Fengwei Qin

Fengwei Qin, the Gaunt Sovereign, was a charmer of the Sable Covenant whose body warned him of every blow a heartbeat early, and who therefore could never enjoy a crowd. Turned in 2876 BCE at the Yellow River, he lasted fifteen years in the Vampireverse before a ferryman's daughter found the one room where the warning failed.

The Held Breath was not a comfortable thing to carry. Fengwei Qin felt it first as a prickle at the back of his neck, then in the skin of his forearms, a single bright tightening a heartbeat before any blade, club or thrown stone arrived, and it never allowed him to be certain which direction the danger lay in. In an empty room it was a gift, the best he knew. In a market it was hail. A raised hand, a child reaching for a fruit, a woman swinging a pail: each of them rang in him, and by the end of a busy morning he would be standing against a wall with his eyes shut and his breath held, which was where the name came from. He scratched his forearms raw. He slept, when he slept, in a grain bin with one door. He never in his life enjoyed a festival. He had been born in 2896 BCE at Minghan, a hill fort in the Yellow River Basin, in what is now China, in the era of the First Night, and the gift, or the early shape of it, was already there. His mother was the keeper of the fort's small temple, and he performed there as a boy in the processions, drumming and stamping and turning on the beat; he was said to be extraordinary, because he never once collided with anybody. The truth was that he could feel when another performer was about to step into his place. What he wanted then, and for the rest of his short life, was quiet. He wanted a house with a wall on every side and nobody in it. For a boy in a temple procession it was an expensive wish. He was turned in 2876 BCE at the age of twenty, on the river road below Minghan, and the maker is a blank. Nobody in the Sable Covenant would speak of it, he never did, and the few accounts that exist contradict one another so entirely that they should be set aside. What is certain is that he came out of that night with a thin face and a new hunger, and that he found, within a season, that his gift worked in a different way when he was no longer afraid of dying. It sharpened. It also took away what little peace he had had. The Covenant, which held the river roads at night, made him its charmer, because nothing else was safe, and the roads soon called him the Gaunt Sovereign. Bribes were cheaper than fights, and he was a very good talker. He could persuade a toll-keeper to unbar a gate by sounding bored, and a merchant to move his mules by night by sounding sensible. He took no pleasure in cruelty, and in those years he was one of the few vampires of the basin about whom a ferryman might say a mild word. He first saw Weiming Han in 2866 BCE, on the evening he killed a man. The man had been a vampire slayer of the Vigil of Yellow River Basin, a hard-faced fellow with a bronze sickle-sword, and he had been running for the ferry at Yufeng landing with a wound in his side when Fengwei Qin let him go. It was not mercy. The slayer was dying and would take longer about it on the road. Fengwei stood on the far bank to watch the end, and he saw the girl come down off the shrine path with the man across her back, singing about a goat. Then she looked across the water and waved at him. He had not been waved at in years. It confused his sense completely, because there was nothing in it to read. She crossed in her father's boat. They spoke until the stars turned, and he remembered, in the odd fixed way that a vampire remembers, that they spoke about his mother's temple, and the price of dried fish, and whether a ferryman's daughter could be trusted. She was eighteen, and she was easy company. When she held out her hand at last he took it, because it would have been rude not to, and he felt nothing at all until her thumb touched his wrist. Then the whole inside of his arm lit up. A slayer's mark, laid on the skin, was one of the things the Covenant knew would hurt a vampire, and it was not in the old warnings that it could be delivered as a courtesy. He drew back, looked at the blister, and told her calmly that he would not underestimate her again. It was a lie, though a kindly one, for in the five years that followed he did so often. Those years were a slow, ugly comedy. She came for him in a dozen small ways: by walking into camps of the Covenant singing and by sitting down at his tables, and by sending him plums. He tried to have her killed three times and each time his hirelings returned with a story about a conversation. He tried to avoid her, and she appeared at the next ferry. He learned, to his irritation, that he enjoyed being pursued by someone who talked. By 2861 BCE he had given up trying to stay away. When her message came to Yuzhaoqin, a go-between's cheerful message about a harvest feast and a gift of dried plums, he went because he was curious, and because the Covenant had run out of better ideas. He knew about the barge, in the way a wounded animal knows about a trap. He told himself that the festival noise was a screen for his own movements. In fact it was the thing she needed, for in that din of drums, a hundred torches on the quay and the shouting of the crowd, the Held Breath fired in every direction at once, and he could not have said where a blow was coming from. He stood on the deck with his hands over his ears. She walked toward him over the planks, humming. The barge was soaked with lamp oil. Fire is the other thing the Covenant knew to fear, and it came down from the quay in a long bright arc, and the prickle in his skin told him, at last, with perfect confidence, that it was coming from everywhere. He was thirty-five and had been in the Vampireverse fifteen years. In the lodging he had rented in the lower town the Covenant found the bowl of dried plums on the one shelf he never used, unopened, with the string still tied.