Hortaush Arvaius

Hortaush Arvaius, the Ember Lantern, was a caravan sellsword from the Persian Plateau who became a vampire slayer in 1685 BCE and could call water to his hand. He spent a decade hunting the Crowned Judge of the Xerhorad hills, and wanted, above all, a well of his own.

The spring above Xerhorad ran uphill that night. It was a short slope and a small stream, no wider than a man's arm, and Hortaush Arvaius had spent the afternoon walking its length with his palm on the wet stones, learning where it wished to go. After dark he told it to go somewhere else. In 1666 BCE, a little before the hour when the sky starts to grey, the water left its bed, crossed forty paces of dry hillside with a sound like a crowd murmuring behind a wall, and came down the stone steps of a house cut into the rock, over the sill of a door that had never once stood wet. He was standing on the sill with a clay lantern in one hand and the other hand stained to the wrist with ash and resin. Behind the door, a woman who had spent the night listening for a pulse heard a river instead. That was the end of the Crowned Judge. The beginning of Hortaush Arvaius was a long way off, at Darurius, a caravan stop on the Persian Plateau in what is now Iran, where he was born in 1712 BCE to a woman who ran a stall selling bread to drivers and a father he knew mostly as a name. Darurius had one well, owned by a family who charged for it. He grew up watching strangers pay for water and the family weigh out silver against it. He decided, at nine or ten, that he would own a well. It was the one plan he made as a boy that he kept for the rest of his life. The way to a well, for a boy without land, was the caravan trade. He hired on as a sellsword at fifteen, guarding tin and dyed wool along the roads between the plateau and the river country, and he was good at it in a tidy, unglamorous way. He took no pay in advance, ever, because a man who had been paid owed the job only a little, and a man who was owed owed it everything. He carried a sling with silvered shot, which he used mostly on jackals. Other guards made fun of him for the clay lantern he carried, a pot with a banked coal in it that he refused to let go out, and it was this lantern that gave him his name, the Ember Lantern. In 1685 BCE, at twenty-seven, he went to a crossroads shrine to bargain with a man he took for a priest. The man wanted to hire a guard for a particular road, and would not say why. Hortaush asked a high price and got it, and only after he had agreed did he understand that the man was an agent of the Vigil of Persian Plateau, and that the price included something he had not asked for. The body had turned up a gift without warning, and a fortnight earlier, at a well on the Darurius road, he had felt water moving under the ground a hundred paces away as plainly as a pulse in his own wrist. Nobody taught him. That is the nature of the Bronze Vigil's way with the called: they find the person, hand over what is known about the vampire, and leave the rest to experiment. In the Slayerverse a vampire slayer who survived his first year had usually learned by being thirsty. He called the gift Drowned Chorus, because when he reached for water there was a sound like many small voices answering, each with its own pitch. The Vigil's scholars said it was hydrokinesis. He could feel moisture in stone, in air and under a threshold, and persuade it to move: lift a stream, thin a fog, push a flood a few paces left. The price was thirst. After a hard use his lips split and his nose bled, and he drank a jar of water with both hands and looked ashamed. In the dry highlands he was nearly an ordinary man, which was why he planned every fight around a spring. For thirty-six years he served the Vigil of Persian Plateau, and most of that service was caravan work. In 1682 BCE he held a river crossing at Kurbarad against a house that had been taking drivers from the ford, and brought the river up around them until they could not stand. But the hills above Xerhorad took the best part of his later career. A vampire had settled there, and no road in the district was safe. She called herself the Crowned Judge and wore a braided wire of copper on her head, and the hill families brought their quarrels to her stone house on the slope, because she settled them fast and her verdicts held. The losers paid a tithe of blood. The winners often did too, though they did not know it. He first met Elashai Ashenon in 1679 BCE at the Cistern Gate, a cut in the hills above Xerhorad where the caravan track passed a spring. She had come from far away. She was from the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, and after the house she belonged to broke up in 1684 BCE she had worked her way east, singing in courts in the river country and then up the mountains by the same trade routes he guarded. By 1679 BCE the hills were hers. She sat at the night camp of the tin caravan and sang to the master, and the master wept, and Hortaush sat across the fire from her and felt nothing at all. It was a mercenary's trait and not a talent: he had worked for too many people who sang. She looked at him for a long time. He did not know until later that his pulse had not moved. The fight at the spring was short, and he lost it, and she took a rib and left him with the sling. He needed thirteen years to learn what to do about her. She had a house with no stream, a ring of informants inside the Xerhorad watch, and a method of listening at doors. Drowned Chorus was no use against a hillside with no water, and the Vigil's old knowledge was no use unless he could stand next to her. A slayer's mark laid on her skin would burn her, and running water at her threshold would keep her inside. So he spent years surveying the spring above Xerhorad as if he meant to buy it. After 1666 BCE there was no great deed. He went back to caravans, with a new sling cord and a stiff left hip, and he took no pupils because nobody asked. He lived to sixty-three. In 1649 BCE, at Darurius, he finally paid the family for their well, and the first morning it belonged to him he stood at the rim in the cold with the lantern and did not draw anything out of it. He was dead a few weeks later. The water in the well, people said, tasted of smoke for some time.