Coli Pacotl

Coli Pacotl, called the Restless Lantern, was an engineer of the Bronze Vigil who became a vampire slayer in Mesoamerica in 1881 BCE. She built canals by day and hunted by night, and the vampire she could never finish, Tzitl Yakal, outlived her by centuries.

The river towns of the old highlands said that the Restless Lantern carried a lamp that never went out, a clay vessel on a cord at her belt, fed with fat from some animal nobody could name, and that she never slept because the flame would not let her. People still told it to travelers a thousand years later. It is wrong in three places. She carried no lamp. She slept, badly and often, on a reed mat with her feet toward the door. And the light the stories speak of was her own forearms, which after a hard night glowed the dull red of a banked hearth and could be seen from the far side of a field. The name was a joke at first, said by the ditch crews who watched her pace the banks at dusk, unable to stay in one place until the water was where she wanted it. Coli Pacotl, who would be the Restless Lantern, was born in 1912 BCE in Kazoic, a river village in what is now Mexico, in the region later called Mesoamerica. Her father mended fish weirs and her mother wove, and Coli wanted nothing from either trade except the part where water was made to go somewhere it had not been going. At eight she rerouted a puddle. At fifteen she was paid in maize to cut a drain for a neighbor's field and did it so well that the neighbor's field flooded the next neighbor's. She kept a knotted cord, one knot for each wall or channel she had finished, and she hummed the same flat three-note counting song while she worked, so that crews learned to judge her mood by whether she was humming. What she wanted, all her life, was to bring the upper river down to the dry fields east of Kazoic. She never finished it. The war found her in the winter of 1881 BCE, when she was thirty-one, in the middle of The Bronze Vigil. The main channel above Kazoic ran faintly rust-colored for nine days, and everyone blamed silt except Coli, who had surveyed that channel and knew silt did not move that way at that season. She walked the banks upstream and found a sluice gate jammed by a body, drained and pale, one of four that winter. Beside it, in the mud, was a man who was not quite a man by the way he stood up. She had no teacher and no training. She had a mud-spade, a bad temper and a hand that, when he seized her wrist, went hot enough to blister his palm. He let go. She did not understand what she had done, and she followed him for three nights to find out. That was the call: no priest, no elder, no vigil sending a messenger. Someone later told the Vigil of Mesoamerica about her and it sent a man with a message. She sent him back with a request for stakes. The gift was Ember Skin, and it cost her. When she called on it her skin darkened and tightened, and heat rose from under it until it was close to baked clay in hardness, so that obsidian skidded and clubs rang as if on a pot. Afterward came the bill: a fever that lasted a day, a thirst that no amount of water cured, and a peeling of the forearms like a sunburn. She kept an oxhide shield, an oddity so rare in the highlands that traders paid her to let them look at it, and a fire-hardened stake. She hunted the way she surveyed. She learned where a vampire fed by learning where the water and the foot traffic went, and she drew her maps in the dirt and wiped them out with her sandal. Her first meeting with the one who would trouble her most came in 1880 BCE, at Cuchil, a temple town where she had been hired to fix a terrace drain. She had gone for the work and stayed for the dead, and on the third evening, measuring a retaining wall with her cord, she felt the hairs lift on her neck. A woman stood on the terrace above her, still as a post. Coli threw the stake before she thought. It struck plaster where the woman had been. The woman was now beside her, and an obsidian blade dragged across Coli's forearm and skated off the Ember Skin, leaving a black line on it like a streak of soot. They looked at each other, Coli Pacotl and the stranger. Then the stranger stepped into the drain culvert and was gone. Coli learned her name only over the following months, from a dead steward's household: Tzitl Yakal, who people called the Silent Architect, because the deaths she arranged looked like collapsed scaffolds and bad ladders. There was work in between. In 1871 BCE she ended a feeding that had gone on seven years in the hills around Chixocol, a vampire who had taken shepherds and never the same family twice. She did it by flooding the pit he slept in during an afternoon storm, so that he had to climb out into the light. It took her four days to stop shaking afterward. In total she wore the slayer's work for eighteen years, and she did it in the gaps between surveying jobs, which is why the Vigil's few records of her list her as an engineer first and a vampire slayer second. Tzitl Yakal came at her again and again, and neither could settle it. Tzitl moved before Coli's stake began to fall, as if the blow had already been announced to her, which in a sense it had. Coli's skin turned her knife. In 1868 BCE, in the burned-out grain store at Cuchil, Coli walked straight into a blaze to reach her, her arms glowing, and the older vampire, who feared fire above all things, stepped back through a wall and did not return that night. Coli counted it as a win and the knots in her cord do not disagree. She never killed Tzitl and Tzitl never killed her, and the whole business had the character of two tradespeople in the same quarter who hate each other's methods. She died in 1863 BCE at forty-nine, of a lung fever caught during a wet season on a causeway job, an ordinary death and not the one the Slayerverse would have liked to give her. She refused to leave the causeway until the last stone was set. The canal to the eastern fields of Kazoic was a third done. The cord was found in her hut, long, with a hundred and some knots. The last one was loose.