Ishzuum Ishdamum

Ishzuum Ishdamum, the Stone Sentinel, was a vampire slayer of Mesopotamia in the First Night, a wall-breaker whose skin turned blades like fired clay. Called at eighteen in 2480 BCE, she died of marsh fever nine years later, her quarrel with a mist-bodied duelist still unsettled.

Ishzuum Ishdamum kept one rule from the day she was old enough to carry a water jar: never stand where you can be walked around. Her mother, a reed-weaver in the walled city-state of Kukuena, had meant it as advice about market crowds and quarrelsome cousins. Ishzuum made a doctrine of it. Put your body between the thing and whatever it wants, and keep your back to brick. The rule held until she was eighteen, and the night it failed gave her the name by which the river towns knew her. Ishzuum Ishdamum was born in 2498 BCE, a year of low floods, in a town that sat in the flat country of Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, in the age later called the First Night. It was a town of mud-brick walls that had to be patched every spring after the floods. Ishzuum grew up hauling bricks and grain sacks, and by sixteen she was working with the wall gangs that settled canal quarrels between neighboring cities by the simplest method available, which was to be the first person through the gap. People called such fighters stormers. She was a good one, though not a clever one, and she knew it. She touched the lintel of every door she passed, and she hummed a dredgers' barge song half a tone flat, so that anyone walking behind her on the quay knew who it was. In 2480 BCE the granary watch at Kukuena began finding bodies that had been drained dry and left sitting upright against the storehouse wall, as if resting. Ishzuum was on the river gate that new moon with a stone-tipped spear and a boy of twelve who was meant to run for help. The thing came across the canal as a low bank of mist, the kind that normally lifts off the water near dawn, and it came up to the gate in the wrong hour and thickened, and then it was a woman in a plain dark kilt with a bronze knife held loosely, like a pen. Ishzuum put the water at her back to cover the boy. It was the one position the rule forbade, and it was the only one that left the boy a way out. That woman was Ludamum Damsarir, the Hungering Duelist, a vampire of the Vampireverse's Gilded Line, and she took the girl's shoulder in her teeth with a courtesy Ishzuum found worse than rage. The wall gangs had a saying that a bite like that either killed you or kept you. It did neither. Over the next three days Ishzuum's skin stiffened and grayed, first at the knuckles, then along the arms, until it had the dull gloss of a bowl left too long in the kiln. A watchman struck her forearm with a copper axe by way of test, and the axe rang and bent. She called it Ironhide because nobody had a better word. Later ballads called her the Stone Sentinel and made the first vampire slayer of her city sound like a statue. It had costs the songs never mention. The hide held in the heat of a fight and made her cook inside it. She lost the ability to sweat and had to go into the canal to the neck after any hard work, steaming. She ate like three men. Her knuckles cracked and wept in dry weather. She did not mind most of this, because she was alive, and because the first thing the hide taught her was that she could take a charge where others only gave one. A mentor arrived before the year was out. Zinai Ashsidtiron, called the Cold Bell, had come down from the cedar country of the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, on the barges of a resin convoy, a journey of some months by donkey track and river, because word of the Kukuena bite had reached her faster than the convoy had. She carried a small copper bell wrapped in wool and rang it in houses to listen to the echo, which she said told her what the walls were hiding. For seven years, until 2473 BCE, she taught Ishzuum the craft the Vigil of Mesopotamia had been losing: how to read where a feeder had slept, how to lay a salt line across a doorway and why it worked, how to let a charge land instead of wasting it. When Zinai went west again she left the bell. Ishzuum never learned to ring it properly. The Vigil, which the Slayerverse remembers as a handful of families and watchmen rather than an army, sent her against two long-lived feeders over those nine years, and she drove both out of the river cities, one from Kukuena's own lower town in 2476 BCE and one from a canal port upstream in 2474 BCE. Neither fight was elegant. She took the spear in with her and kept the shaft between herself and the thing, and when it failed she used her shoulder. What she could not do was catch Ludamum. The two met again in 2475 BCE at a shrine town called Ekuruun, where Ishzuum had spent three days laying salt in every doorway and then waited, sweating through the hide, in a room with one door. Ludamum did not use the door. She came through the gap between a sword-guard and a hilt as a thread of vapor and stood up in the middle of the room, and Ishzuum, who had not slept, put a brand of soot and ochre across the inside of that forearm with a pitch-heated spear shaft before the vapor could fully gather. The woman screamed once, politely, and left by the roof. Neither had killed the other. Both knew the matter was not closed. It ended with a fever. In the spring of 2471 BCE Ishzuum waded a flooded canal to pull a calf out of the silt and took the marsh sickness that came up out of the reeds each year, and for nine days she lay in her mother's house on a mat soaked through, unable to cool herself. She was twenty-seven. In the last night the women watching her noticed that someone had stopped at the doorway, and that the salt laid across the sill had not been disturbed. Whoever stood there stood until dawn and did not come in. Ishzuum, half awake, told them to let her be, because she would be cold by morning. She died before the sun cleared the east wall. Her mother wove the shroud herself. The spear went into the gate post at the river gate, and for a generation children passing under it touched the lintel with two fingers, which none of them could have said was her habit. The salt on her threshold was left where it lay for a month. Nobody could decide whether she would have wanted it swept.