Kaena Babahaon

Kaena Babahaon, called The Stone Warden, was a river-village soldier in Lebanon's Levant who rose from a burned granary in 2392 BCE and spent forty-one years as a vampire slayer. Her copper dagger, a hoarse battle cry and a stubborn temper brought down the Gaunt Mask.

The copper dagger cost two sacks of barley and a quarrel with her brother, and Kaena Babahaon was mildly sorry about both for the rest of her life. She bought it at the river fair below Ashmorim, the village where she was born in 2424 BCE, from a smith who swore the metal came out of the hill mines and who had probably bought it from a man who had never seen a hill. It was a plain leaf-shaped blade a hand and a half long, soft enough to bend in a hard grapple and good enough to hold an edge if you stroked it on river stone, which she did every evening, counting the strokes in threes and humming two notes of a tune nobody in the village could name. That was the whole of her vanity. Ashmorim sat on a bend of a Levant river in what is now Lebanon, a huddle of mud-brick and drying nets, and in The First Night a girl who wanted more than nets had one honest option, which was to hire out her arm. She became a soldier of the plain, unglamorous kind: a spear in the river lords' levy in the dry months, a guard on grain barges in the wet ones, with the dagger at her belt for the jobs a spear is too long for. By thirty she slept sitting up and had a name as the woman who got the barge home. In 2392 BCE, at the age of 32, she was dozing in the granary at the head of the village landing when it burned. The roof came down on the loading floor. Her crew dragged out what they could find, laid the bodies in a row on the wet bank, and went to be sick. She woke there at sunrise with the light on her face and her hair gone to a crust. The dagger lay in the ash beside her with its wooden grip burned away. She rebound it with palm cord, and from then on it smelled faintly of char whenever it was damp. What she remembered from the fire was two thin figures leaving by the loading door, one of them carrying a man over his shoulder like a sack of onions. Nobody believed her until the man was found drained and pale in a reed bed. The Vigil of Levant, a loose league of ferrymen, grain factors and one retired priest who kept a tally of the strange dead, wrote her down as a vampire slayer, a title she neither wanted nor argued with. No one taught her. The Vigil's one real teacher had died that spring, and the rest had opinions. She learned the war the way she had learned barges, by getting it wrong near water. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as The Stone Warden, one of the earliest of the plain kind, a slayer with no gift at all. That was the point of her. The mantle granted Kaena no strength beyond her own and no sense beyond a stubborn certainty about when a room was wrong. What she had was craft, and the craft had a name: Rally Cry. It was nothing mysterious. Two rising notes and a bark, pitched to carry over a barge deck in a gale, the cry she had used a thousand times to make twelve tired people haul on one rope. She found that frightened villagers obeyed it the way deckhands did. A cellar full of ordinary people would, on that sound, stop screaming and carry water or pull a door or hold a line of torches, and a vampire who had counted on panic found instead a ragged, shouting wall. Across 41 years she burned out seven nests in cellars, tombs and cisterns, and she lost more people than she liked to count, though she counted them. Her great enemy found her in 2387 BCE, in the night market at Zinashath. Tira Ashkamelai, the Gaunt Mask, ran the stalls there for the Silent Court: stolen grave goods, stolen grain, a trade in names. Kaena had come with a barge of barley and her dagger and no plan beyond watching the back of a granary factor's house. He went through the door of that house the way he went through every door, as a pale thinning of himself, a drift of cold that slid under the reed screen while she was still deciding to knock. She cut the thing as it passed. The three notches she had filed along the blade for the Vigil's mark touched the back of his hand when he re-formed, and the wound did not close. He left a smear of black blood on the doorpost and a look she remembered for the rest of her life, the look of a very old man finding a splinter. The next six years were a feud conducted through grain. She learned that he could not be hit while he drifted and could be hit very hard in the half breath after, and that sunlight was the only argument he respected. He learned that she would rather lose a barge than a person, which he found tedious and exploited twice. She tracked him from the market to a cistern at Raalalim, to a collapsed tomb on the desert road, to a storeroom where she found nothing but a mask of plastered reed on a peg, set there like a calling card. She kept it. It sat in the corner of her hut for years with a spider living in the eye. It ended in 2381 BCE at Zinmelath, where the marsh salt works spread brine pans out under open sky. She knew he would come there for the salt traders. She spent a night there with forty pan-workers, reed screens rigged over the pans for shade, and a plan she explained in seven sentences. At dawn Tira came across the pans as mist, close to the ground, and she gave the Rally Cry. Forty people pulled forty ropes and the screens tore away together. Light fell on the pans and the mist thickened and could not get away. He took solid form because he had to, with the sun on his face and his skin lifting in sheets, and she was already there with the dagger. He was destroyed, as the Silent Court's own tally cords later admitted. The blade bent at the crossguard. She straightened it against a pan wall with a rock. She lived thirty more years, which surprised everyone, herself included. She went home to Ashmorim and kept the landing ferry, and her knees gave out, and she took no pupils because nobody asked and she would not have known what to say. The war went on without her. She sat on the landing in the evenings, sharpening the dagger in threes and humming the two notes, and when the Vigil sent a rider with news of new nests she gave him the same answer: she would think about it. She did, and sometimes went. Kaena Babahaon died at Ashmorim in 2351 BCE at the age of 73, of a winter cough, in her own bed, which the Vigil noted as an irregularity. The dagger went to her niece, who used it for the next season to cut reeds for baskets. It was worn by then to a narrow dark leaf with one small notch in the middle where the old straightening had left a flaw, and she never sharpened it in threes.