Latiipa Tikuili survives in two records, and both of them are wrong about something. The first is a ballad that the herders around Titias still sing at the spring shearing, thirty stanzas in a rolling meter meant for walking uphill. The second is a tally cord, a long hank of undyed wool with knots in clusters, which the shrine keepers say was his own count of the nights he stood vigil. The ballad exaggerates. The cord, being a count, is dull and mostly honest. Between them Latiipa Tikuili can be reconstructed: large, loud, unmarried, a poor liar, who left the shrine at thirty-four and did not come back for the better part of forty years, through the roughest decades of the First Night in the hills.
The ballad opens with his birth and gets it wrong. It puts him in a storm, with lightning at the lintel, because the singers like the name Storm Charge to have an origin. In fact he was born in 2918 BCE at Titias, a mountain shrine in Anatolia, in the high country of what is now Turkey, and the shrine's keepers reared him because his mother died when he was small and his father could not feed him. He grew up carrying water and wood up a goat track. The cord has a long run of small even knots from those years, which the keepers read as his habit of counting steps. He grew very strong, with a laugh people heard from the lower terraces, and he was the shrine's champion in the wrestling at the shearing for twenty summers running.
The fourth stanza says that he died of the fever and came back, and this is the best-attested part of the story. In 2884 BCE a sickness came up the pass from the caravan towns and killed a third of Titias. Latiipa lay four days without breathing that the healers could detect. They had washed him for burial when he sat up and asked for water. Whatever happened, he left the shrine within the month with a stone-tipped spear that had belonged to a dead herder, and he was called to the work of a vampire slayer at the age of thirty-four, in a year when the Winter Brood's hunters were thinning the caravan roads. The Vigil of Anatolia offered him a place on its rolls. He refused, and the Slayerverse still lists him as unaffiliated: he answered to no one, took his pay in sheep and salt, and slept in whatever barn would have him.
What the Gilded Blade did, and the herders called him a stormer for it, was charge. The ballad calls it the Storm Charge, and the cord confirms it with a cluster of knots at every fight, but no verse explains how it worked. It was a run, with the spear low and the whole body behind it, that did not stop for walls, doors or second thoughts. It had no gift behind it that the Vigil could find; Latiipa was a human man, large and quick and stubborn, and he had trained his lungs and thighs on the goat tracks. The Vigil's elders thought he would be dead in a season. Instead someone sent him south to Yaa Shayaipa, an engineer who had been a slayer for fifteen years, and told her to teach him some sense.
The ballad says nothing about her. The cord does, with a block of knots between 2883 BCE and 2879 BCE that is the neatest stretch in the whole length. She taught him what she knew: how to read a doorway, how to wait, where running water might be drawn in front of a threshold, how a single nail driven into a lintel can do more than a dozen men. He taught her, for nothing, how to be brave in the dull way, by walking at a thing. She said he was the worst pupil she ever had and the only one who ever made her laugh. By the fifth year he was not much changed, but he stopped for a moment at doorways, and that moment was enough.
It was at a doorway that he met Shaa Arrutias. In 2880 BCE, in his fourth year of lessons, he was alone at a herder's hut in the pass of Huruna when a man arrived at the threshold who did not come in. He was lean, polite, and looked about forty. Stanza nine calls him the Velvet Architect and says he spoke softly of the weather. The cord has only a single knot that night, tied hard. What is clear from other sources is that the stranger was a hunter of the Winter Brood who could cover ground between the beats of a man's pulse, and that Latiipa, who had been told about nails, had driven three of the rare black iron kind, hammered from a fallen star and worth a flock each, into the doorframe that afternoon. The stranger could not cross. Latiipa could not leave. They spent the night talking through a doorway, until the sun came over the pass at dawn and the visitor was gone, leaving a long, clean cut across the stout leather of the hut door at the height of a man's throat. Latiipa had never moved.
For thirty-seven more years he and Shaa Arrutias circled each other. They met at the siege of Artupias in 2861 BCE, where he held a breach for three nights and the Winter Brood's hunter appeared on the fourth, took a spear in the shoulder and walked off with the shaft still in him. They met in a salt mine, a river ford, a wedding. Each held the other's attention more than any ally did. The ballad's eleventh stanza makes it a feud of honor, but the cord is more truthful: the knot for each meeting is the same size as the knot for a meal. Neither of them ever killed the other, and neither, as far as the evidence goes, wished to be the one who stopped.
He died in 2843 BCE at Titias, in his sleep, aged seventy-five, forty-one years after he had come down from the shrine. The ballad says he fell on the pass. The keepers, who dug the grave, say otherwise: he was in his own bed, in the room above the wood store, with the stone-tipped spear leaning against the wall. Shaa Arrutias was, by every other account, alive somewhere in Anatolia that year. The herders sing thirty stanzas and no more, and when a child asks them why the ballad has no ending they say there was no ending to sing. Every spring, the keepers pull the three black nails out of the old lintel at Titias, oil them, and drive them back in.
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