learned what could be learned about him, mostly from the dead. She learned that hawthorn or ash-wood through the heart would end him, and that iron nails driven into a threshold would keep him out of a room. Iron was scarce then and nails were dear. She bought nine from a smith in Tarshaan, and used them on the doors of people who could not afford to be robbed. In 1718 BCE word came from the Vigil of Mesopotamia about a newly called spy named Lua Damzuir, who had a gift for making people see what was not there and no idea how to stay alive. Someone had to take him on, and the Mesopotamian Vigil had no one to spare. He crossed the mountains in 1717 BCE, a journey of some weeks on foot, and found her at the weigh-house. She taught him for five years. She taught him to count his decoys, to check his sling cord before every light, and to leave a door the way he had found it. He washed his bowl in the brine channel every morning and she mocked him for it until she noticed that nothing ever fouled his food. She died in 1712 BCE at the Kuhrad ford, at the end of four days of dust that had hidden the sun and left her with nothing stored. Lua had gone home the season before. A shepherd boy on the far bank saw fog come up the river, and a woman standing in it with an unstrung bow, and then he looked away because he was eleven and afraid. Mibaan Kaararad killed her in the cold, quickly, and walked off into the fog. She was forty-nine. The shepherds buried her above the flood line and put up a cairn she would have counted. Lua came back that winter and carried her bow to Mihorad on foot, where the temple on the harbor hung it from a beam above the water. The thief was not seen again after 1631 BCE and nobody found out where he went. The keeper at Mihorad changed the bowstring each spring with fresh gut, on the grounds that a bow should be ready, and nobody told him to stop.