Kalstoos Demkaleuos

Kalstoos Demkaleuos, the Eternal Choir, was an Aegean vampire of the Gilded Concord and a healer turned experimenter in memory, who lived 434 years and made one childe. She was destroyed at Demphion in 1782 BCE by a thief who would not look at her face.

At first light on the roof of a manor in Demphion, in 1782 BCE, the hatch came off with a scrape and the day fell into the room in a bar about the width of a forearm. Kalstoos Demkaleuos did not run. Every door was salted and the shutters had been lined with it, so there was nowhere to run to, and she had spent four centuries learning to take an interest in what was happening to her. She stood and watched the bar move across the boards. It would reach her in about the time it takes to count to forty. She counted, because that was what she did, and a woman with a limp and a bronze sickle-sword came down the rope, the only vampire slayer who had ever got this far. It had taken thirteen years to get here, and she could see the whole of it from the beginning. She had been born in 2216 BCE in Lykariis, a harbor settlement in what is now Greece, in the Aegean region, to a family that salted fish. She was not interested in the fish. She was interested in the neighbors who got fevers, and in why one died and the next did not, and she went about the harbor from the age of twelve with a bone-handled knife and a handful of dried herbs, asking questions that sailors found impertinent. She became the settlement's herbalist-physician. She made notches on a long bone with a flint, one cut for each patient and one for each outcome, because no one had yet invented a better way to remember what had happened to people, and she was convinced that if enough notches were made the reasons would come up out of them like a face from water. It was the work of a scientist, though she would not have had the word. She wanted one thing, which was to be proved right or wrong with evidence, and she was seldom lucky enough to have either. In 2175 BCE, as the age later named The Bronze Vigil was beginning and when she was forty-one, a fever took the harbor and she was dumped with the rest of its dead in a pit outside the settlement. She woke there. Who had done it, she never learned. Nothing she found in her later centuries explained it, and she was too exact a person to invent a story. She could say only that someone had fed on her, that someone had not finished, and that she had come to among the bodies with her hunger already fixed on its schedule. She walked home and treated her neighbors for the rest of that year with a manner that was thoroughly calm, and in the spring she left. She took up with the Gilded Concord, a loose league of vampires with money and good manners, who found her useful. She was a quiet colleague. She never claimed to know where her kind had come from, and they did not like to ask. What Kalstoos Demkaleuos found, in the Concord's long evenings, was the use of her own face. She could smile in a particular way, tilted, slow and held a beat longer than courtesy permitted, and anyone looking directly at her would lose the last hour or so afterward as cleanly as a hand loses a pebble. She named it The Forgetting Smile, and she tested it carefully, with notches. It tired her. Her teeth ached afterward and she was cold for a day. At first she used it as a physician might, to take the sting out of a death or a bad night. Then the Concord found a use for it that was less kind, and she let them, and she was never quite sure when the line had been crossed. Those she had smiled at too many times could not be left to wander, so she took them in. There were nineteen at the last count. She taught them a song to quiet them, and they sang it at dusk without knowing why. The harbor towns began to say there was a choir in the white house above the quay, and she let the name stand: the Eternal Choir, though the Eternal Choir had a single conductor and she was tone deaf. She made one childe, in 2008 BCE. Lykes Lyaries came to her in the course of a night at Stolyos, hiding in the wrong cellar from people she owed, and Kalstoos was feeling sentimental. It was a mistake she acknowledged afterward in plain terms. Lykes was fast, impatient and quite uninterested in notches, and she learned the Concord's manners without its patience. After a few decades she left the house and did not write. Kalstoos did not seek her out. It was the one experiment she never repeated. By 1795 BCE she had come back to Lykariis, to a dispensary above the quay, because the place had a good supply of herbs. On a damp afternoon in that year a stranger came through the door, and Kalstoos turned from the table and smiled. The stranger did not meet her eye. She was looking at the table, at the mortar, at the pestle with a thumb-worn notch. Kalstoos had been smiling at people for four hundred years and no one had ever looked at the mortar. A bronze blade struck the wood and took a strip from her forearm, and she went out through the back and over the quay wall, and sat in a boat in the dark with her arm wrapped in a strip of her own sleeve, and for the first time in a very long time she was curious about a person. She learned the name afterward: Dema Kallykthoos, whom the harbor was beginning to call the Fallen Hound. She noted that the woman limped. She noted that she never lifted her face. The roof at Demphion was the end of that curiosity. The bar of sun reached her ankle, and she smiled, as one does, though she knew it was no use, and the woman looked up for the first time. It was a plain, tired face. That was the last observation Kalstoos made, and she logged it carefully, as she had logged all the others. Then the beam reached her knee. She was four hundred and thirty-four years old, and by the best tally of the Vampireverse she had never once been wrong about a person until the day she was right about this one. The long bone with the notches was found in the ashes of the white house in Lykariis and given to the boatwright's widow, who used it to prop a shutter.