Kukali Kukuan

Kukali Kukuan, the Burning Spear, was a thief of the walled city-state of Cukal who became a vampire slayer in 1836 BCE and fought the Midnight Judge for twelve years. He had no gifts but his feet, a sling, and a patience for waiting at doors.

The sling was made by his mother, out of agave fiber she had stripped and plaited on her knee, and it was meant for scaring crows off a maize patch. Kukali Kukuan was seven when she gave it to him. It was a poor thing, two cords and a pouch of cured deer hide, the left cord a shade lighter than the right because she had run out of the dark fiber. He kept it for the next thirty-four years, and everything that happened to him in the end happened around it. Kukali Kukuan was born in 1859 BCE in Cukal, a walled city-state in the region later called Mesoamerica, in what is now Mexico. His family lived under the wall, in the strip of houses the builders had not bothered to tax, and the family trade was borrowing. His mother borrowed fiber, his father borrowed time from the grain-lenders, and Kukali learned early that a house was something a lender could take. They lost theirs when he was fourteen. After that he wanted a door on a street of his own, with a lintel that nobody could unscrew, and every theft he ever carried out was a deposit toward it. He was a thief of real quality. His walk, which he later called Ghost Step, was no gift at all, only discipline: weight on the outer edges of the feet, breath let go on each stride, a refusal to put a heel down before he had read the floor with his toes. It left him with ruined ankles by thirty. He was never once heard on a granary roof. In 1836 BCE, in the years of The Bronze Vigil and at twenty-three, he went to rob a headman's burial platform near the desert road and found someone already at work on it. He was bitten across the left shoulder, and the thing that bit him was interrupted and fled before it could do more. He lay in the sand for most of two days. When he walked back into Cukal he had no fever he could name, only a scar that would not close and a conviction that something he had never been told about was in the walls. Nobody taught him what it was. He worked it out from drained animals, from doors found latched on the inside, and from a priest of the lower town who told him what he knew in return for his silence on a matter of stolen salt. That was his calling as a vampire slayer, though he never used the term. The Vigil of Mesoamerica heard of him later and sent a runner. He kept the runner's honey cakes and sent back no answer. His sling now took silvered shot, which he made by rolling river clay around beaten silver and drying it in the sun, and he loaded it with a flick of the thumb that he practiced until it was a habit. Before every throw he licked his thumb and held it to the wind, a gesture that other hunters thought was theater and that was in fact the entire secret of his aim. Across eighteen years in the Slayerverse's service he is credited with eleven vampires, the greater part of them unnamed and mostly young. He met the one who mattered in 1831 BCE, at the water-gate of Cukal. The city wall there was pierced by a stone channel that carried a stream under the gate sill, and Kukali, who had been watching the place for weeks because it was the only part of the wall that bats would not roost on, saw a tall man in a river-cult sash stop at the threshold and look down at the water. He did not step over it. Kukali took this in with a calm that surprised him. When the man turned away from the gate and went around, Kukali was already waiting on the other side with a spear point he had heated in a brazier, and he laid it against the vampire's forearm as the arm came up. The skin hissed, and the vampire snapped the spear in two with his other hand and left. The vampire named himself afterward in a sentence Kukali did not catch. He would learn that it was Tzian Ahzoli, the Midnight Judge, who had come to settle an account for a cult that did not pay its debts. The burn did not heal. That was the day the Burning Spear was named, as the lower town told it, by people who were not there, and Kukali was never much pleased with it, because he had meant to use the sling. For the next twelve years the two of them went round Cukal and the villages beyond it like partners in an argument. Tzian could shatter a door with the heel of his palm, and he broke the stone lintel of a granary where Kukali had hidden for a night, rather than waste a minute coaxing him out. Kukali learned to stand only where a channel, a drain or a wet floor lay between himself and the thing he was waiting for. In 1830 BCE he proved to three quarreling trading houses that their own killers were a single hired hand, and he held the uneasy peace among them for six years by threatening to say it in the market. The houses never thanked him. He did not want them to. It ended in 1819 BCE, at Yamapali, where a cistern house had a doorway with a stream running across the sill. Kukali had spent a month arranging for the Judge to come to it. He put the silvered shot into the knee of the vampire at the threshold and let the old brand on his forearm do its work, and Tzian Ahzoli could go neither forward nor back, and Kukali stepped in under the swing of a fist that took the doorpost with it and drove the spear home. It took a long time. Kukali sat on the sill afterward until the stream had washed the stone clean. He died the next year, 1818 BCE, aged forty-one, of the sickness that came out of the old shoulder wound and spread into his chest. The Vigil's runner returned for the funeral. The sling hung for a long time on a peg beside the water-gate at Cukal, and the children of the lower town were allowed to take it down on the condition that they never put anything real in the pouch but dried peas.