Lan Bo

Lan Bo, the Silent Choir, was a river-trade broker of the Yellow River Basin, turned into a vampire of the Gilded House in 1468 BCE. He killed the vampire slayer Mingqin Feng in 1456 BCE and survived her by nearly four centuries.

Fengqin smelled of wet clay and scorched millet, and for the next four hundred years Lan Bo could tell the month by it. In the wet season the tamped-earth walls gave off a cold mineral breath; after harvest the grain-houses breathed out husk and smoke; in the dead of summer the whole city smelled faintly of hot copper from the casting yards by the east gate. He was born there in 1499 BCE, in the Yellow River Basin of what is now China, the son of a salt factor with a narrow house on the wall, and he grew up counting. His father taught him cowries by their sound against a clay dish. By ten, Lan could name a short weight by ear. He became a broker because he was exactly the sort of man a trade town needs and never loves. He was soft-spoken, good at sleeves, and unfailingly there. In Fengqin a bargain between serious men was closed by touching fingers inside a long sleeve, so that onlookers saw nothing, and Lan was better at that silent language than anyone alive. Barge captains asked for him by gesture, which is how the market came to call him the Silent Choir; the name was sharpened later by the seven gate wardens and ferry captains he paid to say nothing, who made, as the joke went, a very quiet choir. What he wanted was uncomplicated. He wanted to be the name every captain and magistrate asked for first. He rolled a string of cowries over his thumb as he talked, a habit his father had given him, and at his worst he did it through funerals. In 1468 BCE, aged thirty-one, he took a fever that did not break. A visitor sat at the bedside through the third night, and in the morning the fever was gone and he was something else. Lan Bo never said who the visitor was, not to the Gilded House and not to the few who asked, and the House, which gossiped about everything, let it lie. He kept his trade. The House, which lent money and moved grain and bronze for older families in the dark of the year, was delighted to have a broker who could work through the night. He rose in it quickly, and within a few seasons he had built a small network inside the Fengqin watch, wardens who owed him debts and would pass a word in the margin of an ordinary day. His gift, which the House called Fang Mantle, was a matter of bone and tendon and was never graceful. Over the space of ten breaths the jaw would drop and lengthen, the shoulders would bunch and shear through a good wool tunic, and a grey pelt would break along the neck. He could also fold himself down, with a great deal of noise inside his own chest, into a raven that flew badly. Each change cost him a day of rawness, and clothing. He carried a spare tunic in an oiled bag, a vanity he was never able to give up. He knew what could kill him: a silver tip, scarce and dear, a thumb's length of it costing about a mule, and a slayer's mark pressed to the skin. The mark was ash and ochre in the hand of someone who meant it, and it burned like a coal laid on a wound. He had heard of it in the way one hears of weather in another province. He found out in 1462 BCE, at the Hanxi landing, a ferry crossing a day from the walls, in the years the Vampireverse remembers as the Bronze Vigil, where a grain barge captain had taken a shipment to be weighed twice. Lan had come to settle it. He did not notice the woman until she was close: a young Exo-Human vampire slayer with a stone-tipped spear and ash up both forearms, who held out her hand with a ridiculous courtesy. He took it. In that instant his wrist went white, and the shape of a thumb rose in it. He did not remember the shift, only the sound of it, and then the reeds in his face and the river up to his belly. By dawn he had a bronze cuff on the wrist, and he wore it for the next four centuries. He did not hate her. That would have been inefficient. Lan Bo gathered information on her the way he gathered it on anyone whose fortunes he might affect: where she slept, what she feared, what her body did. His wardens reported that she kept a stone point, that she hated crowds, that her trick was an itch in her skin which came on, they swore, only for blades. He tested it by sending a boy with a fish knife into her path at Sangpu, and watched from a roof as she turned a heartbeat before the child drew. He then left blades off his list for good. He carried none, he armed no one near him, and from then on he intended to meet her with nothing in his hands. He took the long way to it. For four years he refused every chance the House offered, at Sangpu and at Liuhe, to fight her in the open, while she burned warehouses and he rebuilt them. In 1456 BCE she came down to Fengqin herself, to the dike east of the city gate, in flood season and in rain, with three of her company and her face set for the strongroom wall. He went out to meet her as a raven. Her skin was quiet, as he had known it would be, and she was already lifting her chin to say something when he struck. He killed Mingqin Feng quickly, on the packed earth, with her spear still in her hand. Then, because he could not bear going back to the House with blood on him, he washed his hands in the dike water. That is the detail the Vigil kept, and he could not argue with it. He lived on for 397 years after his turning, and he was never as good at the work again. The cuff stayed. The Gilded House moved from town to town as the bronze road shifted, and Lan kept books for it, and in the famine year of 1071 BCE, when the river failed and the city grew hungry enough to count its grain twice, the wardens of Fengqin searched every storehouse inside the walls with spears tipped in silver beaten out of old ritual vessels, each man carrying a thread dyed grey from the ash of a vow. He was found in a granary on the east side, counting. He was four hundred and twenty-eight. When the wall came down the dust that rose smelled of wet clay, and the last thing the wardens recovered was a bronze cuff, with a string of cowries still knotted through it.