Baius Bakaarad

Baius Bakaarad, the Ivory Hunger, was an assassin of the Ember Brood on the Persian Plateau, turned in 1380 BCE and feared for forty-six years. A fussy keeper of oiled hinges, she dissolved into mist and slipped under doors until a barley-smelling hunter named Xertaad Tafaan finally cornered her.

Every house Baius Bakaarad slept in had a small clay pot of sesame oil beside the door, with a goose feather standing in it, and every dusk the hinges were dressed. She did not need the quiet; Fogstep took her under doors, not through them. She said a squeaking door was a confession, and that a house that confesses itself will be searched. Her servants, who were frightened of her and so thorough, took it as one of the household's rules, like not whistling after dark. It was the only housework Baius Bakaarad was ever known to supervise, and it came from her mother, who ran a lamp-wick shop in the temple town of Kaardes, in the Persian Plateau, in what is now Iran, and who believed that most of the trouble in the world arrived through badly kept entrances. Baius had been born at Kaardes in 1399 BCE. The shop smelled of tallow and flax, and she was sent to the temple kitchens at twelve, where she learned the two things the kitchens taught the quick ones: how long a dose takes, and how little a cup-bearer is noticed. By eighteen she was being hired. The jobs were small, a steward here, a priest's rival there. In the years of The Bronze Vigil she was good at it in the way some people are good at accounts, without enjoyment or shame, and she kept a separate small pot of silver that she told no one about. She was turned in 1380 BCE, at nineteen, at a midwinter feast where the guests wore masks of beaten copper. The man she had come to poison was not the one in danger that night. She woke three days after in a grain cellar with her work-basket beside her, and her first request, to the person who sat with her, was for her basket. The one who had made her was never named in her hearing, or later in anyone's. The Ember Brood did not tell, and she did not ask, and by the time she understood that this was unusual she was too useful for anyone to want the question raised. Her mother believed her dead. For as long as the old woman lived, a boy delivered silver to the lamp-wick shop each month with no message. The Brood used her for forty-six years, and the plateau called her the Ivory Hunger without ever being sure what she was hungry for. Fogstep was the reason. She could draw herself down to a low white mist, cold to the touch, that went along the floor under a door and gathered again on the far side. She could pass through the gap between shield and shield in a doorway guard, or slip a ring of spearmen in a corridor and rise behind them. The cost was real and she was precise about it: after each use she was hungry, slow in the hands and a little stupid for a quarter of an hour, and those quarter hours were the only part of her life she could not control. She learned to schedule around them. The Vampireverse remembers her as the one who never needed a second visit. The Ember Brood remembered her as an investment that had paid. She ran a night market at Taurraush, a row of lamp-lit stalls on the caravan road, because it was somewhere the Brood could feed that looked like commerce, and she liked to be paid in goods she could count. What she wanted, and had wanted for years, was to stop. She wanted a house with a garden and one door that shut properly, in some town where no one was owed anything. She never said so, because the Brood did not release assassins, and she did not know how to be the other thing. In 1338 BCE a hunter walked into her market and she learned his name from the drivers: Xertaad Tafaan, vampire slayer, the first customer in years to make her uneasy. She had heard about him already, a man from Ardvaraius who followed the smell of the dead. She had assumed the stories were the usual kind. But he came at dusk, smelling of boar fat and barley, and went from stall to stall holding things to his nose, and hummed flat, and when she came out of a doorway as mist he did not flinch. He shot into the thickest part of her. The first arrow passed through, which she had expected. The second struck her shoulder, which she had not. He had been following the scent of the fog. She went back through the wall with the wound open and lay for two days, and the shoulder never closed the way she wanted. That autumn she tried to kill him three times. Each time he was somewhere other than where his smell said he would be, and each time the smell was a day old when she reached it. Her servants told her the rest. A hunter at the caravan stop was asking after a smith. A hunter had paid an ox for iron nails, a price so ridiculous that the trader told the whole road. She understood what the nails were for the same hour she heard of them, and she was the only one on the plateau who did. The Ember Brood grew tired of the attention he drew to their houses and let her know it. She left Taurraush. She tried Kaardes, where her mother's shop had long since passed to strangers, and found him there before her, buying figs. In the fourth winter she went to ground at Horbaush, a storehouse at the head of a pass where herders kept grain. It was the one place on the plateau she had never worked. She slept in a corner on sacks. In 1334 BCE, in the grey before dawn, she woke to the sound of poles lifting from the roof, one at a time, and light that had no business there. She tried Fogstep. It carried her as far as the sill. The mist lay against the iron the way a cat lies against glass, and could not cross it, and she felt it turn her back into a woman standing on a floor. The man was in the doorway with his bow, looking tired. "You smell of barley," she said. He said, "Figs." After that there was the sun. She was sixty-five. Xertaad Tafaan, the Crimson Reaper, outlived her by three winters and died of something that had nothing to do with her. The pot of sesame oil was found in her bag by a herdsman, who burned it in his lamps that season and remarked afterward that the hinges of the storehouse door, which had screamed for years, never made a sound again.