Lawaipa Lamuus

Lawaipa Lamuus, the Veiled Shield, was a vampire slayer of the Vigil of Anatolia who could flood a room with dread, and in 1154 BCE she destroyed the spy Ruipa Tirurua. She outlived that enemy by three years, and in the end it was a spring river that took her.

In the spring of 1151 BCE the river below Tarmua rose over the ford a week earlier than anyone had predicted, and Lawaipa Lamuus, who had spent five years killing things stronger than herself, died trying to get a neighbor's cart of seed barley across water that the village children waded in summer. She was thirty-six. The ox went down first, the cart swung round on it, and a rolling stone caught her above the ear. The neighbor's boy climbed out on the far bank with the barley sacks still tied to his back. A woman washing wool at the bend found Lawaipa the next morning, and it was remarked that the cloth fringe across her brow had stayed knotted all the way down the river. Nobody in Tarmua knew quite what to do with her. The people who might have known were hunters of the Vigil of Anatolia, and they were three valleys away, busy with a hard winter's leftovers. The fringe deserves its own account, since it gave Lawaipa Lamuus the name by which strangers knew her, the Veiled Shield. It was a band of dyed wool cords, hanging from a headcloth to the cheekbone, so that Lawaipa saw the world as if through reeds. She never saw a face whole, and above all she never saw a mouth. In a country where the bronze sickle-sword was the best weapon money could buy and a veil was a woman's ordinary clothing, it looked like piety. It was a defense, and she had paid for the lesson. She tied it with three knots and counted them aloud every morning, under her breath, to a reaping tune her mother used to hum over the weirs. Go back to the beginning, and it is not much of a beginning. Born in 1187 BCE at Tarmua, a river village in Anatolia in what is now Turkey, she grew up among eel traps and reed baskets, a quiet girl who read the water the way other children read a face. The shrine upriver paid its hunters in barley and she became one of them, bringing in wildfowl and the occasional red deer for the feast days. The work taught her patience, how to wait out a cold morning without moving, and how a herd goes still just before something arrives. It also left her with a younger sister, whom she walked to the shrine and back every market day because the road was longer than it looked. The road took the sister in 1156 BCE. Lawaipa was thirty-one. Feeders had set up a house at a carters' stop, one of the places on the trade road where mule trains rested and drivers asked no questions, and a girl who went in for a lamp-oil refill did not come out. Lawaipa walked in after her at dusk with a hunting knife and no plan. What happened inside, she never described in order. The people who were there said that something rolled off her like a flood coming up a dry channel, and the room went down on its knees. Men soiled themselves. A feeder who had stood eight hands taller than her crawled for the door. She found her sister behind a curtain, alive and unable to speak, and carried her home. Afterward Lawaipa vomited for most of a day, her nose bled, and her hands shook so hard she could not hold a cup. That was the first time Dread Tide came, and it always cost her the same: a copper taste in the mouth, a pulse in the eyes, and a day of being useless afterward. She was an Exo-Human, as the later accounts of The Bronze Vigil would call it, and the Vigil of Anatolia came to her rather than the other way round. No teacher was ever sent. A runner arrived with word that the Slayerverse had marked the name of its newest vampire slayer, and left within the hour. Everything else she worked out alone, with the habits of a hunter and a ledger of knots. She kept a cord at her belt, one knot for each feeding ground she cleared, and by the time of her death it carried eleven, strung along the trade roads of Anatolia from the salt flats to the cedar passes. She worked quietly, in the hour when the carters were drunk, and she used Dread Tide only when the alternative was dying. She had a dry way of describing it. "I turn the tide on," she told a ferryman, "and then I spend the next day bailing out." In 1155 BCE she came to Yaruhatus. A night market was held in the dry bed of a stream there, torches on poles and rugs on the gravel, and it was run by a vampire called Ruipa Tirurua, known as the Weeping Whisper, who had once been a court informant and still collected secrets the way other people collected rent. Ruipa belonged to the Crimson Circle and held her market by the oldest method there is, which was that nobody could afterward say who they had seen there. She smiled at people, and they forgot. Lawaipa went in with her fringe down and her eyes on the ground, and she took the smile for a trick of the torchlight until a woman beside her stopped in the middle of a sentence, blinked, and asked what she was buying. By dawn Lawaipa herself woke in a ditch with her sickle-sword across her lap and four hours simply missing. She went back the following night. The Dread Tide went through that market end to end, merchants and thieves and children down on the gravel together, and Ruipa walked out through them with her hands open, smiling at the tannery wall, and was gone. The market never reopened. Lawaipa lost the winter finding out where she had gone. She had gone up to Muwaipa, a hill town where grain was stored in windowless houses, and Lawaipa followed in 1154 BCE with three iron nails in her bag. They had cost her a year of hide sales. Iron was a king's metal in those days, given as gifts, and she had traded for it with an ill grace. She drove them into the threshold of the granary house one after another in the dark, and sat down with her back to the door to wait for the sun. When the first light came she tore the thatch open from above. Ruipa did not scream. She stood with the sun on her hands and said something Lawaipa never repeated, and then she smiled one last time, with nothing behind it, and Lawaipa looked at the floor until it was over. The Weeping Whisper was destroyed on that morning, and the town lost nine sacks of barley to the smoke and the argument that followed. After that there were three years. She went home. She mended the weirs, she let the cord lie coiled in a basket, and she slept, when she slept, with the door unbarred, which her sister said was the strangest thing she ever saw her do. The Slayerverse entered her under a short line, and the river carried off the rest. At the shrine upriver they hung the cord of eleven knots on a peg beside the door, and the neighbor's boy, grown, used to take a wheel from the old cart and set it by the ford on market days so people could see how deep the water had been.