Ludamum Damsarir

Ludamum Damsarir, the Hungering Duelist, is a Mesopotamian vampire of the Vampireverse, an assassin turned in 2507 BCE who is alive today. She turned to mist at doorways, made seven childer across forty-five centuries, and still carries the mark a young slayer burned into her arm.

In the spring of 2026 CE a woman who looks about forty stood outside a locked door in Basra and did not go through it. She could have. Ludamum Damsarir, the Hungering Duelist, has been passing under doors for longer than doors have had hinges, and the lock was a cheap one. She knocked instead, twice, and waited for the man inside to decide whether to answer. That is her habit, and she has never explained it to anyone. Her left sleeve was pushed to the elbow, and across the inside of the forearm ran a stripe of dark, flat pigment the width of two fingers, which she has not been able to scrub, scar over or dissolve in four and a half thousand years. She was 4,573 years old that spring. She was born in 2548 BCE in Urdamum, a river village in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, in the age her kind call the First Night, and the village is a flat place in the reeds that has been under silt and rebuilt more than once. Her father cut reeds. Her mother sold smoked fish. The girl was the sort who learned to be in a room without anyone remembering she had entered it, which in a village of forty houses is a talent that attracts the wrong attention and, sooner or later, the right employer. By her twenties she was working as an assassin for a temple steward in a city downriver, using a thin bronze knife, a cup of beer that was not beer, and long patience at back doors. She was good at it. She also hated the waiting, and said so to nobody. She was turned in 2507 BCE, at forty-one, during a harvest feast in a lord's courtyard where the guests wore painted clay masks. She had come to kill the lord's steward, and she remembered afterward the smell of crushed dates, the sound of someone pouring oil, and that the person who took her aside did not give a name. Her maker has never been named in the Vampireverse, and Ludamum herself has never spoken of the matter, not when asked politely and not when asked otherwise. The ones who ask have stopped. What she woke to was only a body that no longer aged and a thirst for blood that she managed, in the years after, with the same patience she had once brought to back doors. The gift came with the change. The people of the river towns called it Threshold Ghost, and what it was, physically, was that her body could loosen. The flesh went thin and cold and then to a low fog the color of river water at dawn, and in that state she could pass under a door, through the gap in a sword-guard, down a well-shaft or between the staves of a gate. It cost her. Each time she came back into her shape she was shaking and ravenous, and the longer she stayed fogged the worse the hunger, which was how she came by her alias. It could be stopped. Salt laid across a threshold held her out of a house. Wards hung in a doorway, whatever the household used, did the same. And a slayer's mark pressed into her skin prevented the fog from gathering across that patch, which was how she learned the last and worst of her limits. Ludamum Damsarir joined The Gilded Line because it offered what she wanted, which was rooms with good doors and the rule that a death was to be asked for formally. She became its favorite duelist. She would arrive at a house by the front, knock, state her business, and offer the person inside a choice of weapons, and the offer was always genuine, and she had never lost the first round. This earned her a reputation for manners in a community that had very few, and for being, as one of the Line's stewards put it, the only killer you could invite to supper. In 2480 BCE she took a girl by the river gate at Kukuena. She was sixty-eight that year, by her own count, and she was bored. A stormer of eighteen, put on the gate by someone with no instinct for staffing, stood with the canal behind her to cover a child and a stone-tipped spear in her fists. Ludamum took her shoulder, drank a little, and left, certain the girl would either die or turn. Neither happened. The girl's skin hardened into something gray and bright like glazed clay, and a woman from the Levant came down the Euphrates to teach her how to use it. Ludamum had made, by accident, a vampire slayer. The girl's name was Ishzuum Ishdamum, and over the next nine years she turned into the one person who made Ludamum uneasy. They met again in 2475 BCE at a shrine town called Ekuruun, where Ishzuum had salted every door in the building but one and sat waiting in the room with the single way in. Ludamum went through the sword-guard instead. She remembered the smell of wet soot, and the heat of the girl's hide, which was like standing next to a kiln, and then a spear shaft hot from the fire laid across the inside of her forearm. She left by the roof and did not feel her hand for a day. The stripe has never faded. She has had it looked at by the best that four thousand years could manage, and the only effect was that she stopped pulling her sleeve down. The matter was never settled. In the spring of 2471 BCE she heard from a river trader that the Stone Sentinel was sick, and she crossed the plain in two nights and stood at the door of a mud-brick house in Kukuena, where someone had laid a line of salt across the sill. She did not step over it. She did not fog under it. She stood there through the whole night, listening to the breathing inside change, and at dawn it stopped. She never told anyone why she had come, and has not tried since to explain it, even to herself. There were seven after that, made at long intervals, never in a hurry. Urbaes Miardbaius, in 2163 BCE, who went east to the Persian Plateau and was not heard of after 1806 BCE. Lua Ninkuash, in 1744 BCE. Khaibur Qadardaran, in 124 CE, who was taken in the Arabian Peninsula and would be destroyed in 841 CE. Ninbaun Bakium, in 458 CE. Zumeshum Tarbaa, in 1153 CE. Hugo Fontaine, in 1941 CE, in Gaul, which is now France. Layla Jabouri, in 1943 CE, in Mesopotamia. Five are dead. Two simply stopped being found. She keeps no portraits. The locked door in Basra opened eventually, and the man behind it said something she did not repeat. She remains in Mesopotamia, in the old river country, and is, by every account that reaches the Vampireverse, alive today. She keeps a small clay bowl of salt on her kitchen windowsill, and she has never let anyone move it.