The harp was cedar, with gut strings and a bronze pin at the shoulder, and it belonged to Hattuus Pitarili for most of a century and a half. A patron had given it to them at the court where they sang, the sort of petty court that kept a singer for the sake of its dinners, and it was heavier than it looked. Hattuus carried it from place to place on a strap across the back, rewound the strings by feel, and talked to it on bad nights. When the instrument was finally buried, it lay across their chest in the dark.
It had started out as a way to eat. Hattuus Pitarili was born in 2115 BCE at Zizia, a caravan stop on the high road in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, to a mother who sold dried fruit to drovers and a father nobody mentioned. The child had a voice, and the inn paid in bread to hear it. By the time Hattuus was twenty they were singing at a small court in the hills, where the local lord found that a mild, clear tenor could settle a quarrel better than a guard. The skill in it was not sweetness, it was timing. The singer watched the room and let the song find the one person who needed to be calmed, and everybody else relaxed along with them. That was the whole of the charmer's art, and Hattuus had it before the war touched them, in the long bronze years the slayers called The Bronze Vigil, when roads were unsafe after dark and nobody asked why. The singer saw it differently. To a singer, a road at night was a theatre with no ticket price, and the audience arrived hungry for company, tired of walking, and trusting. They sat down.
The fever came in 2077 BCE, when Hattuus was thirty-eight and had been coughing since the winter. They lay in the lord's guest room for eleven days and expected to die there. On the twelfth night a visitor sat at the bedside and said there was a different ending. This was Piipa Tishashaili, who had been a vampire for two and a half centuries and who spoke so quietly that Hattuus later could not recall the voice. Piipa made them a vampire that night. It was a plain exchange of blood and fever, with nothing in it a physician could not have described, and it left a body that would not age at the usual rate and would never again like the sun. The Ivory Court, the house of the Vampireverse that held Anatolia's trade roads at night, took Hattuus in. Piipa vanished in 2043 BCE and has not been seen since, and Hattuus never found out why, and never liked being asked.
The gift that came with the turning was a bodily one. Hattuus called it the Wolf Hour, and it arrived like cramp. The jaw lengthened, the shoulders swelled, and hair came up along the spine, until the singer was something much closer to an animal than a person, able to run all night and hit hard enough to shake a wall. It cost the voice. A day after every change, Hattuus could not speak above a rasp, and for a singer that was the real price. They rationed it. Most of Hattuus's work for the Court was done with the voice alone, singing drovers to sleep at the fire and feeding quietly afterward, and the Wolf Hour was held for emergencies. The drovers called the singer the Weeping Marrow, because the songs were sad and because by morning there was usually something missing.
In 2061 BCE, in the stable yard behind the inn at Zizia, the emergency arrived. A lamp-keeper called Yayaa Shapihata, a slim woman with a copper dagger and a habit of eating dried figs, had noticed how many sleepers failed to wake. Hattuus saw her on the second night and let her follow. In the yard the Wolf Hour came on, and the vampire struck first. It should have finished the matter. The woman was somehow already moving, down and sideways, as if the blow had been announced, and the dagger went through the harp strings and across the singer's ribs in the same pass. Hattuus left by the east road with a ruined instrument and the first real respect for an enemy since the turning. The woman seemed to stop breathing in the instant before each strike, and Hattuus had never seen anything like it.
They met seven more times. The slayer found Hattuus in a cellar, at a ford and on a snow-bound pass, and each time the singer took more care. The vampire slayer was a nuisance, tireless in the way that stubborn people are, and reliably there. Hattuus had a vampire's patience, but even that wore thin, and there were nights when they found themself listening for the footsteps. By then the harp had been mended with new gut and a sinew splice, and it sounded different, a little lower. Hattuus left the splice unfixed.
The matter ended at Alaksu in 2049 BCE, in a copper-working town where the Court had a house. Yayaa Shapihata followed them into the casting hall, which was full of smoke, and for an hour the smoke seemed to help her. Then a vent gave way and she coughed. Hattuus killed her on the casting floor, and carried her out in the grey light, and laid her down. The vampire did not feel victorious. They felt the way one feels when the dripping in a quiet room finally stops.
The Court survived the slayer by a century, and Hattuus survived the Court's best years. In 1946 BCE, a company of quarrymen and hunters from the Vigil of Anatolia found the house under Rulaili and sealed it with stone. Hattuus was a hundred and sixty-nine. They did not fight the masons. They sat down, took the harp across their knees, and tried a chord. The strings, mended and rewound across a hundred and thirty-one years as a vampire, held, and the chord rang on after the last stone went in.
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