Dema Kallykthoos

Dema Kallykthoos, called the Fallen Hound, was a thief from a river village in the Aegean who became a vampire slayer in 1807 BCE. She never looked a stranger in the face, which is how she survived forty-two years against creatures who could make a witness forget.

The lid of the cooking pot was cracked, and every autumn Dema Kallykthoos mended it with pitch and a wrapped thread, though by then she could have bought ten lids. It was a clay lid, with a notch for the ladle, and it had been her mother's. People who came to her house in the later years of her life found the pot on the hearth and the lid beside it, patched in at least six places, and took it for meanness. It was the opposite. She had stolen from half the houses on the river and knew precisely what a thing was worth in a stranger's hands. A lid nobody would bother to steal was the only kind she trusted. Dema Kallykthoos was born in 1828 BCE in Therkales, a river village in the Aegean part of what is now Greece, in the years of The Bronze Vigil. Her father poled reed rafts across a ford and her mother mended pots, which is how the lid came to the family. The household was always a season behind on oil. Dema learned to steal at nine, from the neighbors' jars, and she learned that the whole craft was in the floor. The houses of the river were mud brick over timber, and she found that if she walked on the outside edges of her feet along the line where the joists lay, nothing spoke under her. She later called it Ghost Step, and every thief on that river knew a version of it. Hers was better because she took it seriously. It was only technique, learned by repetition, and it cost her a pair of knees that began to ache at thirty. At nineteen she fell from the roof of a harbor storehouse with the guard's dog on her heels and broke the leg that never quite set. The gang she ran with thought it was a fine joke. The Fallen Hound, they called her, after the dog that had treed her and the way she limped, and the name stayed even after the gang was gone. She wanted, in those years, only a share in a river boat of her own, so that she could stop climbing. She had put aside seven ingots of bronze toward it when the other thing happened. In 1807 BCE, at twenty-one, she broke into a manor on the coast road and found the household at supper, sitting upright in the lamplight and singing the same four lines of a song over and over. None of them looked up. A girl of ten asked Dema politely whether she was the new cook. She took the silver and the girl's bracelet and left, and in the road she realized that nobody in that room would remember her visit, and that this was not a thing that happened to people. She was not like them, and she knew why. She had spent her whole life not looking at faces. A thief watches hands and feet and the latch on the door, and Dema had never held a stranger's eyes in her life. That was the call, if it was a call. No teacher gave it to her, and the Vigil of Aegean, which kept few records of its humbler recruits, did not even write down the year until later. She worked out the rest on her own, the whole business of being a vampire slayer. She learned that the thing that had made the household forget could be kept from crossing a threshold with a line of coarse salt, and that a salted doorway held it more surely than any bronze. She carried a gourd of salt on her belt and a bronze sickle-sword on her back, a short curved blade she had bought off a boatwright's widow with the last of her seven ingots. The boat share was not mentioned again. Over the next twelve years she hunted without ceremony, picking out the manors that had gone quiet, finding the oldest servant who still remembered a name, and going on from there. What the Slayerverse would later credit her with was mostly dull work: she followed things back to their holes. In 1795 BCE, at Lykariis, a harbor settlement on the coast, she met the one who had started the song. Kalstoos Demkaleuos kept a dispensary there, in a white house above the quay, with a green stain on her fingers from the herbs she ground. She turned in the doorway and smiled, a slow, tilted smile, and Dema looked at the hands. The hands were on the table. There was a mortar, and a pestle with a worn notch where the thumb went. She swung the sickle-sword at the table, not the face, and cut a gash in the wood and a deeper one in the arm that came up to meet it. The woman went out through the back, over the quay wall and into the harbor, and by the time Dema had limped to the water there was a boat with no lamp lit pulling away. They did not speak. It was perhaps the quietest first meeting either of them ever had. Thirteen years followed. Dema learned that this one was known as the Eternal Choir, because she kept a house of the forgetful, people who had no memory of why they sang, and that she was something like a physician to them. The Fallen Hound never found the house twice in the same place. It ended in 1782 BCE at Demphion, in a manor with one door and a flat roof. Dema salted the threshold and every shutter, and she took up the roof hatch at first light with a hook and a rope and let the day in. The Choir stood in the beam as if measuring it. Then she smiled, and Dema, for the first and last time, looked at her face, because by then there was nothing the face could do. It was an ordinary face. It was older than the house. She lived on in Therkales for seventeen years and did not take another hunt. She died in 1765 BCE at sixty-three, of a cough that came with a wet winter. Those who cleared the house found the lid on the table with the patching already done for the coming autumn.