Kanikis Phidemes

Kanikis Phidemes, the Gaunt Marrow, was a scientist of the Obsidian Brood who counted heartbeats on clay tablets in the Aegean. Turned in 1239 BCE, she hunted down the vampire slayer Meos Kalstoos in 1192 BCE and died in 1103 BCE in the fire that preserved her records.

The tablets of Kaaria came out of the ashes hard as brick. They had been written in soft clay, in the cramped palace script of the Aegean, and left to dry on shelves in the record house of a hill fort, and in 1103 BCE the record house burned for most of a night. A fire that destroys a paper archive bakes a clay one. Four hundred and some tablets survive, many cracked, and they are in the handwriting of Kanikis Phidemes, the Gaunt Marrow, who kept them for a hundred and thirty-six years as a vampire and who died with the roof falling in on them. Most of what follows comes from her own hand. The Vampireverse had other record keepers in the years of The Bronze Vigil, but she was the only scientist among them, and the only one whose notes outlived her. She was not a modest writer, but she was accurate, and the combination is rare enough to be worth the trouble of quoting. She was born in 1260 BCE at Kaaria, a hill fort in the Aegean, in what is now Greece. The family were keepers of the temple lamps, and the girl went up to the observatory terrace at nine with a water jar that dripped through a pinhole and a heap of pebbles, and counted the star-risings against the jar. The earliest tablets are her apprentice work. "Third rising of the red star: nineteen jars after the lamp-lighting. The jar drips faster in the heat; correct for it." She wanted, as far as anything survives of her wanting, to know how things were put together. She hated the smell of burnt barley and left any room that had it. She tapped a fingernail on every cup before she drank, and listened to the note. The Aegean was a small world and a connected one, and in the winter of 1239 BCE a ship came into the bay below Kaaria out of the Levant, deep with cedar and purple dye. Its owner was a man named Yahashon Eltiron, the Ivory Tyrant, who called at the temple to ask after its star-readers. Kanikis was twenty-one. He sat at the terrace, asked her three questions she could not answer, and left her with a fourth to carry. She went down to his ship on a night in the following month. By the thaw she was something else and he was gone with the spring winds, back to the Levant, where he is, by every account, still living. She did not write down his name until the last year of her life, and when she did she put it on the very edge of a tablet. The change gave her ears. The Long Ear was no more than a rare trait of the body, an extension of the predator's senses all her kind have in some measure, and in Kanikis it was unusually acute. She could hear a heartbeat through a wall at a hundred paces. "Miller's wife: seventy-two at rest, ninety after the stair. Her son behind her: one hundred and four. He is afraid of something; it is not me." Most nights she could not turn it off. The whole fort was a rain of pulses, and she slept with wax in her ears and a cloth over her face. She also had, as a second trait, the ability to break apart into a swarm of small dark winged bodies and re-form somewhere else, which she called the Scatter in her notes and did not enjoy. Fire frightened her, and so did a line of salt across a doorway. She tested both, repeatedly, on herself. The Obsidian Brood kept her as their counter. She mapped where they fed by the pulse of the villages, which were the villages the hunters would reach first, and she worked out how long it took a household to notice a missing member. The rest of the Brood thought her cold. The tablets show a woman who was mostly curious and sometimes lonely. "The cat at the lamp house has outlived four of mine. I have stopped naming them." The tablets on the vampire slayer Meos Kalstoos, the Storm Arrow, begin in the second year of her war. "A girl on the river road. Reed bow. She walks with her left hand a little forward, as if feeling a wall. Counted her at forty paces from the boat, behind a cart: pulse forty-eight. Slow as a sleeper's. She is not asleep. Find out what she senses and by what." A month later: "She knows where we are by cold. Skin. Test on myself: stand in the cistern to the chest; my own warmth falls. Hypothesis: where all is cold, she is blind." The test came in 1194 BCE at Halmyra, where the marsh flats were laid out with brine tanks the size of threshing floors. Kanikis chose it with the care of a woman choosing a laboratory. The girl came across the flat as predicted, and her arrow, loosed at nothing, came through the dusk and took Kanikis through the left hand and pinned it to a post. The hand was her writing hand. She wrote with the other one for three weeks and got the figures wrong. "She is not blind; she is blurred. Retire to the Scatter if hit again. The girl broke no bone of mine but she took two weeks of my sums." The tablet carries a small round thumbprint where the clay was pressed, with a drop of dried blood in it. The end of it came in 1192 BCE at Kaaria. She had heard the salt being poured at the gate from the far side of the wall, grain by grain, and she knew the sound. The Storm Arrow came up the stairs to the observatory terrace at dusk with a bundle of fire arrows on her back and found not one cold but a dozen, one in every shadow of the stair, and fired at the biggest. The record of the fighting is eleven lines long. It is the plainest passage in the whole archive. "The girl fell on the third stair. Her pulse did not change until the last. Mine did not change at all, and I find that this disturbs me." She left the bow on the step, unstrung, and was ill for five days afterward, because the Scatter takes a toll, and she did not hunt for a month. Nobody replaced the Storm Arrow, and Kanikis Phidemes never again met anyone who could feel her coming. The tablets have long runs of nothing from that decade, a few notes on salt and grain prices, and they pick up again where Kanikis turns to the question of whether the cold could be taught. It could not. The Brood grew tired of a scientist who corrected them. In 1103 BCE a servant she trusted, a man called Dimos who had carried her lamps for twenty years, barred the door of the record house at dawn and put a torch to the oil jars. Fire was the one thing she had not solved. The last tablet found in the ruins is unbaked on one edge, half-finished, and begins with a number, forty-eight, and the first stroke of a name.