Bhaa Yuviini

Bhaa Yuviini, the Sable Vespers, was a granary thief from a mountain shrine who was made a vampire in 1998 BCE and robbed the noble houses of the Indus and Ganges Plain for twenty-seven years. The slayer Dhamaita Jasuan ended him in 1971 BCE at Dhaniita.

Coming back from mist hurt, and nobody ever told you that beforehand. Bhaa Yuviini found that out within the first month of being made, in a dry granary on a cold night. When he gathered himself on the far side of the door the grain-dust was in his lungs, three hours of the evening were simply gone, and his hands were so cold that he could not close them. This was Mist Form, the gift of the body he had been given, and the cost of it came due every time. Each time he took the mist, he came back a little slower. Each time he used the frost that came with it, a skill of the same blood that he called his small cold, the tips of his fingers went black for a day. He thought of it as rent. In twenty-seven years he never found a cheaper way to pay it. He was born in 2041 BCE at Prasuini, a mountain shrine on the northern edge of the Indus and Ganges Plain. The priests there kept a granary under a stone floor and a count of what was in it, and Bhaa was the boy who was supposed to carry the baskets. What he did instead, at nine, was find out which of the shrine's three keys opened the lower door, and he spent the next thirty years stealing carefully in a trade that valued carefulness. He worked grain first, then lapis, then the good bronze that came up the river roads. He was never caught. He had a gift for judging how heavy a bag by its hang on a man's shoulder, and the habit of counting his own steps in doorways, always an odd number, which he believed made them lucky. In 1998 BCE he was forty-three and travelling with a lapis caravan across the passes to the Persian Plateau, since the road north of Prasuini had become a bad one to walk. There, in a trading town on the high plateau, he stole the wrong cup from the wrong table. The owner was a lean, courteous man named Urbaes Miardbaius, whom the caravan hands called the Crowned Tide for a habit of wearing a band of woven blue cord. Urbaes did not call the guards. He asked Bhaa to sit down and explained, over a long dinner at which Bhaa ate and the other did not, that he needed a thief of the first quality who would not age. This was the maker's choice, as Bhaa understood it: he had no vote and no real alternative, and when he woke the second morning he was something else. His sire stayed on the plateau, three hundred miles of mountain from the plain, and Bhaa saw him only twice more. Urbaes vanished from the plateau years after Bhaa was gone, and nothing has been seen of him since. Bhaa made no children and raised no pupils. He did not wish to be responsible for a second thief. He went home to the plain, across the passes and down the river roads, as Bhaa Yuviini of the Vampireverse, a member of the Gilded Line and, in India's river towns, soon known as The Sable Vespers for his habit of working at evening prayers. The Bronze Vigil had its vampire slayer on every plain and Bhaa meant to avoid them all. The Gilded Line was a loose house of vampires who preyed on the rich and the careless, and he worked it as he had always worked. The difference was that now nothing stopped him. Threshold Ghost, the signature ability he built on the first gift, let him dissolve at a door's edge and slip under it, or through the gap between a guard's hand and sword. He fed on fourteen noble houses over twenty-seven years, and left none of them with a witness. He never raised a fist if he could avoid it. He was a thief. He thought of it as simple housekeeping. His first meeting with Dhamaita Jasuan was in 1974 BCE, in a storehouse in Maraa. He had been aware of the man for a year: a tall engineer with a sooty lantern who kept showing up in places Bhaa wished to enter, and who seemed to know which door he was heading for before he did. Bhaa had never been tracked by someone who simply understood the building. In the storehouse the engineer was waiting with a spear and a bundle of ash-wood stakes, which Bhaa had learned to fear, and Bhaa took the mist and went out under the door with the frost still on his fingers. He felt oddly pleased. He had been seen, and nobody had seen him in thirty years. Over the next three years the engineer got closer and Bhaa grew slower. The two of them traded blows only once more, in a drain beneath a merchant's house in 1973 BCE, and that time the stakes drew blood. The Gilded Line stopped sending him on the big jobs. He found, to his surprise, that he was not afraid. He was tired. The lapis road was long and the doors were mostly the same. In his last year he wrote nothing and told no one; nobody around him knew that he had begun to count in even numbers. In 1971 BCE he went to the hill town of Dhaniita, where a minor lord kept a good store of barley, for a job he had been advised against. It was dawn when he came through the door. He had misjudged the cold, and the mist took longer than he allowed, and he came out of it standing in the bottom of a stone store-house that had somehow, in the night, lost its roof over the threshold. The sun came down through the hole in a clean column, and he understood it all at once: the plan, the roof, the man who must have spent four nights quietly pulling out the tiles. He had time to be impressed. Dhamaita Jasuan, at the far side of the room, had not lifted the spear. Bhaa was seventy years old, and the count of his doorways, odd or even, stopped there. He left behind nothing but a pile of grain that had not been moved, a tin cup on the lowest shelf, and the print of one cold hand, frost still on it, on the wall by the door.