Bo Bo

Bo Bo, the Hollow Judge, was a river-village berserker turned into a vampire stormer of the Obsidian Throne. For 427 years they raided the Yellow River terraces and hoarded relics, with one rule that held until a slayer took the roof off.

Be under a roof by the grey hour. That was the rule Bo Bo lived by, and for four hundred and twenty-seven years it was the only rule they bothered to keep. Sunlight was the one known thing that could end them, a fact the river towns had learned by watching and had told each other in flat certainty, and Bo took it as a household matter, like a draft. Every lair they made had a roof thick enough to be called a ceiling, with a second under it. They counted the minutes to dawn the way a clerk counts days to a debt. The rule was tested often. It was tested by a collapsing granary, by a burning ferry, by a night in the open when a storm blew up from the east and they spent four hours folded under a capsized boat, and each time it held. The only test it failed was the last one. Bo was born in 3037 BCE at Qinxiujia, a river village on the Yellow River Basin in what is now China, a place of black pottery, fish-weirs and reed boats. They grew up broad and bad-tempered and joined the village's war-band as soon as they were permitted, where they became a berserker of the line, the kind sent in first because no one expected them to come back. They came back often enough to be noticed. At thirty-seven, in 3000 BCE, they were turned. A plague pit outside the village had been dug that season and they were found in it, still breathing, by a maker nobody named. The maker never returned, and Bo never spoke of the matter, either then or afterward, and the Obsidian Throne, which took them in, did not ask. Whatever it had been, it left them with a hunger that would not be reasoned with, and a nose. The nose was the Vein Map. From any ridge, in any wind, Bo could taste the blood of a district: the sleeping, the sick, a woman near her time, a man bleeding quietly from a bad tooth. It came as a chart behind the eyes, with red threads running to every house, and the pulse of each marked by a tick. It was an astonishing gift and an unpleasant one. A fortified town in a battle was a screaming mess of them. A slaughter-yard gave them a headache that lasted a week. They wore a strip of damp linen over their nose near the butcher's quarter and never explained why. The gift made them the finest stormer on the river. A hill fort with a hundred souls in it, ringed with a wall and a ditch, was no obstacle to someone who knew which room the headman was sleeping in. In the Vampireverse, which is how the vampire side of the war has been recorded, Bo Bo was known as the Hollow Judge, because they passed sentence on a fort in a single night and left it with nobody inside. The Obsidian Throne gave them work and a seat, and Bo gave it a century of raids. They took hill forts the way a river takes a bank, patiently, and in the sixteen terrace towns of the lower basin they carried off whatever had been left behind: jade axe-heads, black eggshell cups thin enough to read through, cowrie strings, a ceremonial bronze that nobody could afterward explain. Bo put each find in a vault with a red cord on the door. There were twelve vaults by the end. They were not a collector in any refined sense; they simply could not bear for anything that had been valued to be thrown away. Bo made two childer in their long life, and lost them both. Tangzhao Jia, whom the river called the Bloodless Hunger, was made in 2964 BCE and destroyed in 2946 BCE. Wei Xiu, the Ivory Architect, was made in 2839 BCE and built the best of the vaults before being destroyed in 2801 BCE. After Wei, Bo made no more, and the Obsidian Throne stopped suggesting it. The vampire slayers of the Slayerverse were an old irritation, but the one that came in 2601 BCE was new in kind. Fengbo Xiu, the Lantern Torch, was a builder from a hill fort who could close her hands on a doorpost and lift a wagon by its axle. The first meeting was in 2591 BCE, in the cellar of a granary at Qinxiujia, where Bo had gone back to hold the ferry as they did every few years, out of something that was not quite sentiment. The woman came down the steps with a torch and a cut on her hand, and Bo read her at once: the whole chart of her, hot, steady and walking straight into a trap. They put her against the wall. She put the torch in their face. It was the first time in four hundred years that Bo had been burned in the open, and the scar ran from the cheekbone to the jaw and never faded. They were angry, but under the anger there was an odd thing, which was that she had not screamed. For two years she was invisible. She came with pine pitch and wormwood and river mud, and the Vein Map, which could read a pulse through a wall, could not read it through a haze of resin smoke. Bo took to waiting indoors. In The First Night a vampire's whole weight was in finding, and for the first time they were the one being found. She cut their ferry lines, set fire to two vaults and let a third flood, and Bo noted, with the grudging respect of a professional, that the flood had been done properly, with a channel dug upstream and a gate lifted at the right hour. The Throne asked whether they had a plan. They did not. In 2573 BCE they met at Fengrenming, in the great hall of the largest vault, at midnight. She had left a lantern lit in the doorway and her blood smelled of nothing, and Bo knew it was a trap and went anyway, for reasons they could not afterward have named. She led them through three halls. They followed. Somewhere in the third, with the grey hour a finger's breadth off, they realized she had stopped retreating and started climbing, and by then the main beam was above her. The roof came down in slabs. Light fell in and found the room, and Bo ran for the corner they had always kept dark, and an arrow went through the cuff of their sleeve and into the post, and they stood in the sun, held by a thread, with the hot clean light on their scarred face. Four hundred and sixty-four years. The last thing the Vein Map offered them was a chart of one person, standing on the ridge, breathing hard, and entirely alone. The red cord on the vault door at Fengrenming stayed where it was for years afterward, tied in a knot nobody else could undo.