Lua Damzuir

Lua Damzuir, the Sworn Thorn, was an informer turned spy and vampire slayer of Mesopotamia in the Bronze Vigil, a man who could fill a street with fog that did not exist. He trained under Baes Ardbaush, hunted a tracker who never lost a scent, and burned them out in 1704 BCE.

Lua Damzuir scrubbed his eating bowl with river sand every morning and set it upside down on a flat stone to dry, and he did this in every place he ever slept, including a few where sleeping was a risk. The bowl was unglazed and brown, a little lopsided, and had belonged to his mother. His enemies came to understand that the bowl was a better map of his movements than any informer's report. A bowl upside down on a stone meant he had slept there. A bowl missing meant he had moved on, and was probably already watching. The Vigil would later call him the Sworn Thorn. He was born in 1744 BCE at Damenninir, a river village in Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq, to a family that mended boats. The boy preferred the quay to the yard because on the quay people talked, and he paid attention. By his twenties he was an informer in the household of a city governor at Kitardamum, a small, careful man who sold what he overheard to a steward and a steward to whoever paid more. The pay was barley and a room with a door that closed. It was the life he wanted, and the thing he wanted most was a house of his own with a roof that did not leak, which he never got. The war found him in 1718 BCE. A stranger came staggering up the quay at Kitardamum with a wound in his side and a sealed pouch, and asked to be taken to the shrine of the river god, which was two streets away. Lua carried him there, because it was easier than refusing. The stranger lived long enough to tell a priest what was in the pouch. The priest looked at Lua for some time, and then asked whether he had ever seen a thing that was not there. He had. He was twenty-six, and he had seen it every day since boyhood, a kind of pressure behind the eyes that he had learned to keep quiet. The priest was a member of the Vigil of Mesopotamia, and by midwinter, in the thick of the Bronze Vigil, Lua had been told the word for it and what it made him: a vampire slayer who happened to be a spy. The Slayerverse had a name for the trait, Phantasm, and an older, rougher one used on the quay: the Fog That Was Never There. It was an act of the body and nothing more mystical, like a stammer or a rare gift for pitch. Lua could push the pressure outward, and anyone within about twenty paces saw a bank of mist rise from the ground, thick enough to hide a doorway, and heard sounds in it that matched what they feared. He could hold it for a count of about a hundred. After that his nose bled and his left ear rang for the rest of the day, and for an hour he could not tell the sounds he was making from the ones he had made up. He carried a sling with silvered shot, and the fog was the cover for it. Nobody had ever told him that a spy was not a fighter. He turned out to be both. His first meeting with Lua Ninkuash came in the spring of 1717 BCE at the barley wharf at Nasirrum. Lua was following a boatman who was selling grain to vampires and found the boatman bleeding from a cut hand. The vampire who had come for the grain was behind the stacked sacks, and when Lua raised the fog the vampire did not so much as turn their head. They were tracking by blood, and blood did not care about fog. Lua took a fall that left a bruise on his ribs for a month, fled through a reed bed, and understood that he had been given a lesson in how little he knew. The Vigil of Mesopotamia had nobody to teach him what he had met. It sent him over the Zagros to a woman who might. Baes Ardbaush was the Sworn Shield of the Vigil of Persian Plateau, which meant he had to cross a mountain range and a region border, a matter of several weeks in the autumn of 1717 BCE. She had agreed to take him in word received the year before. At the salt road weigh-house at Tarshaan she looked at him, sniffed, and told him to put down his bowl, because there was not enough space on the roof. He had nothing to teach her, and she taught him nearly everything: how to make a decoy trail that a nose would believe, how to cut a hand and hide the smell, how to wait for the vampire to make the mistake. Five years of it. She had two fingertips that did not feel and a way of laughing at his habits that made him stop minding them. Baes was killed in 1712 BCE by a vampire he had never met, at a river ford when he was a long way off. He heard it from a courier. He went to the ford that winter and found a cairn, and then he walked her bow to the harbor temple at Mihorad, because someone had to. Then he went back to Mesopotamia and set about the thing she had taught him to do. It took eight more years. Lua Ninkuash, the Cold Vespers, was a hunter of the Gilded Line who had outlasted seven cells sent to end them, and whose Red Trail could pick a single wounded stranger out of a city. Lua laid false trails across Kitardamum, Nasirrum and the marsh towns, and found them followed every time. Along the way he broke seven covens across the region. He did it on cloudy days and in other people's kitchens, and it was in someone's kitchen that he formed the plan. A tracker follows one person's blood. So he would make himself the one person. In 1704 BCE at Kitardamum he cut his own palm, walked through the pitch yard behind the river warehouses, and let the vampire follow. The yard stored bitumen and dry reed for the boatwrights, a whole year's supply, and the only door he left open was one he had soaked in oil. He stepped through, lit it behind him, and raised the fog to hide the exit. Lua Ninkuash did not flinch from the false mist and went through the door at a run. The sling hand blistered and the yard burned for two days. He was destroyed in it, the vampire who had made him a fool at Nasirrum. Lua Damzuir lived ten more years in Damenninir, and never did build the roof. He died in 1694 BCE of a fever at fifty, in a rented room with a draught. His sister took the bowl, still lopsided, and it stood upside down on a stone in her yard for the rest of her life.