Lykes Lyaries

Lykes Lyaries, the Crowned Collector, was an Aegean vampire assassin who spent 259 years setting great houses against one another and keeping the circlets of the fallen. She was bad at gratitude, grief and patience, and brilliant at one thing, which was being somewhere else.

Waiting was the thing she could not do, and the record of her life is mostly a record of what that cost her. Lykes Lyaries could not sit through a feast, a siege or a sermon. She tapped, shifted, left rooms before they were finished with her. Fast as she was, she could not be quick enough to make up for the hours she threw away in being restless. For a creature that lived 287 years, she used remarkably few of them well, and she knew it. She said so once to a harbor-master, in the tone of someone mentioning the weather. She was equally bad at being grateful. She was born in 2036 BCE in Stolyos, a harbor settlement in what is now Greece, in the Aegean, to a family of net-menders who owed money to everyone they knew. At twenty-eight she was running from men to whom she herself owed it, and she went to ground in the wrong cellar. The woman in it was Kalstoos Demkaleuos, who kept a bone with notches on it and a sentimental streak that she regretted, and who in 2008 BCE made a vampire of her rather than let her bleed. Lykes was a poor pupil. She could not abide the patient, tilted manners of The Gilded Concord, or the quiet hum of the household her sire kept, or being studied. After a few decades she left and did not write, and she gathered her own company, The Gilded Line, and she never once thanked the woman who had given her two and a half centuries. She was bad at grief. In 1782 BCE the news reached her by way of a sailor that Kalstoos had been destroyed at Demphion, by a limping thief named Dema Kallykthoos, with the roof taken off in the morning. Lykes listened to the whole account on a quay at Stolyos with her arms folded. Then she asked what the sailor knew of the price of timber. She did not go to Demphion. She did not go to the white house, though she stood, in the years afterward, at the end of the street it was on. It is the only grief on record in her life, and it was conducted entirely in not going. And she was bad, most of all, at being seen to lose. In 1761 BCE, in the plague season at Methoon, she went down into the temple cellar to take a circlet from a dead headman, a thing she had done in a hundred cellars before. One of the corpses sat up. The light that came out of the young man was white, flat and hard, like a bucket of noon, and it laid her arm open to the shoulder. She went up the stair so fast the guards later swore she had never been there. It was the first time anything had hurt her in a century, and she took it badly. She learned from a serving girl that the man was Melykon Kademon, a stormer of the town levies, and that the people of Methoon had taken to calling him the Ivory Arrow. She did not forgive him for it, or for the scar. She was bad at sleeping in strange houses, which is a poor defect in a hunter whose work is done in them. Through the long years of The Bronze Vigil she slept in a different loft every month and woke at every creak, and when she did sleep she dreamed of the stair at Stolyos where the nets were hung to dry. Among the vampires of the coast, in what the Vampireverse remembers as a golden age for her sort, she was admired and not liked. Lykes Lyaries was too quick to be a comfortable guest and too restless to be a patient ally, and the few who took her in found their wine drunk and their window open by morning. A vampire slayer, if one had caught her at rest, would have found her in a posture of exhaustion and hunger. None did. She kept moving, and the world kept its distance. What she was good at was speed. Her gift, Heartbeat Step, let her cross a courtyard in the time it took a pulse to finish one beat, and to arrive in front of a man while the sound of her was still behind him. It came with a price she never discussed: a drumming in the ears afterward and a thirst that doubled. She could also feel a pulse at a few paces, and she learned that small wounds would open or close at her will, which was a more useful trick for the quiet end of the trade. Over the centuries she was an assassin of high quality, preferred by those who wished a headman to have an unfortunate fall. She was good, too, at making people hate each other. Across her years she set five great houses of the Aegean coast against one another, and for each one she took from the ruin the circlet of whoever had worn it, a bronze fillet or a plaited gold band. She kept them in a cedar chest in a locked room at Stolyos and tried each on once, in the dark, never again. The coast knew her as the Crowned Collector. She wanted one thing out of all of it, a quay at Stolyos of her own, with its own boats and her name over the water-stair, and it was the one thing she never got round to buying. Melykon Kademon followed her for twelve years. He came close three times. Once she left him cut across the ribs under a fish rack she had pulled down. In 1749 BCE she walked into the strongroom beneath the granary at Arikalos, to take what a dead headman had worn, and found a line of coarse salt across the sill that she had not seen him lay. The room went white. She hit the doorway at a speed that blew the line apart, and she felt his dagger before she heard him. She was a vampire of 287 years, and she died in a doorway, in the light of a man she had never once managed to be bored by. The chest at Stolyos was opened afterward and found to hold forty-one circlets, laid in order, each wrapped in a strip of net.