Horrenep Setrarara

Horrenep Setrarara, called The Sworn Blade, was a temple dancer from a Nile hill fort who became a vampire slayer in 2948 BCE at eighteen. Quick as a pulse and armed with a sling, she destroyed the assassin Amunra Ankhtau and drowned in a flood three years after.

The store-clerk at Mennefkau kept his accounts on small wooden tags, scratched with a flint point, bundled by year and tied with cord, and about two hundred of them survive in a sealed jar. Eleven concern Horrenep Setrarara. None was written to praise her, and the clerk never once got her name right the same way twice. Horrenep Setrarara, The Sworn Blade of the Slayerverse, started out in his books as a debtor. The oldest reads, in the clerk's cramped hand: "Dyer's girl, born in the flood month. One loaf for the mother." That tag dates her birth to 2966 BCE, and for the rest of this account the tags are the spine and I will say where I leave them. She was a child of The First Night, as the Vigil's elders count it, and she grew up behind the dye vats of the hill fort of Mennefkau, in what is now Egypt, and was apprenticed to the temple choir at nine for the sound of her laugh. The tags next show her as a dancer, entered at "two loaves, one jar of beer, owes the store two jars," a debt that rolls from year to year without ever being struck out. The clerk does not say why. A charmer by temperament, she could talk a gate-guard into stepping aside, a priest into forgetting a fee, and a drunk into giving back a purse he had no memory of taking. She wanted two things, to be paid on time and to dance at the great festival downriver, where the real audiences were. She also refused to cross any threshold with her left foot first, and would stand in a doorway for a count of twelve until her right was ready. People thought it was manners. In the flood month of 2948 BCE, at eighteen, she was dancing in the court at the harvest festival when a figure in a river-cult sash stepped out of the crowd and went for the fort's steward. The tag for that night is the longest in the jar: "Year of the late river. Horrenep, dancer, left the feast before the bread. Steward unharmed. One door-post broken. Salt wasted across the door." What the clerk did not know was that she had crossed the court between two beats of a drum. She never had a teacher. She learned in a single evening that her body could do a thing no one's should, and she called it Heartbeat Step because that was how she counted it: one pulse for the world to stay still, one for her to cross it. It cost her. Her heart hammered like a bird in a basket afterward, her calves seized, and she was ravenous and foul-tempered for hours, so that the Vigil of Nile Valley learned to put a loaf in her hand before asking her anything. The figure in the sash was Amunra Ankhtau, a woman the cults called The Gaunt Herald, who had come for the steward at the Ashen Concord's order and was ready for everything except what happened. Her gift was a kind of prickling in the skin a heartbeat before any blade fell, and it had never failed her, and it did not fail her now: she felt the girl's hand coming, and moved, and the dancer was there anyway. They struck three times in the lantern light. The steward's door-post broke. Horrenep poured the festival salt out of its bowl across the threshold to stop the woman following her, and she stopped, with a look that Horrenep described years later as that of a dog meeting a closed gate. Amunra left with a scored cheek. Horrenep, shaking, took the steward's hand and told him it had been a very good feast. The next three years are the thinnest part of the record, because the clerk stopped writing about her and the Vigil kept no tags at all. What survives is her reputation. She broke thirteen houses in the Nile Valley, which is to say she walked into the rooms where they kept their accounts and walked out again, and the surviving stories agree that she talked more than she fought. Her weapon was a sling. A temple silversmith at Mennefkau pressed silver leaf over round clay pellets for her, three dozen at a time, and she carried them in a sash against her ribs. She was a vampire slayer who did most of her damage from across a room. People who knew her say she hummed under her breath when she aimed, one tune, always the same temple hymn, and could not be made to stop. Amunra was harder to work against. The Held Breath, as the Concord named it, gave her a sliver of notice before any hit landed, and for three years that sliver was enough to keep her alive. The Concord kept her moving between boats and storehouses, and the Vigil of Nile Valley lost two scouts trying to fix her in one place. What finally pinned her was a town. Setnefep was a river landing on a bend, with a stone-floored granary that had three doorways and a wooden grain-chute, and it was there, in the spring of 2945 BCE, that the Concord took a cellar room to hold a meeting. Horrenep knew about it a day ahead and spent the afternoon at the landing buying salt from a ferryman for the price of a song. She laid salt across two of the three doorways in the dark. The third she left open, and stood in it. The Gaunt Herald came out of the room, felt the prickle that told her where the fight lay, and stepped to meet it. Horrenep fired three silvered shots almost together from the doorway, close enough in time that the warning had no room to sort them. One took her above the collarbone. The Heartbeat Step took Horrenep the rest of the way, and when the breath came back into the world the vampire was down against the stone with the clay pellet still ringing in the floor beside it. It was the tidiest killing of her life and she vomited in the street afterward. She had three years left. The tags record that she did not dance again. She helped repair the dyke at Mennefkau instead, hauling bundles of reed to its crown in the flood month of 2942 BCE, and when a section gave way under the push of the water she was on it. She was twenty-four. The last tag reads: "Horrenep, dancer, owes the store two jars. Struck out." There is no mention of how the clerk paid it. A ferryman's girl at Setnefep is said to have kept an ivory knife-hilt with no blade that Horrenep had given her, and used it for years to scrape fish.