The boatmen of Bhadeini still sing a ballad about her, and it is the nearest thing to a source that survives. It has no title, only a refrain that the singers add at the end of every verse, and it runs to eleven verses when a good voice is available and five when the beer runs out. The first verse goes: "She went into the river a girl and came out a queen, and the river was not asked." That is a fair summary of Dedea Yuraesh's life in a single line, and like most good lines it leaves a great deal on the floor.
She was born in 2320 BCE at Bhadeini, a harbor settlement on the Indus and Ganges Plain in what is now India, in the age the slayers call The First Night. She was a stevedore's daughter and then a stevedore, and a stormer by temperament, one of those people who answer an insult with their whole body. She was twenty-eight when the river took her. The ballad says she was thrown from a barge in a quarrel over a cargo of salt; the Vampireverse says she dived after a drowning child and did not come up. Either way she was pulled out of the water in 2292 BCE by hands that were not entirely kind, and the hands belonged to Mamaan Karayuini, the Ashen Hunger, who had been feeding along that river since long before she was born. The second verse reads: "He took her cold and gave her fire, and she paid the debt in blood." It is the only verse in which a man appears.
Mamaan made her a vampire and kept her as an apprentice and then as a companion, and by every account she disliked both arrangements. When she woke she could hear everyone, and this was the part the ballad leaves out. The gift the slayers later recorded as Mind Reading arrived as a murmur in her own skull, a crowd talking through a wall, loudest at close range and worst in a market, and it gave her headaches that lasted until she fed. The only remedy she found was to hum. She hummed boat songs under her breath all day, loudly enough to drown the rest, and the vampires who joined her house took it up, so that the Hollow Choir was a name before it was an organization. She wanted silence. It was her one great want, and she spent forty years of her second life failing to get it. Mamaan vanished in 2280 BCE and has not been sighted since. She did not look for him, and the Choir took her name instead.
The third verse is about the water. "Where she walks the river follows, and what it takes it does not give back." This one is nearly true. The ability the Choir called Surface Tide, a secondary gift of hers beside the mind-reading, drew water out of rivers, wells and ditches and ran it across the ground in a low flat sheet to the height of a man's waist. It knocked people off their feet, filled cellars, and took the footing from a charging man in the moment he most needed it. It cost her. Her lips cracked, her skin dried, and for a day after a big tide she drank until she was ill. The ballad credits her with poisoning the wells of a dozen towns, which she did not do on that scale, though she fouled enough of them, to hide where the Choir had been feeding, that the story stuck.
In 2263 BCE, on a reed ferry landing below the middle river, she first met Dhakaa Rania, the Hollow Torch, a vampire slayer who had come down from the hills with a reed-shafted bow. The ballad gives him a verse: "A hill man with a bench leg and no mind at all." She knew what it meant. When he stepped off the boat she reached for his thoughts and found nothing but a flat roar, like standing near a waterfall. It was the quietest thing she had ever met. She put a tide across the landing and took his legs, and he came up out of the reeds and put an arrow through her sleeve. She left. She did not, afterward, pretend she had been alarmed, and she did not tell the Choir why the encounter had pleased her.
Dedea Yuraesh, the Sable Regent, as the Choir called her, fought him for eleven years. She never tried especially hard to kill him, and the Choir wondered at it. In 2257 BCE a fever put him in bed at his own shrine for a season, and she knew it, because a boy in the shrine's kitchen thought of nothing else. She let the season pass. It is the only mercy in the record of her whole career, and the ballad has no verse for it. What she said, according to a member of the Choir who survived her, was only that a war needed two, and then she resumed her humming.
The eleventh verse, which only good singers attempt, is about Rabhaita. It was a brick town on a river terrace with a stepped well, and she chose it because the well went down a long way. She raised the whole well up the street in 2252 BCE, a roaring flood at the height of his waist, and he walked through it with the bad knee and an ash-wood arrow in his teeth. He loosed from three paces, through the heart, into a woman who had wanted quiet and now had it. She was sixty-eight. The Hollow Choir stopped humming for a month, and then it started again, somewhat off the key. Her body was burned on the terrace.
The ballad ends with a verse about the river: "It rose for her and it fell for her, and it still does." The Bhadeini boatmen mean that the river floods every year. They do not seem to mind that this was true before she was born. An old ferryman there once told a visitor that on quiet nights, when the flats are low, you can still hear someone humming off-key in the reeds, and that he thought it was a heron.
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