Jiayu Tang could smell every cut in a day's walk, and for thirty-six years this was both the best and the worst thing about them. The Red Trail was not a trick of will. It was a trait of the body, something like a rare keenness in the nose and the roof of the mouth, and it brought blood to Jiayu on the wind the way a bell brings a congregation: a scraped knee two fields away, a woman in the third month of a bad pregnancy, a dying goat. The cost came afterward, in a headache that sat behind the eyes and a nausea that could last until noon. It made crowded places impossible. It made bedrooms worse. Jiayu preferred the open air of the high ground and the company of people who bled a little less often, such as the old, the careful and the dead.
Jiayu Tang was born in 2413 BCE at Lanxiu, a mountain shrine in the Yellow River Basin, in what is now China, to a family that served the shrine in the usual way, which meant carrying water up the steps. Jiayu was a dancer. In The First Night it was an honest craft and a hard one, built on counting, long fasts and the habit of looking at an audience without seeming to look. The dancers of Lanxiu were taught that a room could be held by a single raised hand if the timing was right. Jiayu was good at it. By their twenties they could make a crowd of pilgrims turn their heads together, an effect that the shrine's keepers, being practical people, put to use at festival collections. A charmer, in the old sense, is just someone who has learned how much people want to be led.
At twenty-six, Jiayu was ready for something larger than a mountain and a begging bowl. In 2387 BCE a visitor came up to Lanxiu with a silk-wrapped gift for the shrine and stayed three nights. This was Tangbo Qin, called the Velvet Mask, who had been a vampire for 93 years and who watched the dancers from a corner as though pricing them. Jiayu asked, on the third night, what it would take to be someone who never aged. Tangbo said that it was not a bargain, that it had a cost, and that most people did not like the cost. Jiayu asked again. Tangbo made them that night and left the shrine at dawn, and Jiayu came down from the mountain three days later with the beginnings of a hunger and a sponsor. The Ember Choir took the new vampire in, and there is a story that Jiayu sang, and a rule that the story was never to be repeated.
Jiayu's trade, in the Vampireverse of the basin, was information. The nickname, the Gaunt Collector, came from what they collected: not trophies, but obligations. Jiayu made it their business to know who owed what to whom, which house had a daughter promised to two suitors and which headman was behind on his grain tax. They paid in favors, discreet loans and the occasional silence. At their height they had eight informants in the wall-wardens of the river towns, each with a small bone bead from a single string, which they returned at each report and received again with something small in it. When one of them died of old age Jiayu cut the bead from the string and kept it. The string, they said, was the only honest ledger in the basin.
Qinzhao Bo was an irritation at first. A young hunter from Zhaoyu who had become a vampire slayer on the ramparts of a siege had been reported by two informants, and then three, as a man who seemed to be wherever the trouble was. They met in 2368 BCE at the river gate of Zhaoyu in the autumn fair, where Jiayu had come to pick up a bead from a gate-warden. A man in the crowd smelled of nothing at all, not sweat or blood or smoke. Jiayu noticed the nothing. It was the first time their nose had ever failed to find a living person, and they stopped, and an arrow went through the sleeve of their coat. They laughed, because it was a good shot. They threw him across a wicker pen, which was perhaps a little cruel, and went away over the roofs. There was a cut on the inside of their forearm where the arrowhead had grazed it. It did not hurt, but it itched for a month.
The wards were the real nuisance. Within a season Qinzhao had worked out that a line of salt across a door kept Jiayu on the wrong side of it, and that river water running over the sill did the same. Jiayu found their own houses closed to them. A man who had spent ten years tracing the debts of the basin now had to sit in the open air like a beggar while a boy with a bow decided whether a roof would take them. It was undignified, and it was effective. They respected it. They never said so.
What Jiayu did not forgive was the truce. In 2366 BCE the hunter talked three feuding houses of the river towns into a twelve-year peace, and in twelve years a collector of debts has very little to collect. Jiayu bought what they could: a headman's grievance here, a rumor about a stolen bride there. For twelve years the peace held and the trade dried up. In 2354 BCE a man was found dead on a threshold and the houses went for each other's throats. It had taken the whole of the twelve years to arrange, and Jiayu counted it cheap.
The hunter's last trap was at Boren in 2351 BCE, a ferry-shed on stilts at a ford. Jiayu knew it was a trap. The Red Trail brought a single drop of blood down the bank on the night wind, a fresh cut on a doorpost, and the nose said there was exactly one person within a mile. They could not cross the water at the sill and did not try. They tore a hole in the thatch with their hands, dragged a roof post loose with a strength that surprised even them, and found the hunter above them in the loft with a bow already drawn. The arrow went through the heart. The beam came down across the hunter's chest. The Gaunt Collector died against the doorpost at the age of 62, and Qinzhao died under the timber a little before the light came up, perhaps a minute later.
Tangbo Qin outlived the child they had made by two hundred and nineteen years and was destroyed in a coven purge in 2132 BCE. The string of beads was found in the torn coat at the foot of the doorpost at Boren. There were eight on it, and a ninth lay on the floor beside the doorpost, a little apart, as if it had come off in a hurry. It had a groove worn into it by thumbs, and nobody could say whose.
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