Khera Menamunu

Khera Menamunu, The Velvet Whisper, was a ferryman's child from Senamuni who was made a vampire at twenty-one and became the Velvet Throne's most reliable assassin. Khera was thwarted for the first time by a baker's son, the vampire slayer Nefet Amunmeni, and outlived him by sixty-five years.

Nefet Amunmeni saw Khera Menamunu for the first time at dusk in 2663 BCE from the wall of the hill fort at Ankhsetsetu, and later described the figure on the causeway as someone walking on a floor that tilted. The stranger wore a reed-colored cloak. The stranger stopped at the irrigation cut before the gate and stood looking down at the running water for as long as it takes to say a short prayer, and then turned aside into the lengthening dark under the wall and was not there. Nefet had been told by the river warden what to watch for. He still had to ask the man next to him whether he had seen it too. Khera had been born in 2691 BCE at Senamuni, a river village of ferrymen and fish-smokers a day's pull below the fort, in the Nile Valley of Egypt in the first centuries of The First Night, to a family that kept a flat boat and a mother who never learned to like the water. The child learned to read currents, to be silent in a boat at night, and to touch the frame of every door with two fingers on the way in, a habit from a house where the roof leaked and the frame was the one part you could trust. Khera was good at disappearing in the reed beds and quick at sums. What Khera wanted, from about the age of ten, was a boat of their own, with a name painted on it, that did not belong to anyone's mother or anyone's debt. In 2670 BCE, at twenty-one, Khera was ferrying a passenger across at nightfall when the passenger stepped off the boat in the middle of the river and walked the rest of the way over the shallows. That passenger was Amunra Menmenu, who was called The Bloodless Duelist and had been bored for a very long time, and who made Khera a vampire as a kind of experiment in an apprentice. It was not tender. Khera learned in a week what the new body needed, and in a month what it could do, and by the next flood The Velvet Throne had taken them up as a name worth using. The Throne's work is the sort of thing the Vampireverse prefers to leave unwritten. Khera Menamunu, known along the river as The Velvet Whisper, became an assassin because it paid in the one currency they had never had, which was to be left alone between assignments. The gift was Umbral Step, and it looked from outside like a conjuring trick and felt from inside like a drop. Khera could step into a patch of true dark and come out of another within about a dozen paces, as if the dark were a single floor with trapdoors in it. The cost was cold and nausea, a dizziness that lasted a quarter of an hour, and the fact that it only worked where there was real dark to enter. Lamps killed it. So did salt poured across a doorway and the painted door-marks that river households put over their lintels, which Khera could not cross, any more than they could cross a line of running water laid at a threshold. Khera kept a short list of such things, the way a ferryman keeps a list of shoals. The causeway at Ankhsetsetu was supposed to be a single clean job, in 2663 BCE: the fort's water-reckoner, who kept the irrigation tallies and thereby the Throne's rivals' grain. Khera did not take the gate. They took the dark under the wall, came up through the granary and found on the second stair a double rank of men with locked shields and a lantern behind them, and a soldier at the front with a copper dagger. The dagger opened the back of Khera's hand. Khera went back the way they had come, which cost them an hour of sickness in a drainage ditch, and sat there thinking that it was the first time a plan had failed because of a drill. They met three more times, always at doors, and the Throne's own records, which were thin, list the soldier as the only vampire slayer who ever cost Khera an assignment twice. Khera came to respect it as a craft, and some nights found they were rehearsing the next approach not from the Throne's orders but from the soldier's habits: which door he favored, when the lamps were trimmed, how long a baker's son waits before he relaxes his shoulders. Nefet never rushed and neither did Khera, and each began to read the other from the salt on the sill. At some point in those years Khera noticed that their mother, at Senamuni, had begun leaving a heel of bread on the doorstep each evening, in the old way, and that a man had been seen at the house asking nothing. Khera stayed away for a season out of something that was not quite gratitude. Khera had never said a word to the soldier, and he had never said one back. In 2655 BCE Nefet Amunmeni died of the river fever at forty-four, in his bed. Khera heard it from a ferryman and did not believe it until the next dry season, when the fort's stair stood just as before, and the shields were just as close, and the soldiers were just as afraid. A man who could only be beaten by dying of the same thing as everyone else was not a man Khera could be sorry to have missed. They were sorry anyway, in a small cold way, and Khera made no mention of it to the Throne. Khera made one child, Taseni Tahorra, in 2646 BCE, a skinny fisherman's daughter whom Khera trained to read currents and tell lies, and spent the rest of their long life as the Throne's blade. In 2590 BCE, aged one hundred and one, they were destroyed in the Delta marshes, far from Senamuni, by hands within the Throne that nobody afterward named. The flat boat in Khera's family stayed tied at Senamuni a good many years. Someone had painted a small name on the bow, in an old, careful hand.