Baraim Sidyahath

Baraim Sidyahath, called The Salt Reaper, was a caravan sellsword from the Levant who became a vampire slayer at seventeen and destroyed the storm-handed engineer Baai Tirelsidai. She did it with fire and a stone-tipped spear, and she died young, of nothing the war had to do with.

"Keep that girl away from the pitch jars," a caravan master called Dunuth liked to say, years after she was gone, and he never failed to add that he had said it before anything happened. Nothing had happened yet when he said it. He was only a careful man who had watched his hired spear-hand sweat. Baraim Sidyahath, whom the Levant came to call The Salt Reaper, was born in 2752 BCE in Elalraai, a temple town in what is now Lebanon, where the shrine's brine pans spread below the walls like a field of grey scales. Her mother raked salt for the temple. Baraim grew up with cracked heels, a taste for the crust that formed on her own wrists, and a plain wish that never changed: to earn enough tin and barley that her mother could stop raking. In the years of The First Night that made her a mercenary, and she was a good one, because she did not romanticize it. She was seventeen when the war found her, in 2735 BCE. Her caravan was crossing a dry valley above the coast when the water-cistern at the usual halting place turned out to be empty and its sluice-gate jammed. The people who came out of the dark while the animals bawled were not bandits. They fed on blood, they were faster than anything she had trained against, and one of them, a tall man with a builder's blunt hands, stood on the cistern's lip and drew a line of white light between his fingers. That was Baai Tirelsidai. Eleven of her companions died. What saved Baraim was a fever in her hands that she had felt rising all that afternoon, and which now broke, so that the shaft of her spear began to smoke in her grip and the stone head glowed the colour of a lamp wick. The gift had a name later, Sunfire Brand, but it had none that night. Pressed against wood, bone or hide, her palm left a mark that burned bright for as long as it took to count a hundred breaths, and anything the mark touched was scorched through. It cost her. After each use her hands blistered, her mouth dried to paper, and a fine crust of salt came out through her skin, which is how the temple workers began to call her the Salt Reaper before she had any say in the matter. She had a habit of tasting her wrist before a fight, to judge how much she had left. She swore she was never wrong. Baai Tirelsidai left that night with her spear head in his shoulder, and she did not forget the way he looked down at the burn as if it were a flaw in his masonry. The Vigil of Levant, which the Slayerverse remembers as a loose company of shrine-keepers and hill guides who passed warnings from fort to fort, took her in the next season. The Vigil had no one who could teach what she was, and the old hands argued for a month over whether a girl of seventeen who sold her spear by the day could be trusted to carry a vampire slayer's work at all. She settled it by being useful. So in 2734 BCE they sent word down the coast with a salt-fish trader, and an Egyptian slayer named Raet Tasetu, called The Ninth Spear, came north by river-boat and coast road to find her. Raet stayed until 2730 BCE. A dry, grumbling woman who ate raw onions at every meal, Raet taught Baraim to fight only where she could choose the ground, to wait for the grey before dawn, to aim at the throat and the long muscle of the thigh, and never to meet a vampire in a room with a second door. Raet went home to the Nile Valley when her teaching was done. She lived a good many years more and died of a fever that had no quarrel with anyone. For two years Baraim hunted the work of the man who had hurt her. Baai had been a temple architect at Melelath before he was turned, and he built the way a ledger-keeper steals: quietly, and in the pattern of the work he had always done. Cisterns with a second chamber nobody had ordered. Cellars under granaries. He ran three informants inside the local watch, and Baraim found them by following the grain accounts and then by sitting for three nights in a tavern doing nothing, which she hated. One of the three she turned with a gift of tin. The other two she let alone, because they were more useful afraid. It ended at Morhaai in 2733 BCE, in a pumping house where Baai had stored his strength the way another man might store oil. His gift, Stormheart, lived in his body like a held breath, and he let it out in arcs that lifted the hair on her arms and split the beams over her head. She did not outfight him. She waited for him to spend himself, stepped into the smell of scorched hair, and pressed her palm to the roof timbers while he stood beneath them. Silver would have hurt him and fire hurt him worse. The roof came down burning. She dragged herself out with her hands cooked raw and counted her breaths all the way to the water trough, and that was the end of the vampire who had killed eleven people at a dry cistern. She had six years after that. The Vigil offered her a captaincy and she turned it down, because it paid in honour, and sent her mother tin instead. Her hands never fully healed, and she held a cup with both of them. In 2727 BCE she died at Elalraai, aged twenty-five, of a lung sickness that came with a wet winter and had no part in the war at all. She was in her mother's house, under the roof her mother's wages had finally paid for. Baraim Sidyahath left no writing, no students and no list of what she had burned. She left a debt of seven jars of barley at a tavern in Morhaai, which the tavern keeper claimed for the rest of his life and which the Vigil, embarrassed, finally paid. The spear is said to have stood in the corner of the salt store for forty years, scorch marks on its shaft, and the girls who counted the loaves were told not to lean on it.