Melenon Yahtirsidon

Melenon Yahtirsidon, the Ember Hand, was a caravan-stop girl who trained her nose until she could read a vampire's trail through cedar smoke. Called as a vampire slayer in 2841 BCE, she destroyed the Bloodless Sovereign within a year and died of an ordinary illness at thirty.

Melenon Yahtirsidon paid for her craft every day with her food. Scent-Reading was not a gift. It was a skill she built from the age of nine, a nose trained like a hand, and the bill came in the form of every meal: she could taste the age of the meat, the salt in the cook's sweat, the sheep's last pasture in the milk. Cities made her ill. She could not walk through a tannery quarter without a cloth soaked in vinegar over her face. She ate mostly bread and olives, plain, and was thin as a rail all her life. The Vigil of Levant, which valued her, once offered to feed her at its own table, and she sat down to a bowl of lentils, closed her eyes and put down her spoon. She said she could smell the pot's last three meals. Melenon Yahtirsidon, whom the Levant would later call the Ember Hand, had been born in 2862 BCE at Enashhaon, a caravan stop in the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, in the long middle of the First Night, where her father kept the oil press and her mother kept the books of what the caravans owed. The press was her nursery. It stood in a pit of cool stone, floored with pressed olive pits and rank with a thousand harvests of olive paste, and she learned there that a smell was a language with a grammar: top note, body, tail. She would sit in the pit with her eyes shut and name what was coming down the road by the dust on the wind. She was right far more often than the adults. By sixteen she was the stop's informal tracker, a trade that would have made her an unusually useful vampire slayer to anyone who cared to look, finding strayed goats and a number of strayed husbands. What she wanted was modest and exact: she wanted a press of her own, with three olive trees and a roof, and no more accounts of what other people owed. The night she was called was in 2841 BCE, the night a feeding party came to Enashhaon. She never described it afterward to anyone, not even in the roughest outline, and the Slayerverse has only the plain facts: a household of eleven, a stop emptied in a single night, and a girl of twenty-one who survived because her father had pushed her into the oil pit and dragged a pressing-stone across the cover. She lay there with the smell of olives in her nose and the smell of the people above her in her throat. One of them was not like the others. She could not name the scent. Cedar resin over something cold, like a hand held too long in a well. When the stone shifted at dawn she had a length of olive wood in her fist, the stake-end of a broken press-lever, and she used it. That was her calling, if it can be called one. No mentor came for her. She taught herself the rest from the bodies she found, and from what the Vigil's runners eventually told her, which was not much. She had no gift of the body, and no one in the Slayerverse has ever claimed that she did. The olive-wood stake was hers by habit: she cut a new one from the tree behind the press whenever she could, thin and hard and hand-length, and kept it inside her sleeve. Everything else was her nose. In nine years as a hunter, and for most of that time alone, she tracked the feeding parties of the Thorned Choir up and down the coast road, reading their trails across wind and water. A vampire smelled of something, whatever he washed with. She learned the cold. She could separate the cold from the cedar and the myrrh and the hyssop they burned to cover it, as another woman might pick out one voice in a choir, and when she stood in a doorway and her face went still, her few friends knew to step back. The cedar-and-cold trail led her to Alalath Tiralai in the same year. She had known where to look since the night of the oil pit. She stood at the edge of Enashhaon's well in the first light after the massacre, with the stake in her hand and her father's blood still tacky on her sleeve, and saw a stooped man in a physician's leather coat come back to the stop to look at his work. He had an herbalist's satchel and a sad, intelligent face. He was the Bloodless Sovereign, and he had come back, she learned later, to count the dead. She threw the stake from forty paces. It went through his left hand, and he looked at it with interest. Then the blood in her own veins pulled. Her nose bled, her sight went red and she dropped to her knees, as though a long hand had taken hold of the inside of her arm and begun to turn it, and the thing at the well watched her with a scientist's mild attention. The sun came over the ridge. He left, with her stake still in his palm. She tracked him for a year. It was not a clean year; she lost two fingers of the left hand to a Choir lieutenant at Beritaon, and she nearly starved in the high pastures. The Vigil of Levant sent men, who learned to follow her rather than lead. She learned things the hard way, and wrote none of them down, because she could not write. Sunlight, and running water at a threshold, were what the old Levantine slayers said could finish one of them, and she tried both on the lesser vampires and they worked. Alalath, whose name she learned from a prisoner, would not be tried so easily. She had to find his door. It took her till the summer of 2840 BCE, at Sidmorhaon, a harbor town on the cedar coast where a dye-works stood on a stream. The reckoning at Sidmorhaon was short. She waited in the dye-yard through a long night. When he came out of the dye-house at the first gray, because he had no choice, because she had cut the shutters off the windows, the stream ran through the threshold at his feet and the sun was coming over the roofs. He could not step back. He could not step forward. He looked at her, and it seemed to her that he was very tired. She did not speak. He said her name, which she had not given him, and then the light reached the yard. She lived eight more years. She never got the press with three olive trees, but she did buy a small house at Enashhaon from the ruin of her own, and planted a single tree behind it. She died in 2832 BCE of a lung sickness, at thirty, after nine years as a hunter. The tree was found fruiting that autumn, two years early, and the people of the stop pressed its olives by hand, and said afterward that the oil smelled of nothing at all.