Hazinai Hakaon

Hazinai Hakaon, called The Bloodless Mask, was a temple astronomer of the Levant who became a vampire in 2833 BCE and spent six centuries counting heartbeats. A thief with a sling, and a pulse too faint to find, ended his work in 2197 BCE.

"He knew you were afraid before you did," Dumaq the water-seller told a palace scribe, years afterwards, when the scribe asked what the Bloodless Mask had been like. "He would stand at the end of the lane with his head tilted, like a man listening to a flute in another house, and then he would say your name and ask if you were hungry." Dumaq was not a man given to flights of language. He had sold water at the gate of Yahtirkaon for forty years and had survived it by not looking up. The scribe wrote the remark down because it was the only thing anyone said about Hazinai Hakaon that sounded as though it came from a person who had met him. He had been born in 2877 BCE in Yahtirkaon itself, a walled city-state in the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, to a family of lamp-trimmers who kept the temple lights. The temple took him on at nine to carry water to the astronomers' roof and he never left. By the time he was forty he was the senior reader of the star-tables, a man who counted things for a living and was good at it. If the word had existed, he would have been called a scientist; as it did not, he was called careful. He kept long rows of tally marks on clay, not only of stars but of everything: how many days a flood lasted, how many breaths a sleeping child drew in a hundred beats of the water-measure, how fast a dying man's pulse ran and then did not. It was the last of these that began to interest him, and the interest grew. He was forty-four in 2833 BCE when he made the journey that decided the rest of his life. A copy of a star-table had reached Yahtirkaon from a city on the lower rivers, and he joined a donkey caravan going east to check it against the original, which took the better part of two months on the road. There he met Dama Zuishash, the First Hunger, a long-lived person who fed on blood and who had been alive, by every account, since the cities began. The meeting was not chance, though Hazinai pretended it was. He had heard a rumour in the astronomers' quarter that some people did not die when they ought to, and he had gone looking for the rumour. Dama made him that year. Hazinai said afterward that it was a trade, and the trade was fair. He did not dwell on what he had given. Dama was destroyed in 2789 BCE by a rival house, and the news reached Hazinai by clay letter the following year. He read it, folded it, and went on with his tallies. He came home to the Levant with a taste for cities, and he found his place in The Velvet Circle, a loose company of long-lived people who kept the coastal towns fed without drawing attention. It paid in privacy. Hazinai attended their gatherings in a mask of pale lime plaster, shaped to his face and worn smooth on the inside rim, partly because the Circle favoured masks and partly because he did not care to have his colour looked at. People started to call him the Bloodless Mask, and he liked it more than he let on. For centuries he kept to the work he understood, which was watching. The gift that made him useful was called Pulse Hunter, and it was physical, a trait of the body like a keen ear or a long reach. He could feel a heartbeat through a wall. Through two hand-spans of mud-brick he could say whether the sleeper beyond it was male or female, young or old, frightened or at rest. It cost him dearly in crowds. In a market or a temple court the pulses piled up in his head until he could not tell one from the next, and he stuffed his ears with wool and wax and hunted only in empty hours: the dead of night, the lanes between the lime kilns, the cellar under the water-gate granary of Yahtirkaon where he kept his tallies. The cellar's walls were scratched from floor to ceiling with rows of marks, one row per night, one mark per heart he had counted. He had not killed all of them. That was the part he found hard to explain to anyone who asked. For more than six hundred years of The First Night and the age after it, nothing much troubled him in the Vampireverse, where a careful man could be left alone. Slayers came and went along the coast; he kept out of their way, sleeping a night here and a night there, and he outlived most of them by simply being in a different building. In 2207 BCE that stopped. A broad man with a flat voice came to Yahtirkaon, following a mother's complaint about her lost boy, and found the granary cellar by the simple method of walking along the water-gate wall until a door sounded wrong. Hazinai heard him from three streets off. He heard the heart in that man's chest, strong and steady and strangely slow, and he understood a second too late that the man was not afraid. The Breaker's Blow took the cellar door off its pins. A sling-stone of silvered shot, which burned like a coal, struck him in the shoulder, and he went out through the water-gate and into the canal. It was the first time in six centuries that he had run. The man was Yahmora Bahaai, the Steadfast Vow, a vampire slayer of the Levant who had been a thief on the desert road, and for ten years Hazinai could not shake him. He learned the man's habits. The slayer spoke to doorways before he went through them. He hummed a flat four-bar tune. And, as Hazinai found out to his cost, he could make his pulse vanish. In the autumn of 2200 BCE, in a cistern at the edge of a hill town, he lay for an hour and listened for a heartbeat that should have been there, found only a faint flutter like a moth against a wall, and walked away convinced that the slayer was dead of the cold. He was wrong. It is the only error of that kind he is known to have made, and he did not forgive himself for it. He ended in 2197 BCE at Yahelashon, a hill town where he had gone to ground in a house whose door had never been locked. He heard the nails go in. Each blow of the hammer sounded in the threshold, a short iron note, and he felt each one in the soles of his feet like a pain in a tooth. A vampire could not cross iron in a sill, and he was standing on the wrong side of it. The slayer came through the door he had taken off its pins, and held the ash-wood the way a man holds a tool he has used before. Hazinai had time to think that this one had listened carefully to him for ten years, and that it was a kind of courtesy. He was six hundred and eighty years old. The mask was taken down from its peg by the door by the man who had ended Hazinai Hakaon, and was not seen in that house again. The tallies were left in the cellar at Yahtirkaon, and a scribe of the following generation used the backs of the clay to write a grain-list.