What Nikaini Takakaini saw, in the temple courtyard at Araran in 2405 BCE, was an empty square. She was standing at the south door with a sling loaded when the north door opened and shut and a man stood in front of her. Nothing had crossed the paving in between. Later she told the gate captain that she had watched the place where he would be, and he had gotten there first. She hit him anyway. The silvered stone took him under the ribs and he felt it crack, and she drove him toward the east wall with her next two stones until the first sun came over the roof. He took a burn along the forearm and left by the gate. That was Mamaan Karayuini, the Ashen Hunger. It was the first and best thing she would ever do to him.
He had been a vampire for five and a half centuries by then, and before that he had been nothing so grand. He was born in 2991 BCE at Kabhaesh, a temple town in the Indus and Ganges Plain, in what is now India, in the age later called the First Night, to a family that kept the town's well-house. At twenty he drowned in the river, or nearly did: he had gone in after a goat, and the current took him under the temple steps. Hands pulled him out of the water that were not entirely kind. In 2971 BCE they belonged to Suraa Javiini, the Crowned Regent, a vampire who ran a court of feeders out of a river town and who recruited the way a landlord collects debts. Mamaan woke different. He could not remember whose voice he had heard first.
Suraa made him a mercenary, which is to say she lent him out. The Hollow Choir was a loose affair of coven houses along the river plain, and it paid for muscle that could be left unsupervised, and Mamaan was that. He took jobs. He settled grain quarrels, collected debts from town elders and, once, on the strength of a rumor, killed a priest who knew too much about a cellar. He did not love any of it, and was not troubled by it.
What he had was Fleetfall. It was a gift of the body, not a device. His legs and spine could fire in a sequence faster than a person could follow, and a distance of thirty paces closed before a heart had finished one beat. It cost him heavily afterward. His thighs shook, his vision tunneled, and the thirst that followed was worse than it should have been, so he did not use it lightly. It also had limits that the Vigil knew by now. Salt laid across a threshold stopped him cold, and so did wards hung in a doorway. And direct sunlight, which he could not outrun because it fell everywhere at once.
He traveled. In 2529 BCE he took a post escorting a jade caravan east across the mountains, in the service of the Choir's trade, and halfway across the Yellow River Basin he made a vampire of his own. Tangqin Zhao, whom they would later call the Midnight Widow, was a woman he had no real reason to choose beyond a feeling that she could be left alone and would survive. He rode home without her. Two years afterward Suraa Javiini was destroyed in a purge of the coven houses, in 2527 BCE, and Mamaan was in the plain at the time and was not there to see it. He never said whether he regretted that.
Nikaini cost Mamaan Karayuini more than any vampire slayer had in some centuries. The others had come at him with bronze and temper, and he had treated them as weather. She came with a ledger. He found, a little to his irritation, that he had started to ask the Choir's informants what she ate, and which gate she favored, and whether she still tapped the stones. After the courtyard at Araran, in 2405 BCE, she watched the city with a patience he found uncanny. He had expected someone who would be angry, and she was not angry. She salted every threshold, she posted watchers at dawn, and she kept the sling oiled and the stones silvered so she could tell her own from the river's. He sent himself against her again and again for eleven years, because he was the best the Choir had at getting through a wall, and she was always standing at the other side of it.
He killed her in 2394 BCE, on the river steps below Araran, at dawn. He had tested the east wall and found the place where the sun fell late, and he came at the hour she least expected, since she believed he could not stand the light. It was a long fight. Her hide, which the Vigil of Indus and Ganges Plain called Ironhide, turned his blows as if they had been struck on a kiln wall, and he had to work through it slowly. At the end she sent a last silvered stone at his face from the sling, and he caught it, and the stone split his palm to the bone. He killed her with the same hand. She was fifty-three, and he found, to his surprise, that he had respected her.
He kept the stone. It sat in his palm for a week while the burn closed, and then he put it in a pouch he wore at his belt and carried it for the rest of his days. When he made another vampire, Dedea Yuraesh, whom they called the Sable Regent, in 2292 BCE on the plain, he let her handle it once and never again.
In 2280 BCE, at seven hundred and eleven, he went down to the river one evening with the pouch at his belt and a bundle on his back, and did not come back up. No one in the Choir saw him leave. He has not been sighted since. The Vampireverse says he took a boat. Nobody has said which.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
