Each time Baon Tiryahashim used the Breaker's Blow, something small gave way inside the right hand. It was usually a finger joint, sometimes a wrist bone, once the whole forearm, and every break had to be set and bound and fed back to health before the next one. The blow itself was simple to describe. It lifted a laden wagon out of a ditch, folded a bronze door in half, and ended arguments in a doorway. The bill came after, in a dark room, with a strip of linen between the teeth. Baon made a point of never letting anyone watch the bill being paid, and that discretion explains a good deal of the reputation for coolness.
The Levant, in what is now Lebanon, gave Baon Tiryahashim a hard start in The Bronze Vigil, an age of bronze states and caravan roads. Baon was born in 2184 BCE at Raalon, a hill fort above the cedar slopes, to a family of gate-keepers who had held the same low wall for six generations without improving it. Baon grew up counting arrows for the garrison and became a soldier at fifteen, a wide, quiet recruit with a gift for standing in the right place. In the fort's records, such as they were, Baon appears as a spear on the northern wall and a name scratched into a roster of rations. Baon's one real want was to last longer than the wall. A life that ended at fifty, in a ditch, for a lord who never learned the soldiers' names, struck Baon as a poor bargain.
So in 2145 BCE, at thirty-nine, Baon went looking for the bite. It was not a hard thing to find if one knew which traders would talk. Baon was turned by Yahashon Eltiron, the Ivory Tyrant, who made vampires as other lords made alliances, for use, and who left the new one to learn the rest alone. Yahashon is said to be living still, and Baon spent a hundred and twenty-eight years as a vampire taking care never to be summoned back into that house. Baon was never allowed to make any childe of their own. Baon, in the later years, claimed this was a choice.
The Gilded Choir found a use for the soldier. The Choir was a house of the Levantine coast that preferred contracts to massacres, and Baon, with a plain face and a patient voice, became its envoy to the city kings, wearing a circlet of beaten copper to signal the Choir's authority. Hence the title, the Crowned Envoy, which was meant half as a compliment and half as a joke. The work was sound enough. Baon bargained for safe houses and silent wells, and when bargaining failed there were other methods. Over the years Baon fouled the wells of thirteen towns to hide where the Choir had been feeding. The fear projection that came with the Choir's bloodline helped, a dread that ran ahead of Baon into a room and made witnesses forget what they had seen. Baon regretted the wells, in an abstract way, about as much as one regrets weather. The Vampireverse, as the Choir's own scribes later called their side of the war, kept no record of those towns except the count, and Baon never asked to see it. Baon liked to say that a soldier could be forgiven for what the orders said and not for what the hands chose, and was careful never to say which of the two the wells had been.
The slayer from Egypt arrived in 2109 BCE. Baon was at the well-town of Mezrat, four days from Raalon, in the third week of a negotiation with a headman who kept raising his price, when a hunter named Nefep Raraet walked up the road with a grain-barge sunburn and an oxhide shield. Baon had heard of the Pale Oath: a tall, quiet man from the river valley who never seemed to be standing where a thing landed. Baon decided to test the rumor. The Breaker's Blow went through the door-frame and the plaster behind it, and Nefep was simply not there. The second try split his shield from rim to boss. The third came back with a stake through the forearm, which hurt more than Baon had expected, and Baon threw the man into a dung cart and went home to set the arm.
Baon thought about the vampire slayer for years afterward, and about Nefep Raraet by name, in the manner of an old soldier thinking about a fortification that does not fall. The man was a hunter, no more, with no army or gift of speed or any visible cleverness. Yet he arrived at a threshold already shifting his weight. Baon met him four or five more times, always at a door and always in the dark, and each time one or the other broke off. A rival in the Choir suggested that Baon was too fond of the slayer to finish the work. Baon answered that finishing the work was precisely what had not been possible. The hunter was a stubborn thing, wearying beyond reason, and somewhere along the road Baon had started to respect him, which was the annoying part.
The news of Nefep's death in 2094 BCE reached Baon through a salt trader, three years after a long, unproductive winter in the north. The man had died at home in his bed, in a river village, of nothing at all. Baon sat for an evening without speaking and then asked the trader whether anyone had been with him. The trader did not know. The rivalry had never reached a verdict and now never would, and Baon found that this was worse than losing.
The end came in 2017 BCE, far from Raalon and farther from the Nile, at a salt works beyond the Orontes. A rival house, one of the many that had been waiting for the Gilded Choir's envoy to stumble, cornered Baon in a drying shed with silver-tipped spears. Baon was a hundred and sixty-seven years old and the owner of three broken fingers, and the Breaker's Blow went through two walls before it failed. The record of it is a Choir ledger written by someone who was not present. In the box with Baon's few possessions was a splinter of oxhide, grey and hard as horn, which no one in the Choir could account for and which was buried with the circlet.
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