Chicul Xokucul

Chicul Xokucul, the Storm Torch, was a canal engineer of coastal Mexico who became a vampire slayer in 2189 BCE, running faster than the eye could follow. He destroyed the assassin Yacotl Macuic in 2177 BCE and died of a fever, in his own time, in 2170 BCE.

The tool that outlasted Chicul Xokucul was a plumb line: a length of knotted cotton cord weighted with a river stone, with a thumb of red ochre dried into the knot at each span. Engineers of the coast used the ochre to mark levels on the stakes, and the cord hung from the rafters of every house he lived in. He was born in 2214 BCE at Yayaixtl, a harbor settlement on the Pacific side of what is now Mexico, in Mesoamerica, and the first place he worked was the harbor itself. It had a bad mouth. Storm swells came straight through the gap and the fishing boats were hauled up the beach each night like cattle. At nineteen Chicul was set to work with a gang of basket-carriers on the breakwater, and by twenty-three he was the man who told them where to lay the stones. He worked out that the wall should curve, not run straight, and that if it were angled to the swell the water would spend itself on the rock rather than on the boats. The old men said it would not hold. It held. He was an engineer to his marrow, and he hated to see a thing done badly. The second place was a hillside above Pachiic, and it was where the trade ended. In 2189 BCE, when he was twenty-five, his sister Ixmal was taken from a terrace-wall camp by a coven in the hills. They fed on blood and kept a hall above a spring. Chicul had no teacher and no company, no Vigil to apply to, and no weapon except a sling and a few stones. He sat in the camp for a night and thought about it the way he thought about all problems. Then he took the silver bracelet that had been his mother's, melted it down in a mud crucible, cast eleven small pellets of shot, and walked up the hill. Nobody was ever able to say how long he was inside the hall. By the account of the one witness, a goatherd, it was a matter of breaths. Two of the coven were found dead afterward with silvered pits in their skulls, and Chicul came down the track carrying his sister. She lived. She never spoke afterward, though she liked to sit at the end of the breakwater and watch the tide. What happened to his legs that night had no name in his language. He moved, and the courtyard went by in a smear. The Blur Road, as the Vigil of Mesoamerica later called it in the age now named The Bronze Vigil, was a thing of the body, a fine quickness in the legs and the nerves, and it let him cross a courtyard before a person finished one heartbeat. It also took something back. His muscles shook afterward as though from a fever, his nose bled, and for a day he ate like a field gang. Used twice in a night, it laid him flat. He worked out the exact limit by trial, the way he had worked out the angle of the breakwater, and he never spent it carelessly again. He had joined the Vigil by then, a quiet group of watchers who had no head and no rank, and who counted him a vampire slayer of the Slayerverse the day he walked down that hill. They were glad of him. In 2188 BCE the coven's assassin came down to the harbor to remove the man who had spoiled the hall. This was Yacotl Macuic, the Cold Sovereign, and Chicul met him on the breakwater causeway on a night with no moon. He had been warned, in the sense that his dogs stopped barking. The creature came toward him as a low mist along the stones, and Chicul put a pellet into it and watched the shot go through without catching. Then it was a man again, a cold-handed young man with his teeth showing, one arm at Chicul's throat. Chicul did the only thing his hands knew. He had been marking stakes all day and his right palm was red to the wrist, and he slapped it flat against the vampire's forearm. The arm did not go to mist. It stayed where it was, solid and bleeding, and the creature stared at it with something very like dismay. They both understood it at the same moment. The slayer's mark, laid on the skin, held the flesh together. Chicul ran, and Yacotl let him. It was the first time either of them had lost. Chicul Xokucul, soon known along the coast as the Storm Torch, was a different kind of slayer after that. The ochre pot went into his belt beside the sling. He treated each hall the way he treated a canal, looking first for the water, and he flooded two cellars by opening a sluice upstream, which drove the occupants out into daylight. There were skirmishes at the salt flats and in the lagoon villages, and over nineteen years as a slayer he destroyed what the Vigil counted as seven of the coven's elders. He did not talk about it. His habit was to tap every beam of a bridge before crossing, and he would turn back at a rotten one even with a vampire behind him. His want was simple, a finished water-works at Pachiic that would bring the spring down to the terraces and leave the hall above it dry. The reckoning came in 2177 BCE, at Pachiic again. By then Yacotl had been hunting him for eleven years, and Chicul had decided that the only way to end it was to meet him in a place he had already measured. He painted the lintels of the hall with red hands. He dragged an ash pole up the terraces. At midnight he went in, and the Cold Sovereign came out of the dark with the courtyard fogging round his feet and a long blade of obsidian in one hand. The Blur Road took Chicul across the paving before the mist could close. He laid his marked palm against the vampire's chest and held it, and the body that wanted to be air stayed a body, and the ash went in. It cost him the use of his legs for eleven days. He thought, afterward, that the creature had looked at him with something that was almost respect. The third place was a lagoon called Mitlapan, to the south, where the remaining years were spent. He built a causeway across the shallow water, carried by baskets of earth, a work of several seasons that people still crossed on their way to market. He lived in a house on stilts at the end of it. He was plain-spoken and a little deaf from the sea, and it was there, in 2170 BCE, that a lung fever took him, at the age of forty-four. He had been a slayer for nineteen years. The Vigil of Mesoamerica had never named a successor, because there was nothing to inherit but a sling. Ixmal sat with him at the end. When the house was cleared, the plumb line was found hanging from the rafter above his bed, and the stone was just clear of the floor.