Hormian Shataad

Hormian Shataad, the Sunlit Blade, was a marsh hunter from the Persian Plateau who became a vampire slayer in 1303 BCE and spent thirty-three years harrying the Winter House across Iran. He never killed his rival Darbaan Kaartaush, and the rival kept a piece of him.

The spear was nine hand-spans of cornel wood with a head of banded grey flint, and by the time Hormian Shataad died it had been rehafted six times and reheaded twice. He liked to say it was the same spear anyway, the way a river is the same river. His father had cut the first shaft at Tafaius, the hill fort above the marshes, for taking geese in the reeds, and the boy carried it years before he was trusted with anything sharper. The later Vigil inventories list it only as the stone-tipped spear, and nobody who saw it took it for a weapon of any grandeur. It was a hunter's tool, and Hormian kept it that way. Before he stepped through any door he pressed his thumb to the flint edge three times, a habit that cost him a good deal of skin and that he never once explained. Tafaius sat on a shoulder of rock with the marsh below it, and the marsh was where Hormian, born in 1333 BCE in what is now Iran, learned the one trade he ever properly had. A marsh tracker reads what the birds will not say. He learned to read a broken reed as a sentence and, harder, to leave none of his own. What the Vigil later named Trackless Stalk was nothing mysterious, only a way of walking: weight on the outer edge of the foot, toes lifted clear of the mud, each step set on a root or a stone or the lee of a tussock, and a bundle of cut sedge dragged behind to brush out whatever was left. Done properly it took an hour to cross a field. It also ruined his knees by forty, and he walked the last twenty years of his life with a hitch the fort children imitated. His wants were modest. He wanted to be left to the marsh, to watch his sister's sons grow fat on goose, and to die at Tafaius with grass to look at. The granary at Tafaius burned in 1303 BCE. For two winters the fort had been losing a watchman or a herdsman every few weeks, and the grain store, a long mud-brick shed with one door, had become a place the garrison had stopped looking at. This was the Bronze Vigil, as the age is now called, and bronze was for officers; the watchmen had bronze knives and were no use. Hormian, thirty years old, went in with a torch one evening to find out what the men would not. Someone shut the door behind him and fired the thatch. He was found at dawn under a fall of burned sacks, not dead, with sunlight lying across his face through the hole where the roof had been. He told the story once and flatly, and the headman's wife added the part about the sun, which is why the Winter House, who had cause to remember it, came to call him the Sunlit Blade. Nobody taught him what to do next. He had no mentor and no teacher. He took the spear from where he had left it by the door, buried what could be buried, and walked out to find the Vigil of Persian Plateau, a loose company of trackers and fort-keepers who had fought on those hills longer than the fort had stood. He had become a vampire slayer without anyone asking him, and in the Slayerverse's own records he is a plain human one: no gift, no strength beyond a hunter's, and he knew it. He met Darbaan Kaartaush the following year, in 1302 BCE, at the ford of Zarmand where the grain road crosses the river. He had followed ox-cart ruts for nine nights, and the ruts led him to a line of carts moving in the dark with no driver he could see. The Winter House was shifting the stolen harvest of three villages. What came at him was not a man running. The air gave a flat crack, a pale smear passed the edge of his eye where something had already been, and a tall thin figure stood a spear's length away, having crossed the ford without wetting a hem. The Vigil called that Fleetfall. What he felt more was the other thing, a pressure in the chest and throat that made the knees ask permission to fold, and which no one had warned him about. He did not fold. He drove the stone point into the figure's shoulder, the flint snapped, and the figure was gone, carrying a flake of it. Hormian lay in the river with three cracked ribs and the smell of wet copper in his head and decided he would have to learn to hate this one properly. He never managed it entirely. The war of the next decade was mostly patience. He learned from the wreckage of other men's mistakes what the Vigil still teaches: that the long-lived would not cross a line of salt laid in a doorway and shrank from the few iron nails a village could afford, grey and brittle and bought from northern traders at the price of a good goat each. Nobody knew why, and he did not pretend to. It was knowledge written in the ruins of people who had tested it. By the count of knots on a cord he carried, he broke fourteen households of the Winter House between Zarmand and the salt pans at Hargan, and in 1298 BCE he took the pans back with eleven men and a borrowed sledge-load of salt. The Winter House never answered in kind at Tafaius, which he came to suspect was one person's decision. They spoke only once. In 1291 BCE he tracked a trail to Ardvaius, a marsh village empty of everything but its reed beds and, on the island behind it, a ring of new mud-brick towers laid out like a crown. Darbaan stood on the lowest wall with both hands open, which was a surprise in itself. The offer, called across a ditch, was that Tafaius would be left alone for as long as Hormian taught them how he walked without leaving a mark. He asked what for. To measure it, said Darbaan. He laughed, which he later called a mistake, and went back downriver by a way that left nothing. The lesson he drew was that the Crowned Architect did not hunt for hunger alone, and that this was worse. The one person he did teach came up from the south. Menkara Itkai, a young man of the Nile Valley, had walked the lapis road east as a guard to a donkey caravan, and he reached Tafaius in 1282 BCE with the caravan broken behind him and a gilded bell on his belt that his mother had given him for luck. Hormian disliked the bell on sight and then taught him to pack it in wax. The young man was called that year, in the Vigil's phrase, meaning he stayed, and they worked the marsh together for a season while Menkara asked why of every answer. When the route reopened he went home to the Nile Valley. In 1277 BCE a trader brought a tablet to Tafaius saying Menkara was dead. It did not say how. Menkara had left the lump of wax behind, and Hormian kept it in his pouch for the rest of his life. He was sixty-three in 1270 BCE, and the knees had at last given him a reason to stop. He did not stop. In late autumn he crossed the gorge below Hargan on a rope bridge the locals had told him not to trust, following a stray cart; a strand parted under his weight, and the Vigil found him at the bottom two days later with the spear laid beside him, the way he would have set it down at a door. Nothing in the war killed him. The last anyone saw of Darbaan Kaartaush was that summer, a thin shape on a ridge above the salt pans at dusk, standing very still and watching the sledges go. They built a cairn for Hormian Shataad on the bank above the gorge and set the spear in it, flint upward, which he would have disliked. In spring the Vigil came back to turn the stones and found two of them moved aside and the shaft laid across the top, the head gone, taken off cleanly at the binding. There was no print on the bank, none on the path, nothing in the mud. Nobody had expected there would be.