Red Tide costs her the back of the mouth first. A few heartbeats before she uses it, Iti Rakaet tastes copper under her tongue, and her teeth ache as if she had bitten foil; then the blood in whatever is near begins to move, hers included, and her eyes run. She weeps red-tinged water down both cheeks for as long as the gift lasts, which is how the Weeping Collector got her name, and she has never found a way to stop it or to make it look dignified. Afterward comes a hunger that does not negotiate. She has said that the trick of the work is to have the bill settled before the gift, because afterward she is poor company and worse security. It happened in what is now Egypt, in the age of the Bronze Vigil, and the Meshorep Horsenep who died of it was a vampire slayer in a long line of them.
She was born in 1407 BCE at Nefamunep, a mountain shrine in the Nile Valley, the fourth daughter of a family that kept the shrine's lamps and had no use for a fourth daughter. She went downriver young and hired out as a shield to the port lords, a woman standing behind a merchant with a copper-bound club, paid by the day and by the scar. The work suited her. It was honest in the way that only bad bargains are: everyone knew the price. Her habit, which she kept for three thousand years, was a small pair of bronze scales that she carried in a leather pouch and set down on any table where money changed hands. She weighed the payment in front of the payer, every time, and the payers learned to find it funny or to pay more.
The bargain that changed her came in 1375 BCE, when she was thirty-two. A lord of the river ports owed her a season's wages and a good deal more, and refused both. A cedar factor from the Levant coast, who had watched her handle the lord's guards, offered her a berth on a timber freighter bound for Byblos and a conversation with a man who might help. The crossing took the better part of two months, hugging the coast, bailing every morning. At the end of it was Yahashon Eltiron, the Ivory Tyrant, a long-lived man in Lebanon who traded in cedar and in other people's debts, and who made her what she became. He did not ask whether she wanted it. He asked whether she wanted her money back, with interest, from the lord who had cheated her. She said yes, and it was the last time she said yes before reading the terms. Yahashon is alive today, as far as anyone in the Vampireverse can say, and she has not seen him in a long while. She does not discuss him, though she would not call it a quarrel.
She came home the next year and joined the Obsidian Covenant, a loose house of vampires in the valley that bought and sold favors the way the port lords bought grain. She was a mercenary in the full sense: a contract, an advance, a set of terms, and she kept to them with a literalness that unsettled her employers more than cruelty would have. If the factor had paid for the removal of a crooked guard crew, she removed the crew and not the factor's rival who happened to be eating nearby. She collected overdue debts for the lords, and when the debtor was dead she collected from the heirs, with the scales. The valley's lords found her useful and kept her at the far end of the table.
In 1363 BCE the factor at the reed landing of Sekhmere, three days down the valley from the shrines, hired her to deal with a ring of guards who had been selling the lord's grain and who knew too much about the factor's own accounts. She did what the contract said, and she fed within its terms, which was her fee. On the third night a man came down the bank wrapped to the eyes in linen with a stone-tipped spear. He was the first slayer she had met who walked toward her in the dark without a torch, and it took her a moment to understand why: he could see her. She stood in the shallows and opened her hands. The river went red around his spear. It was Meshorep Horsenep, the Veiled Warden, and he bled for it, though not as much as she expected, and he left her with a clean shot and a ruined sleeve. She let him go because the contract did not cover him. She also remembered his walk.
They went on like this for five years. She understood he was not a slayer of the Obsidian Covenant's sort, answerable to no house or order, and that made him oddly expensive to ignore, since a man with no master has no one to bargain with. He came for her at ferry landings and at the edges of the lords' warehouses, always at night. He set iron nails, rare as they were, in doorways she was meant to use, and she found each pair and stepped around them, a little offended that he thought she would not. She admired the persistence. In the Vampireverse a tiring enemy is the best kind, because every other kind is gone by the second year, and she had a modest, unspoken respect for a man who turned up on schedule.
In 1358 BCE she met him on the quarry road at Tep-Anu, at night, in the cold season. He had wrapped his face in two layers of linen, and when she came into range he threw the spear and missed by the width of a hand. She had not expected the throw. She would have thought him too careful. Red Tide pulled the blood from his chest in one draw, and he was dead before the spear stopped rolling. Iti Rakaet killed Meshorep Horsenep, and she felt nothing she could put a price on. She took a strip of his outer linen from the roadside before she went. She could not have said why, and she has not been able to throw it away.
Her line since then has been small and chosen with the same care she gave to a contract. She made Raim Sidraim, the Ashen Mask, in 310 BCE in the Levant, and Itkai Taitu, the Sleepless Herald, in 676 CE in the Nile Valley, who was destroyed in 1191 CE. In 1709 CE she made Ghita Fassi, the Velvet Warlord, in Morocco, and in 1958 CE Hana Haddad, the Weeping Shroud, in Iraq. Raim fell in 194 CE. Of the four, only the last two live, and she writes to neither.
She is alive today, three thousand four hundred years into the work, and she is still, by her own accounting, a woman who is owed. The scales are in a cloth bag in a cedar box that came off a Byblos freighter. Under them, folded flat, is a strip of linen the color of old tea.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
