Dhakaa Rania

Dhakaa Rania, the Hollow Torch, was a gift-less shrine porter from the hills who became a vampire slayer of the Indus and Ganges Plain at thirty-two. He fought by sheer rage and a reed-shafted bow, destroyed the Sable Regent in 2252 BCE, and died old in his bed.

The girl who first saw him at work was called Sarava, and she was eleven, and she told the story for the rest of a very long life. It was a wet evening in 2266 BCE at the mountain shrine of Makaesh. She had gone to the storehouse behind the hall to fetch lamp oil and found the shrine's porter standing in the middle of the floor holding the leg of a broken bench, and at his feet a thin, pale person who had been tall and was now nothing in particular. The porter was breathing like a bellows. His eyes, she said, were open and looked at nothing, as though a lamp had been lit in an empty room. Then he saw her and put the bench leg down very carefully and said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, that she should go and fetch the elders and that she should not touch the oil. His name was Dhakaa Rania. He had been born at Makaesh, in the hills of what is now India, in 2298 BCE, and he had carried water and firewood up its steps since he was old enough to carry anything. He was thirty-two that evening, broad in the back, with a left knee that had never been right since a fall on the snow stair, and a habit of rubbing his thumb three times over the notch of any bow he picked up before he would draw it. What he wanted was modest. He wanted a bench of his own on the sunny side of the hall and nothing to do for a week. He had no gift of the body that anyone had ever noticed. He could not move the earth or read a mind or heal a cut. What he could do, when a certain thing happened in him, was fight. The elders of the Vigil of Indus and Ganges Plain came up the mountain in the next weeks to look at the storehouse and the pale thing on the floor, which they identified at once. They asked him how he had done it. He said he did not remember. They called him to the Vigil, gave him a reed-shafted hunting bow, and made him a vampire slayer on the spot, a human one, with the same training and nerve and craft as anyone and nothing besides. No teacher took him in hand. There was no one nearby with the experience to do it. What the elders gave him instead was a name for the thing in him, which they called the Berserk Rush, and some rules about how to use it. The Rush was not a power. It was a surrender to rage, a narrowing, in which pain and fear fell away and the body did the best work it knew. It came without warning. It left him afterward shaking and sick for a day, unable to hold a cup. They called him the Hollow Torch, for the way he burned and the way nobody was in the room while he did. For the next years of The First Night he worked the long river road beneath the mountains and broke the vampire houses of the plain one at a time. The Slayerverse files him as a stormer, a man who goes straight in. He was no tactician. He was a patient, ugly fighter who spent more care on his arrows than on his own meals, tipping them with ash-wood, sharpening them on a river stone he carried in a pouch, and he learned his enemy's weaknesses the way a farmer learns weather: fire, ash and hawthorn through the heart, and a good deal of luck. Among the villages he got a reputation for plain speech. He told them exactly how many he thought would die, and was usually right. In 2263 BCE, at a reed ferry landing on the lower river, he first met Dedea Yuraesh, the Sable Regent, who ran the Hollow Choir of the plain. She had been twenty-eight when she was made, and was nearly thirty years a vampire by then, and she had the habit of knowing what her opponents were about to do. She had read his thoughts as he stepped off the boat. She found, she said afterward, only a roar, a torch in a hollow, nothing to hold. The Rush was a poor thing to read. She called up the river instead. Water rose out of the bank and ran across the landing in a sheet that took his legs from under him and pushed him back into the reeds, and he went into the Rush with a river on top of him and shot an arrow through her sleeve. She went away, and so did he, and neither was ready to call the matter closed. They fought in some form for eleven more years, across a dozen landings and towns, and each had learned the other well enough to dislike what they saw. Dedea had her gift of Mind Reading, and he had a mind she could not enter in a fight. He did not have her tide. When he was at his worst, in 2257 BCE, a fever laid him in the shrine at Makaesh for a season, and he told the elders to leave the bow where he could see it. She did not take the occasion to finish him, which the Vigil noted and could not explain. The end came at Rabhaita, a brick town on a river terrace with a stepped well, in 2252 BCE. She pulled the whole well up through the street. He went into the Rush in water to the waist and walked through it, with the bad knee and the ash-wood arrow in his teeth, and put the arrow into her heart from three paces away. They burned her on the terrace. He sat down on the steps of the well afterward and could not stand for a while. Dhakaa Rania lived another twenty-seven years, longer than he had any right to, and died in 2225 BCE at the age of seventy-three, of a fever and old age, at Makaesh. He got his bench. Sarava, by then a grandmother, sat on it with him on warm afternoons, and did not ask him about the storehouse. She had learned, she said, that he did not remember it.