Elashim Sidrahaon

Elashim Sidrahaon, the Crimson Thorn, was a temple courier from a Levantine river village who became a spy, then a vampire slayer who could hear a lie being born. She hunted the Eternal Sovereign across the coast roads and outlived him by twenty-nine years.

Every evening for as long as anyone in Tirashmorai could remember, Elashim Sidrahaon set a bowl of boiled barley on her window sill for a neighbor's one-eyed cat, and every morning she scolded the animal for leaving half of it. The scolding was part of the arrangement. She was a woman of small, fixed habits who happened to be dangerous, and the people who later called her the Crimson Thorn never quite reconciled the two. Tirashmorai was a river village in the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, and she was born there in 2594 BCE, in the age the Slayerverse calls The First Night. She hummed while she worked, always the same four bars of a ferrymen's song, always slightly flat. Her trade was errands. By her teens she was carrying sealed clay tags and bundled tallies between the temple storehouses of the river and the cedar ports on the coast, and in time she carried things that were not written down at all. The gift showed itself early and cost her friends. When a grain factor swore on his mother that a jar was full, something behind her forehead gave a small flat click, like a pebble dropped in an empty bowl, and she knew the sentence had been built on top of a different thought. Later she could take in a crowded room the way other people take in a smell. She never heard words so much as the grain underneath them. It left her with headaches that ran for a day and the occasional nosebleed, and it made her a superb spy, and the Slayerverse remembers the gift as Lie Breaker. The temple stewards who employed her as a courier never knew how many of their rivals' secrets she had simply sat next to. The war found her in 2565 BCE, when she was twenty-nine. A ferry station upriver had gone quiet for three nights, and she was sent to find out why. She found one traveler left alive, a big man in a plain cloak who stood in the doorway of the ferrymen's hall as though he owned it. She could not read him at all. That frightened her more than his size. There was a thought in him, but it was a single flat, patient surface with nothing moving underneath, and she did not yet know that this was how a vampire's mind felt to her. He told her to go home. She broke a table leg across her knee and hit him with it, hard, in the throat, and he looked faintly surprised and then walked out into the dark. His name, she learned later, was Setu Amunsetra. She stood in the hall for an hour holding the splinter. The village elders, who had rarely agreed on anything, decided afterward that anyone who could stand in front of that and not run had been chosen, and the Vigil of Levant sent word to her door that it wanted a vampire slayer and would take the courier. Help came from the north. Tarus Yamuus, the Lantern Warden, had followed a trail of emptied villages down out of Anatolia, through the mountain passes and along the coast, and he arrived in Tirashmorai in that same year with a cracked leather case and a lantern he never lit. He was a careful, dry man who disliked being thanked. He taught her for three years, from 2565 BCE to 2562 BCE, and most of what he taught was about patience: how to stand still in a room until a vampire decided you were furniture, how to lay salt across a threshold so thin that it looked like dust, how to carry a weapon you hoped not to use. Tarus carried an old quarrel of his own with a crowned duelist in the mountains, and it was the one subject on which he lost his composure. She took the olive-wood stake from him, or rather he took her own olive-wood stake and fitted its tip with a cap of beaten silver, and told her that her quarry would not mind the wood nearly as much as the metal. He left in 2562 BCE, once the Eternal Sovereign was done with, and she did not see him again. Word reached her years afterward that he had died at the siege of Titiwaas in 2551 BCE, with his quarrel unsettled. She was forty-three. She hummed the ferrymen's song for a week and burned the lantern's oil in his name, the only time anyone saw her waste anything. The hunt for Setu took three years and covered most of the coast road. He moved the way a tax moves, collecting what he was owed and leaving a gap. She read mercenaries who had been paid off to look away, innkeepers who could not meet her eye, a salt merchant who had never in his life told the truth about weights. She learned that the Eternal Sovereign guarded cedar rafts for a living when he was not feeding and that his employers in the Nile Valley paid by the season, which meant he would come back to the coast every year. He struck her three times in that period. Each blow felt like being hit by a door. His skin shrugged off her knives, and she learned to work on his temper and his habits rather than on his hide. He was bad at lying to her, she noticed, and terrible at being patient with her silence. It ended in 2562 BCE at Baashon, in a cedar press-house at the foot of the hills, in the cold part of the night. She had spent two days laying thread-thin lines of salt across every doorway but one and had left the lamp burning so that he would think the place was empty. When he came through the open door she was crouched in the roof beams with her face wrapped in a wet cloth against the smell of resin. The fight went badly for her until it did not. He broke two of her ribs against a press beam and took two fingers off her left hand with a single closing grip. The stake with its silver cap went in under his breastbone, and the Eternal Sovereign, who had been four hundred and sixty-three years old, said something that she could not make out and was gone before the lamp guttered. Afterward she sat in the resin and laughed until she was sick. The cedar crews found her at dawn. She lived another twenty-nine years, to 2533 BCE, and spent most of them clearing the feeding grounds along the roads. Thirteen in all, by her own tally scratched on the lintel of her door, and each one took longer than it should have because she refused every apprentice who came to her. She said the work was mostly listening, and she did not want anyone listening to her. She wanted, quite specifically, a quiet house, a patch of lentils and the right to be bored. Late in life she got them. Elashim Sidrahaon died in the winter of 2533 BCE of a lung fever in Tirashmorai, at the age of sixty-one, in the house with her tally on the lintel. The neighbors found the barley bowl on the sill, empty for once, and a one-eyed cat, a granddaughter of the first, asleep on her bed. Someone's child kept filling the bowl for years after that, and nobody scolded the cat.