Jaa Dejaesh

Jaa Dejaesh, the Winter Wall, was a temple hunter from the Indus and Ganges Plain whose grip could crack stone. A vampire slayer for 42 years who answered to no one, he drove Nian Tabhaesh out of the Aryunian hills in 2767 BCE and never quite finished her.

"You don't have to break it," the woman from the east told him. "You only have to not let go." The old keeper of the Yujabhaesh shrine remembered it fifty years later, and swore that the stranger had said it in a language he did not know, which he had understood perfectly. The young man she said it to was holding a stone bench-end in one hand at the time. It had come away from the wall because he had touched it carelessly. He looked at it as though it had insulted him. Her name was Yujia Ren, and she was not much taller than his shoulder. Jaa Dejaesh, later called the Winter Wall for the cold stillness he brought to a fight, had been born at Yujabhaesh in 2804 BCE, a caravan stop in India where the roads of the Indus and Ganges Plain crossed, in the long dawn of The First Night. His mother sold dried fish to the caravan men. At seven he could lift the lid off a grain jar that two grown men used a pole for, and at ten he had learned not to, because the neighbors had begun to talk. He became a hunter for the temple herds: a boy who went into the dry hills for wild boar and returned with it over his shoulders, whole, the neck broken by his hands because he had not trusted the spear. His body was the sort of strange accident that the old women of the caravan stop called a blessing and the men called a nuisance. It did not feel like either. It felt like owning a wall you could never put down. The call came in 2779 BCE, when he was twenty-five. He found a stranger by the road, bleeding from the neck and the belly, a wanderer who carried a stone-tipped spear and nothing else. Jaa carried the man to the shrine on his back, a walk of most of a morning. The stranger lived long enough to say what he was, which was a vampire slayer from some Vigil that had no name in the plain, and to put the spear into Jaa's hand and say that the work needed doing and that he was not to ask who would pay. Jaa buried him. He kept the spear. In the Slayerverse's records he appears as unaffiliated for the rest of his life: no Vigil, no oath, nobody who gave him orders. He answered to no one, and he thought this was the part of the arrangement that suited him. Yujia Ren found him in 2778 BCE. She had walked from the Yellow River for more than a year on the jade and salt roads, because word had reached her Vigil of a strong boy called without a teacher, and she was the one in the Vigil who was good at that. She taught him for two winters. He learned to eat before a fight. He learned to count the doors in any room and to treat his own hands as a weapon with a price, since his gift, Mountain Grip, wore the sinews of his wrists and left his fingers bleeding at the nails when he used it hard. He learned to sleep with his hands in a bowl of cold water. She left in 2776 BCE for home, and he never learned what became of her, because he did not ask and nobody from that country came west again. Left alone, he did what hunters do and went to the hills. Between 2773 BCE and 2767 BCE, travelers in the hills above Aryunian vanished in ones and twos. The shrines on the terraces stopped lighting their evening lamps. Cattle came down the paths with their throats opened. The tithes of the hill villages were being carried up the slope in the dark, by people who walked as if asleep, to a place on Karshem Ridge that nobody visited twice. The villages called the thing at the top of the ridge the Black Tyrant. Jaa went up in 2767 BCE with the stone-tipped spear and a basket of coarse salt, because Yujia had said salt lines were a useful thing for a man to know about, and he had learned to trust her opinions about useful things. Nian Tabhaesh had a terrace shrine on the ridge with a long dim hall and a stone doorframe. She met him in the doorway, and then she was not in the doorway: she was in the air around him, a loud brown cloud of wings the size of a palm, scratching at his face and forearms. This was the Wing Storm, and it was the most unpleasant thing he had ever encountered. He held the lintel stone in his left hand, which he had never done before, and put his right palm against the doorframe, and the doorframe came away. He swung it. The cloud broke around the stone and reformed, bleeding, as a woman against the far wall with her arm raised. He crossed the hall, took her wrist, and pressed his hand there. His palm had been rubbed with salt and red ochre in the shrine yard, and the mark it left on her skin turned the part of her under it to ordinary flesh. She could not scatter. She screamed once and tore herself free by leaving a strip of her arm behind. By dawn she was gone from the ridge, and the hill villages lit their lamps. He had won, but he had not finished it, and he knew the difference. For the next thirty years he met her at intervals, and each meeting left them both a little more careful. In 2759 BCE he found her old temple town, Yuvidean, and spent an evening on the observatory platform trying to pin her to the floor; he took a deep cut across the shoulder and retreated. In 2748 BCE she sent a bundle of dead grasshoppers to his door, all wearing his handprint in red clay, as a joke, he decided. He did not laugh. She was the first enemy he had met who studied him back. He took it as a compliment, in the wary way a hunter takes the interest of a cleverer animal. Jaa Dejaesh died in 2737 BCE, at sixty-seven, at Yujabhaesh, quietly, of a long illness in the chest. He had been a slayer for forty-two years and had trained no pupil; there was a young man who followed him for a season and left. Nian Tabhaesh outlived him by nearly four hundred years and was destroyed in a fire at Bhayua in 2351 BCE, far downriver, by someone who had never heard of him. The doorframe he had torn from the Karshem Ridge shrine was used by the hill villagers to build a lamp-niche at Aryunian. Their children still press a hand into the stone where his had pressed it, to see how far they can reach.