Every use of Fleetfall cost Darbaan Kaartaush a measurable amount of meat. They knew the amount because they had weighed it, on a balance of bone pans and river pebbles, before and after a night's run, and scratched the difference into a wet clay tablet baked afterward in the dung fire with all the others. A short dash across a field was a few knucklebones on the pan. A full night at speed, with the air splitting ahead and the afterimage hanging behind like smoke that has forgotten the fire, cost a sheep's worth of blood and a week of shaking hands. The tablets filled three shelves before any slayer wrote their name down. The Crowned Architect, as the Vigil would later call them, was a scientist before the word existed, and the habit never changed.
Darbaan was born in 1943 BCE, in what the slayers later called The Bronze Vigil, in Ardvaius, a marsh village in Iran where the reeds grew thicker than the barley, and by forty they were the herbalist-physician the whole district sent for, an unwelcome job in a place where most sickness came out of the water. Even then they weighed everything: dose, patient, fee. The villagers found it rude and the sick found it comforting. What they wanted, in the plain way a clever person wants things, was to know the rule behind a fever, and nothing in the marsh would tell them.
The rule they got instead came from Fadarad Kafafaes. In 1903 BCE, forty years old, Darbaan went into a flooded river at night after a patient's lost child and did not come out under their own strength. Hands pulled them out that were not entirely kind. Fadarad, the Gaunt Hunger, had been made herself in 1925 BCE, and she made Darbaan twenty-two years later in the way she had been made, which Darbaan never wrote down. She taught what she knew, which was little beyond hunger. Darbaan taught themselves the rest. The house they joined was the Winter House, which kept to the long dark of the plateau winters and went quiet in summer. In 1646 BCE a company of men fired the reed-roofed hall at Karzin where Fadarad slept and she was destroyed. Darbaan, a long month's walk away studying frost on a copper basin, heard it from a salt trader and wrote down the date.
The name came from the buildings. Darbaan designed rings of mud-brick towers, low and close, with one narrow door each and a sunken court in the middle, so that a household of twenty could sleep with a wall on every side and a view of every approach. Villagers called them crowns. They were also, plainly, experiments. Darbaan had learned what every one of the long-lived learned eventually, and at a price: a line of salt across a doorway raised blisters on the soles of the feet, and iron nails driven into a sill, grey and rare in that age, brought a rash that did not stop. The thorn bundles and bitter herbs villagers hung over their doors did nothing at all. Darbaan's own crowns kept salt and iron out of reach, and the first thing a new member learned was never to be first through a door.
The first they heard of Hormian Shataad was a silence. In 1302 BCE, at the ford of Zarmand, the Winter House was moving the taken harvest of three villages by ox cart at night, and the oxen stopped. There had been no sound of the man, no scent, no bent reed. When Darbaan arrived at the ford in a single stride of Fleetfall, a man in dull marsh clothes was already standing in the water with a stone-tipped spear, shaking, and he did not fall down. Almost nobody did not. The dread Darbaan could press out of the body, a weight in the throat and knees of anything with a pulse, usually worked like a hand on the back of the neck. Hormian shook and stepped inside it. The flint broke in Darbaan's shoulder. They had met vampire slayer bands before, trained and ranked and loud. This was the first who was only a hunter, and Darbaan was back at the crown within the hour with a flake the size of a thumbnail under a cloth and a very particular curiosity.
They spoke once, in 1291 BCE, at Ardvaius, where the crown on the island behind the old village had been finished that spring. The Sunlit Blade came up the causeway with the spear point down, which Darbaan had not expected, and Darbaan stood on the lowest wall with both hands open, which he had not expected either. The offer was simple: Tafaius would be left alone for as long as he taught Darbaan how he walked without leaving a mark. He asked what for. To measure it, Darbaan said. He laughed and went back downriver, and Darbaan stood on the wall for some time afterward and could not find a print on the causeway to measure. Tafaius was left alone anyway. Nobody ever asked Darbaan to explain that, and Darbaan never did.
Neither killed the other, and Darbaan was not there at the end. Hormian fell from a rope bridge over the gorge below Hargan in 1270 BCE, at sixty-three, and Darbaan, who had stood on a ridge above the salt pans at dusk the summer before and written nothing, heard of it from a boy selling goat cheese. They went to the cairn in the spring. The Vigil had set the spear upright in the stones, flint up. Darbaan took the head and laid the shaft across the top, which seemed the polite arrangement, and walked out of the gorge without leaving a print, to see if it could be done. It could not, quite.
Darbaan made few vampires in four thousand years and regretted most of them with scientific accuracy. Shaush Horvaius, the Wretched Judge, came in 185 CE, a magistrate of a plateau town who liked sentencing too much, and was destroyed in 212 CE by a garrison that had waited patiently for a harvest festival. Piili Tiararipa, the Crowned Widow, made in 583 CE, went west to Anatolia and took a title Darbaan privately thought borrowed from the architecture; in 1445 CE masons sealed her into a cistern, and she is not dead, only shut in. Daran Arhores, the Ashen Envoy, was turned in 646 CE and is alive today, serving as Darbaan's messenger to the rest of the Winter House because she can be trusted to say a thing the same way twice. Leila Shirazi, the Gilded Hunger, was turned in 1774 CE and destroyed in 1823 CE in a fire at a caravan inn outside Bushehr. Darbaan recorded the date and the temperature.
Darbaan Kaartaush is alive today, in 2026 CE, three thousand nine hundred and sixty-eight years old by their own count, and lives in the Persian Plateau in a house with no towers, which is the first sign of real age. The Vampireverse prefers its legends loud and has little to say about them. The tablets are a spreadsheet now. Beside the spearhead, in a small bone box, sits the flake of flint, and every spring Darbaan weighs both. Neither has changed by a grain in more than three thousand years, which Darbaan finds the most interesting result of the whole long experiment: the one thing that stays where it is put.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
