Ela Haenhaai

Ela Haenhaai, the Black Widow, was a vampire broker of the Weeping Assembly on the Levant coast, a ruined grain merchant turned in 1187 BCE who sold what others stole. His body came apart into shrieking wings at a cost he tallied carefully, until Zinashai Elsidyaha found his last vault in 1157 BCE.

Every time Ela Haenhaai came apart, something failed to come back. It was never much. In the first year it was the taste of salt. After a dozen scatterings he lost the hearing in his right ear, and the sense of how cold a stone was before he touched it, and the habit of dreaming, and the thin ridge on his left thumbnail that his father had called the family seal. He kept the tally in his head the way another man would keep a ledger, because he was a broker and the habit of counting was the only discipline he trusted. This was Belfry Scatter, the thing in him that the people of the Levant named for its noise: the body breaking into a hundred palm-sized winged pieces that screamed like a shelf of bronze bells thrown down a stair, and gathering again somewhere else, a little thinner. It also left him hungry for days. He avoided it the way a careful man avoids selling his own furniture. When he used it, it was because the alternative was worse. He had been born in 1220 BCE at Kayahai, a temple town on the coast of what is now Lebanon, in the Levant, the son of a grain merchant whose family sign hung over the door of a store as wide as a threshing floor. He grew up smelling barley dust and lamp smoke. He learned weights before he learned letters: a cord around his neck carried a set of silver weights, from the great one down to the one that matched a thumbnail's worth, and he checked them against a standard at the temple every new moon. He wanted one thing, and he wanted it with the patience of a creditor. He wanted the family sign back over the door of the Kayahai grain house, which his father had lost in a bad year and which, at thirty, he had lost again. The bad years came in a row. A famine took the harvest, raiders took two caravans, creditors took the rest. In 1187 BCE, aged thirty-three, he stood in the empty store with a debt on his name and an offer, delivered by a tall visitor who had arrived with the winter wind off the sea. The visitor was Yahashon Eltiron, the Ivory Tyrant. He did not frighten Ela. He sat on a sack and explained, as one broker to another, that there was a way to live long enough to collect on every debt that anyone owed, and that all he asked in return was service. Ela volunteered. He did not ask the price, which was the only bad bargain of his life, and it turned out to be an expensive one: the revenge he wanted was finished in three nights, and the service went on for thirty years. Yahashon Eltiron is alive today. He never asked afterward what became of his creation, and nobody has found out whether that was neglect or a kind of respect. In the years of The Bronze Vigil, Ela Haenhaai rose in the Weeping Assembly, which held its meetings in houses of mourning because nobody asks a mourner why he has come. It suited him. He wore a black shawl to funerals, the sign of a broker among the bereaved, and the Sidkaa quays gave him the name of the Black Widow, which he disliked and kept. He bought and sold what the Vampireverse could not obtain for itself: temple plate, seals, the names of the dead, an introduction to a magistrate. He held eight vaults for the goods, and he never lied about their contents. His deals were honest in the narrowest sense, and he was proud of that. In the fever year of 1160 BCE he did what a broker does with a market in distress. The sickness had closed a lane at Sidkaa, and the healers had marked the dead, and a man in a black shawl who carried a boy out of a sick-house at midnight excited no comment. Except that one of the dead woke and watched him. He did not know it until he found her at the grain store by the harbor gate a few weeks later, among the sacks where he stored the crated relics: a thin woman with a sling. Three stones hit him in the chest before he understood what they were. Two of his ribs gave. He scattered, and in the cloud she came in with a knife, shouting, and when the pieces gathered on the far side of the store he was missing the nail of his left thumb. She had it in her fist. It was the first time in his twenty-seven years as a vampire that anything had cost him a part he could see. He tried to buy her off, because it was what he knew. A bag of silver went to the pyre site where she lived, with a note that said only that the sender regretted the sickness. She walked to the harbor wall and threw it into the water without counting it. Zinashai Elsidyaha, the vampire slayer who called herself the Burning Vow, had no price. He had never met anyone in whom that was true, and he found, to his annoyance, that he admired it. Over the next three years she followed his purchases. His clerks drank, as clerks do, and the Weeping Assembly drew away from a broker who had drawn a hunter. He gave up the grain store, and then the second vault, and the third. In the end he went south, to Sidsidashath, where the eighth vault stood in a harbor tower on the rocks. She found it in 1157 BCE. He heard the hammering through the stone, a muffled stroke at a time, and understood from the rhythm what it was. Nine iron nails, one after another, into the sill of the only door. He had weights for most things but not for that. He went up to the roof to see, and found the hatch gone and the sky grey. He tried Belfry Scatter, for the last time, because the alternative was worse. The pieces rose, hunting a gap that did not close, and found the east window she had left open, and the east was where the sun came up. What the woman found on the floor afterward was grey, like the dust under a millstone. The set of silver weights was lying in it, complete except for the smallest. She lived on twenty-four more years and did not speak of it. The harbor-master entered the weights in his tally at a fair price, and noted, in the margin, that one was missing.