The sling was made of goat hair, plaited by his mother in the mountain shrine of Tadaran, and it took her the whole of a winter. Faurius Rabaes was seven when he was given it. The cord was a hand's breadth too long for him, so he wound the slack twice round his wrist, and that habit, he told a woman later, was the only mistake he never corrected. He killed a hare with it that spring. By twelve he could break a clay jar at sixty paces. By twenty he had used it to settle debts for the river cults of the plateau, from a distance and in daylight, and he was paid in barley and bronze rings. It was the one thing he owned that anyone would have wanted.
He was born in 1927 BCE, to a mother who kept goats and a father who kept the shrine's lamp, and the life he fell into after leaving was a short one. A hired knife was an honest trade on the plateau of the Bronze Vigil: the cults of the river quarreled over water-rights and fishing weirs, and someone had to be paid to end the quarrels quietly. Faurius took the work because he was good at it and because he liked the traveling. He was, by every account, a bad man to cross and a poor companion on a long road, since he whistled through his teeth and never said where he was going.
The change came in 1907 BCE, in the Iran of long ago, on the road home from a wedding. He was twenty. The wedding party had been twenty-three strong, mule-drivers, musicians, a bride's aunt, and by the river ford something had come out of the reeds and taken eleven of them in a few breaths. He never saw it clearly. What he remembered was a pressure behind his breastbone, like a hand on a drum, that had begun to tighten a quarter of a mile before the screaming, and that did not stop. When it was over he was the only guest still standing, and the sling was still wound round his wrist. He walked home alone, and it was a month before he dared speak.
The sense, which the Vigil would later call Grave Compass, was a bodily thing, no more mystical than the nose. It came as an ache in the molars and a pull on the breastbone, stronger the closer a vampire stood. It told him which way and roughly how far, and it told him nothing else. From a street away it was a hum. In the same room it was a clamp. He used it with the sling: a clay pellet case-hardened with a skin of beaten silver, which he made in a clay mold in his lodging, and which could take a vampire in the throat at fifty paces if he was patient. The silver was dear. He never carried more than eleven shots, and he counted them out in the dark.
He answered to no one, and in the river cults of the Persian Plateau he was known as The Ember Reaper, for the red-brown cord he wore wound at the wrist. The Vigil of the plateau sent him two letters and a dozen messengers in the first year, offering a house, a salary and a rank, and he declined all of them with the same short phrase: he did not take orders from anyone who had not seen the ford. That left him free to choose his targets, and he chose well, but he had no one to back him, and he never trained a pupil. He killed three vampires in as many years, all small, all alone. Then he met the fourth, and she was another matter.
Fadarad Kafafaes ruled a night market in Raurush on behalf of the Winter House, and he first met her there in 1905 BCE, two years after he had started to track her. He walked in with the Grave Compass clamping his chest and found a market in which nothing looked wrong: lamps, bread, singers, merchants selling plum-paste and lapis, and at the heart of it a gaunt woman in a plain gray gown who was smiling at him. His eyes told him she was a harmless old widow. His sense told him otherwise, and for the first time in his working life the two disagreed so badly that he had to shut his eyes to think. He shot blind, from the hip, and the pellet took her across the upper arm. He was Faurius Rabaes, an assassin by trade and, by then, a vampire slayer of the Slayerverse by accident, and he had not planned on being outwitted by a woman in a gray gown. She did not scream. She said something quietly to a guard, and the guard, who was holding a spear, forgot what he was holding it for. Faurius backed out through a curtain of dried fish and ran.
The two crossed paths four times in the nine years that followed. Each time the sling gave him one clean shot and each time he took it, and each time she remained on her feet. On the third he thought he had killed her. A weal across her cheek would not close for a year, and she wore a veil to the market after that. On the fourth he had no shots left and walked away. He did not hate her. He thought of her as the kind of weather that a man learns to dress for.
In the winter of 1896 BCE he took a fever at an inn on the river road, aged thirty-one, and was dead in nine days. Eleven years of the war had cost him most of his teeth and a good part of his hearing in the left ear. He had never had much of a plan. The innkeeper's wife went through his pack, found the sling, and sold it for a measure of barley to a trader going up toward Raurush, and in the market there the cord, with its slack still plaited for a boy's wrist, hung from a nail within a month.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
