Kachil Tzitzian

Kachil Tzitzian, the Pale Choir, was a harbor hunter of the Aegean whose ears were so sharp that a sleeping town sounded like a storm. Turned in 1968 BCE and a member of the Sable Circle, he met the slayer Nikthoes Nikdema in 1944 BCE and was destroyed by them in 1937 BCE.

The sound of a town at night was a roar. This was the first fact of Kachil Tzitzian's long life, and the one he found it hardest to describe. Every heart within a street's length was a drum, and a harbor settlement held several hundred hearts, each at its own pace, every one of them pushed through his skull. Sleepers beat slowly. Drunks beat fast. A woman in labor beat double. He stuffed his ears with wax and tallow, bound a strip of cloth over them, and still woke with the knuckle-ache of a man who had been listening to a very large machine all night. In the end he stopped sleeping in towns at all. The gift was his and the price was his, and as far as anybody knew, no one had offered to take either off him. Kachil Tzitzian was born in 2002 BCE at Ixkal, a harbor settlement on the Aegean coast of what is now Greece that ran on dried fish and obsidian. As a boy he was the one sent into the hills after goats, and later a hunter in earnest. He could stand motionless on a ridge for the length of a morning and name the animals below him by their breathing. His brothers thought it a trick. His mother thought it a kindness from the sea. When he was twenty he took a wife, and when he was thirty she died of a cough, and he went on hunting alone and quietly for four years, killing what he needed and no more, with a hunter's dislike of waste. In 1968 BCE, at thirty-four, he took a fever on a mountain track and woke some days later in a dark room, in a body that was no longer quite his. Who had made him, he never said. The Sable Circle that took him in later put the question to him more than once, and he would only look at the wall. Whoever it was had left no name and no instructions, and the one living thing he knew in the room was himself. The Vampireverse is full of makers who are known and boasted of. He was made by someone who had decided to be forgotten, and he took the hint. He learned the rest alone: that blood was food, that the sun was merely tiresome, and that salt laid at a door held him as firmly as a chain. Running water across a threshold held him just as well. He learned the second one the hard way, in a cistern, and never forgot it. The Circle gave him work. The Bronze Vigil was not an age that wasted a tracker, and the Sable Circle was not a house that wasted a man. In his early years the Circle's elders told him that a vampire slayer would one day cross the coast and he must be ready to run; he took the advice as the Circle intended, which is to say lightly, and he practised leaving rooms by the quietest door. A hunter is useful, and Kachil, now with senses that took in every living creature around him as if they were lit, was the best tracker the Circle had ever seen. He called the full gift The Long Ear, though it was one part of the Predator Senses he had been made with, and he used it as a hunter uses a dog. He found travelers on the coast roads, hidden strongrooms, informers in the harbor. He fed seldom and left no mess. People spoke of the choir in the dark of the quays, the soft sound of many hearts beating together, and it was from this that his alias came. The quays called him The Pale Choir, and he came to answer to it, since a man who has listened to the dying often has a choir of his own. The night he met Nikthoes Nikdema was in the death-house at Kakaes in 1944 BCE. A sickness had come in on a grain ship, and the death-house was full, and he had gone in for the easy feeding that a plague gave a vampire. He stood in the doorway listening to a room of still hearts. He counted them. He was good at counting. Then, at the back, a heart he had marked as finished began to beat again, hard and slow. A figure on a reed mat sat up. They were twenty years old, with a hired shield's build and a gray, wet, furious face. The thing he later told the Circle was that he had never been so surprised by a heart. They fought. He took a broken collarbone from a hand that came down on him like a falling beam, and he left by the door. From then on he could not stop listening for them. He could tell the slayer's heart from a hundred others, a slow stubborn drum that did not quicken at danger. He took to avoiding Kakaes. It did not help, because the slayer came to him: through the nests in the tomb and the cistern and the rock cellar at the end of the salt road, one after another in seven years. He lost a base each time. He lost three companions, all unnamed in the Circle's account. He was not sentimental about it, but he noticed that the opponent never once rushed him, and that was what he found unnerving. A hunter knows another. In 1937 BCE he had gone to ground at Euthereues, in a cistern cut into the rock above the harbor, and slept there with his ears stuffed and a ring of salt at the door. He woke because the sound of the spring changed. There was a flow, a sudden steady rush, across the doorway. It was running water at the threshold, and he understood it in the same breath. He listened for the slayer and heard nothing at all, because the water covered everything. The one thing he did hear, at the last, was a hand on stone, a slow grating pressure like a ship's keel on a shingle. He was sixty-five years old. He did not mind the sound, as it happened. It was the first quiet he had had in sixty-five years.