Jia Ren

Jia Ren, the Sable Marrow, was a hired knife in a Mesoamerican river village until he was made a vampire in 1604 BCE. He worked three places and one trade, until a marsh thief with a stake and a silver cap destroyed him at Yachitl in 1578 BCE.

On the night at Xalchi in 1587 BCE the household swore afterward that nobody had come in, which was the first thing that went wrong. Jia Ren had been hired to kill a cacao broker named Tomal and had let himself in through the roof at the lake end of the compound, putting out each lamp as he went, because the dark was his to carry and the house was cooperative. He had done the thing a hundred times. What he had not done was walk into a strongroom already occupied. A thin man was kneeling over the broker's bead strings with a stick in one hand, humming, and every sleeping servant in the house had begun to murmur agreement with a lie. The stranger turned, saw a vampire, and was frightened. The stick grazed Jia's ribs. It was the first time anything in years had left a mark that took a night to close, and it was a thief's. The first place Jia Ren worked as an assassin was Qinweishu, the river village of Mexico where he was born in 1629 BCE. The lord's house stood on a clay mound above the flood line, and its steward needed a man who could move in the dark without a lamp. Jia's gift was already there as a boy's talent for not being noticed, and by twenty he was the steward's knife. He carried out nine jobs, all of them quiet, none of them proud. He liked the dark corners of that house, the storerooms and the stair behind the kitchen, and he was bad with money. By his early twenties he owed shell strings to three families, and the lord's steward, who preferred his debtors useful, let it run. Jia wanted nothing grander than to owe nobody. He hummed when he was cutting a cord. The second place was a cellar under the market town of Tatzi, and it ended his debts and his life as he knew it. In 1604 BCE, at twenty-five, he fled three creditors and went to ground in what looked like an empty storage pit. It was a great deal more than that. The cellar belonged to Tzitl Yakal, the Silent Architect, who dug chambers and cisterns for the vampires of Mesoamerica and spoke to no one if a clay tablet and a thumb would do. He made Jia in that room and turned him over to the Ashen House, which had a use for a man who already moved like a cat. Tzitl drew plans on wet floors for Jia to memorize and did not explain them. Jia learned that the drawings were routes. He worked out of Tatzi for twenty-six years of the Bronze Vigil and never once asked what any of them were for. His gift, Nightfold, was the reason the Ashen House kept him. It lived in his skin and eyes, and when he stood still in a lit room the light went thin and sour around him, as though a fold of dark were being drawn off his shoulders and let fall. Hallways became hunting grounds. It also left him cold to the bone and with weeping eyes for an hour, and he could not abide a full noon. Direct sunlight and silver-tipped weapons hurt him, and he knew it, and in a quiet way he was careful. Eight Vigil cells came for him over twenty years. He outlasted them by being patient, not brave. He made no childer. Tzitl had not asked it of him and he had never wanted the company. Paan Tzimayaic, the Gilded Torch, entered the picture at Xalchi, and he was a surprise in every way. Jia expected a hunter's stance and found a thief with a patter. The man hummed a room to sleep, with a voice that put a drum in Jia's chest, and for a moment Jia nearly believed he was asleep himself. After that night he understood he had met the only thief in the marsh country who was also a vampire slayer, and the house of Tomal went on his list as a place not to return to. He tried to go on as before. A man who could put a household to sleep with a sentence was dangerous even to the Ashen House. For nine years after that he was followed. He never saw the thief and could not catch him. A cellar he used was found empty. A landing at noon, where he had meant to pass in a covered canoe, had a bar across it. A trader he had paid for information began to sell the same information to someone else. The Ashen House advised him to leave Mesoamerica and he declined. He thought the thief a stubborn, tiring man with a good eye, and respected him in the way one respects a bad winter. He began to fear the sun in the way a man fears a debtor he knows by name. In 1584 BCE a coast trader boasted in the Tatzi market that he had sold a silver cap to a marsh thief, and Jia went home and was ill for a week. The third place was Yachitl, and it was where he stopped. In 1578 BCE a message reached him that a rival house had put a prisoner in the pillared hall on the platform. It was a plain bait, and he took it for the same reason he took everything: it was the Ashen House's order. He came before dawn and found the hall empty, the door unlatched and a bead ledger open on the floor. He waited in the one dark corner. When the roof thatch shifted, the sun poured across the floor and the thief was standing exactly where the dark was thickest, with a pale stake in his hand and a silver cap on the point. He was fifty-one. Paan Tzimayaic put the stake under his ribs. Nobody in the Ashen House spoke of the Sable Marrow afterward, and the Vampireverse keeps his name only as a lesson about bait. Tzitl Yakal drew nothing on the cellar floor for a season, which the house noticed. Years later at Tatzi a boy found a clay tablet the Silent Architect had thrown into a corner, scratched through with a thumb, and used it for a grinding stone.