Fengbo Xiu

Fengbo Xiu, the Lantern Torch, was a wall-builder from a hill fort on the Yellow River who gained a vampire slayer's strength by accident and spent three decades hunting one tireless predator. Her reed-shafted bow, snapped and restrung eight times, tells most of the story.

The bow was made for a girl of eleven by an uncle at Yuren who was better at carpentry than at kindness. Mulberry for the limbs, sinew for the backing, a string of twisted hemp, and a quiver of reed-shafted arrows vaned with heron feathers from the marsh below the fort. It was a child's weapon, and for most of Fengbo Xiu's life it was the only bow she owned. She restrung it eight times and broke it twice, and the way it broke is how she learned what her hands had become. She was born at Yuren in 2631 BCE, a hill fort on the Yellow River Basin in what is now China, and grew up to be an engineer before the word had a use. Yuren was a walled place of rammed earth, and she liked walls better than people. She liked the way a wall could be argued with: why it leaned, which side drank the rain, which course of earth had been pounded by a lazy crew. By twenty she was the one whom the fort's headman sent for when a rampart cracked. By twenty-five she had drained the lower terrace and put a stone-lined culvert under the east gate, and she had never once been thanked for it, which she said was the proper reward for drainage. The beam came down in 2601 BCE, when she was thirty. A lintel over the new granary door slipped its seating while eleven people were underneath it, and Fengbo, who was nearest, put her shoulders and both hands under it and held. It weighed as much as a loaded cart. She held it for as long as it took the eleven to crawl out, and she did not feel it start to give or feel it stop, only the grip, which did not tire. That was Mountain Grip. Her hands could close on a doorpost and lift a wagon out of a ditch by its axle, and she could tear a gate from its frame if the pegs were bad. Nobody taught her what it was or what to do with it. A woman from the Vigil of Yellow River Basin came up the hill within the month, having heard what had happened at the granary, and told her what was coming for her kind, which was the vampires who had been hunting the river for as long as the river had had villages. The woman left after one night and was not seen again. That was the whole of the instruction. A vampire slayer of the Slayerverse learned mostly by breaking things. The grip cost her. She ate twice what a man of her size ate. She could no longer sleep with her fists open, and woke most mornings with her fingers curled around some part of the bed. And the bow snapped. The first time was within a week, when a flinch while drawing took the upper limb clean off, and the second was the night after, when she decided it had been an accident. After that she learned to draw it to a hair's width of the full limit and no further, which was the finest piece of engineering she ever did. Few people understand the effort in not using the strength you have. She called it her small work and said it was the only one she was proud of. In The First Night the river towns had no walls to speak of against what hunted them, and the enemy she was given was Bo Bo, the Hollow Judge, of the Obsidian Throne, who had held the lower river for four hundred years and kept a dozen relic vaults in the terrace towns. The first meeting was in 2591 BCE at Qinxiujia, a river village where the vampire had been born, and where, she learned later, they went back at intervals to hold the ferry. She had gone down into a granary cellar with a torch, and the thing that met her at the foot of the steps had known she was coming for some time. They could read blood on the wind. They found her in the dark by the cut on her hand, put her against the wall, and she put the torch into their face. The scar that left was one of the few things anyone could say for certain about Bo Bo afterward. She spent the winter with four cracked ribs and a better theory. The theory was smoke. A vampire who reads the wind cannot read the wind if the wind is thick with pine pitch and wormwood, and she began to carry the stuff in a clay lantern with pierced sides, the lantern from which the Vigil took her name, the Lantern Torch. A young slayer from Anatolia named Tarus Yamuus, called in 2583 BCE, reached Yuren in 2581 BCE after two years on the northern steppe roads with the caravans, a sickle-sword on his back, a splitting headache and an enormous respect for what he had heard. From 2581 BCE to 2575 BCE she taught him. She was not a good teacher. She made him build a wall before she let him fight beside one, and he complained about it, and she told him the wall was the fight. When the six years were over she sent him home with her blessing and a dried-reed map. She kept the bow. By 2573 BCE Fengbo Xiu had spent eighteen years working out how to kill Bo Bo. The vaults at Fengrenming had a great hall with a roof of timber, mats and clay that Bo Bo had never left uncovered in four centuries. Fengbo went in at midnight as bait, with the lantern lit, and she let them find her. Bo Bo came out of the dark and she led them through three halls, stalling, until the grey hour, and went up the inside wall to the ridge. She put both hands under the main beam and lifted. The mats slid, the clay came down in slabs, and the light of the dawn fell into the hall like a dropped plank. Bo Bo ran for the darkest corner. She loosed a reed-shafted arrow, which pinned a sleeve to a post, and held them there. It took less than a minute. She lived five years after that, in the gatehouse at Yuren, with the bow hanging over the door. She never strung it again. She died in 2568 BCE, aged sixty-three, of a wet-season fever that took half the fort, and she was the only one who had asked not to be carried out until the rain stopped. Within a year the children of the fort had borrowed the bow to shoot at gourds, and it split on the eleventh day, which was, everyone agreed, the right end for a bow.