Dama Zuishash

Dama Zuishash, called The First Hunger, was a temple astronomer turned vampire in 3000 BCE who ran the Velvet Circle's counting houses in Mesopotamia for two centuries. He fought a vampire slayer for three years, outlived him, and was destroyed by a rival house in 2789 BCE.

When the rival house finally reached him, in 2789 BCE, Dama Zuishash was sitting at a table in a salt-pan settlement called Girsudu, sorting clay pellets by weight. He had done it every evening for longer than the settlement had existed. Everything in the room belonged to the one the caravans called The First Hunger. The people who came through the door carried a spear tipped in silver, a metal he had never permitted in any room he slept in, and they had spent two centuries learning that fact the hard way, one of their own at a time. He had time to put down the pellet in his fingers. He was two hundred and forty-six years from the cold roof of Galishun, and he had out-thought every house in the Mesopotamian lowlands except the one that simply waited. The record of what followed is short and has no flourishes. He did not call out. The tray was found afterwards, tidy, with one pellet missing from the lightest row. The roof in question belonged to a hill fort called Galishun, in what is now Iraq, and Dama Zuishash was born under it in 3035 BCE, in the years of The First Night. The temple there kept a school of night-counters, men who sat on the flat roof with a knotted cord and notched sticks and marked where the bright wanderers stood against the fixed stars. Dama was the best of them. A later age would call him a scientist, but the temple only called him exact, which in a hill fort was not always a compliment. He wanted to know why the sums were never quite right at the year's end, and he kept the residue, the tiny leftover error, in a separate bag of clay pellets, one for each day the calendar failed him. He was turned in 3000 BCE, at thirty-five, on that same roof. His maker is unknown to history and was never spoken of by Dama himself, and the Velvet Circle learned early not to ask. What the record keeps is the aftermath: he woke in a cold storeroom, fed, with the cord still in his belt. He lost the stars at once, since night-watching had become a different occupation, and he spent the next decades measuring what he had become instead. He found that he was long-lived and that he fed on blood. He found, by experiment on volunteers who were not entirely volunteers, that he could do something with it. Within the Vampireverse, the Circle that took him in valued him not for the strangeness but for the tally. Vein Marionette was physical and plain and it cost him. With a hand raised and the target in sight, he could steer blood in a living body, pulling a limb out of true or stilling a heart for a few beats, and he could draw a spilled quantity across a floor like a thread through cloth. Afterwards his hands went cold and his mouth tasted of copper, and he needed to feed twice as soon. It did not work at distance, and it did not work well on anyone who had learned to go slack. The Circle used it for debt collection. Dama, who ran the counting houses, used it more rarely and with irritation, as one uses a hammer on a sluice that has jammed. He preferred to pit the rival houses of the plain against one another and sell each of them the weapons they would use on the next. He profited from every fall. This took patience, which was the one thing his body had given him in unlimited amounts. In 2974 BCE a man came through the drain of his warehouse at Damninum. The cellar there was his best counting house, and he had a girl in the side room because a supplier had delivered her without being asked. Ninun Bakudamir was, as far as Dama could tell, an ordinary mason with a lamp. Then the engineer smeared a mark across Dama's wrist, bitumen and ochre in a doorpost shape, the sign of a vampire slayer in the loosest sense, and the arm went dead from the elbow down. It stayed dead for three days, like a limb slept on. He scrubbed the stain with river sand and it would not come entirely clean. The cellar burned that night, taking half a year of tallies with it, and Dama's chief emotion, which surprised him, was interest. Nobody had ever measured him back. He spent the next two years studying the mason in the manner he studied everything. He sent a flock of nineteen goats across the ford of Kesh-Adar in the spring of 2973 BCE, to see what the engineer had built, and counted what each one set off. The yard was elegant. He said so aloud, to no one, standing on the far bank. The year after, at dusk in 2972 BCE, he walked up to the well at Damninum alone and offered Ninun a place with the Velvet Circle at a price that would have embarrassed the temple. Ninun dropped a counterweight at him in reply. Dama stepped out of the arc and left, a little regretful. He would have kept the man a century. He had not expected the refusal to feel like a result. He heard of the fever from a driver in late 2971 BCE and was angry for the length of an evening, in the way of someone whose experiment has been interrupted by weather. He did not go to the lean-to. He sorted pellets differently for a month. The war carried on without the slayer who had broken his arm, and the Circle noticed that Dama had grown quieter about it. One more act is recorded. In 2833 BCE he took a caravan west, across the dry country and over the mountains to the cedar ports of the Levant, and there made a vampire named Hazinai Hakaon. It was the only time. He told the Circle it was an inquiry into whether the process could be repeated at a distance, and he came home without her and never explained why he chose a trader's daughter on a coast he did not like. He lived another forty-four years. After the house from downriver took him, one of their party sifted the table and found, in a pouch on his belt, a single pellet scorched black down one side. It weighed exactly what its unburned fellows did.