Lua Ninkuash

Lua Ninkuash, the Cold Vespers, was a marsh tracker turned vampire of the Gilded Line, a hunter who could follow one bleeding stranger across a whole city. They served the Bronze Vigil's darkest side for forty years in Mesopotamia and were destroyed in 1704 BCE at Kitardamum.

"You will feel the cut after I have found you," Lua Ninkuash told a reed-cutter at the door of his hut, quite kindly, as though it were a courtesy to warn him. The reed-cutter's wife was the one who remembered it, years later, to a scribe who wrote it down, because she had stood behind the door with a child on her hip and the words had been so reasonable. The cut was a nick on the man's forearm from a reed. It had happened an hour before and he had not noticed. That was the sort of person Lua Ninkuash was: someone who knew about your injuries first. They were born in 1778 BCE at Galishash, a marsh village in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, where people lived on mounds of packed reed and mud and poled to market in boats that sat inches above the water. They grew up tracking. The marsh people hunted wild pig, waterfowl and the occasional buffalo that wandered in from the dry country, and a hunter in that landscape worked by reading smaller signs than anyone from the cities could see: a bent reed, a smear on a stem, the smell of a wounded animal on a breeze. Lua was better at it than their father, and did not say so. They carried a pinch of dried marsh mint in the cheek, a habit they would keep when they no longer needed it, and hummed boatmen's songs under their breath without knowing they were doing it. The betrayal came at thirty-four. A lover whom Lua trusted sold them to a raiding party for a debt and a share of the proceeds, and the raiders opened a wound in Lua's side and left them in the shallows for the water to finish. A coven found them there in 1744 BCE. The coven's maker, Ludamum Damsarir, who was known as the Hungering Duelist, knelt in the mud and put the question plainly: the bite or the grave. Lua took the bite. Ludamum was not tender about it. The hunger that came after was frightening, and the first person they fed on was the lover, which is a thing that was mentioned in the Gilded Line with a kind of dry approval. After that nobody of that house ever asked Lua what they wanted from the world. What they wanted, as it happened, was small. They wanted to go back to Galishash one evening and not be recognized by anyone. They never did, because anyone who might have recognized them was dead or would have screamed, and a person who feeds on blood cannot walk through a marsh village unremarked. Ludamum, who is alive as these lines are written, considered the wish sentimental and told them so more than once. But Ludamum put Lua to work in the way that suited them best, and the work earned them the name the Cold Vespers. In the middle of the Bronze Vigil, the Gilded Line was a house of brokers and collectors, and what it needed from a tracker was the finding of people who had gone missing on purpose: debtors, witnesses, a granary clerk who had run with a tablet of accounts. The Vampireverse had its own tidy economy of this, and Lua became its best instrument. The trait had no name in the marsh. The Line called it Red Trail. A single person's blood, even a drop, even a day old, laid a scent in the air that Lua could follow across market squares, through a crowd, and over a river by smell alone. The senses that came with it were sharper than a hound's. The cost was that the world was loud with blood, all the time, and it took them years to learn to walk through a butcher's lane without losing the thread of a conversation. Over the next forty years they outlasted seven hunter cells sent by the Vigil of Mesopotamia and several by lesser parties. They survived by never standing still in one place for more than a week, and by a rule that nobody told them but they came to on their own: if a threshold had nails in it, they walked away. Iron nails, driven into the doorstep, were the kind of hard-won knowledge that the slayers had paid for. Fire was the other. They kept clear of lamps. They were not fond of reed halls. In the spring of 1717 BCE, at the barley wharf at Nasirrum, they were following a boatman who had cut his hand on a sack hook when a young man came out from behind a stack of grain and raised a bank of fog around himself. It was a good fog, thick and cold, with voices in it. Lua did not look up. They had a blood trail to follow, and fog did not change the smell of a man at all. The young man was a vampire slayer, newly called, and he fell badly over a stack of sacks, got up, and ran into the reeds. They let him go, because the boatman was bleeding. Later, in the Gilded Line's ledgers, he went down as a nuisance. His name was Lua Damzuir. It struck them, a little, that his first name was theirs. He did not stay a nuisance. He went away for most of a season and came back different: no fog, or less of it, and trails that went in circles, cut with goat blood and rags. The lesson he had learned was one they would have taught him, had they been friends. It annoyed Lua Ninkuash enormously that a boy could learn so fast. They respected it all the same, in the way you respect a tough joint of meat. Over the next thirteen years the two of them crossed each other's paths at Nasirrum, the marsh towns and Kitardamum, and Lua Ninkuash lost, in that time, a house, two assistants and a good deal of pride. The end came at Kitardamum in 1704 BCE. A single blood trail ran through the river quarter and into the pitch yard behind the boatwrights' warehouses. It was fresh, one man's, and it was the best scent they had followed in years. They went through the open door at a run, past stacks of bitumen and dry reed, and found the door behind them alight. They were seventy-four. They were destroyed in that yard in the flames, which took two days to burn out. They had wanted to see the marshes again and they smelled, at the end, only pitch. Ludamum Damsarir did not send word, and no one in the Gilded Line had the nerve to ask him. In Galishash a boy fishing at dusk is still told, sometimes, not to hum the old rowing songs after dark, in case someone is listening.