Melykon Kademon

Melykon Kademon, the Ivory Arrow, was a shock-fighter from the Aegean temple town of Methoon who woke in a plague cellar in 1761 BCE with noonday light in his hands. He spent twelve years hunting one vampire, and died nine years after he caught her.

A biographer of the Ivory Arrow can arrange his life by three places, because he said himself that a man was no more than the rooms he had worked in. The first was a temple town, and Melykon Kademon never quite left it. The second was a field of salt. The third was a strongroom under a harbor granary, and he spent twelve years of his life walking toward it without knowing the name. Melykon Kademon was born in 1785 BCE in Methoon, a temple town in what is now Greece, in the years of The Bronze Vigil. The town lived on offerings and on the tolls from a coast road, and its sons were raised either to serve the temple or to stand in front of it. He was one of the second kind. By seventeen he was the sort of man the coastal levies called a stormer: a shock-fighter, put in the front of the line because he did not feel fear until afterward and felt it in full then, usually alone in the dark. He fought five seasons for Methoon against the raiding crews from the islands. He wanted, as most of them wanted, an olive grove of his own, a dozen trees and a wall, where nobody would ever ask him to run at anything again. He kept a copper dagger tucked in his belt that he never drew on anyone before Arikalos, only on rope and bread, and he had a habit of shutting his eyes when he walked into a familiar room and counting the steps to each wall. The spring of 1761 BCE brought a fever to Methoon that took one house in three. Melykon, who was twenty-four, went down with it in the second week. The temple physicians called him dead on the third night, which was a matter of professional pride, and he was carried down to the cellar beneath the temple where the dead were laid until the pits were ready. He woke on a stone slab among the others, to the sound of someone at work. A tall woman in a good gown was at the far end of the room, lifting a bronze circlet from the head of a dead headman, and she was not alone in her pleasure; she had also, he saw, been feeding. He did not choose what happened next. The light came out of his skin like a bucket of noon thrown against the wall, and in it the woman threw her arm across her face and cried out. It blistered her to the shoulder. She was across the room and up the stair before he had finished sitting up. That was the first night he met Lykes Lyaries, and the day he became a vampire slayer, the Slayerverse's newest and least willing. No teacher ever explained it to him. The temple was inclined to call it a mercy and the Vigil of Aegean called it a gift, and he called it, for years, the Lantern. The second place was a salt pan on the southern shore, near Orthmia, where he took work in 1760 BCE when the temple would no longer have him in the town. For eleven years it was his base. It was bleak, flat country, and the pans were shallow clay basins that glittered like broken plates, and he raked the brine at dusk beside men who never asked why he wore a cloth across his eyes by day. He learned in that place to use what he had. The Lantern of the First Day, as he came to call it, was a brightness that rose in the skin and could be thrown outward in a flat, hard glare, strong enough to sear a creature that shunned daylight. It cost him dearly. After each use his sight went to a gray blur for a day or three, and the longer he held it the longer he was blind. It was better than any weapon he had owned, and it was a bad bargain, and he would take it again. He also learned about salt. Raking it at dusk he came to see that a line of coarse salt laid across a doorway was a thing the hunted creatures stepped around, and he began to carry some in a bag. For those years he followed the circlet-collector up and down the coast, and she followed her own plans, and each of them thought the other a nuisance. He learned her name, Lykes Lyaries, and her alias, the Crowned Collector, from the families she left behind. He never learned why she bothered to keep the circlets. He caught her three times and lost her three times. The first time the Lantern failed in a room too large; the second time she left him, bleeding from a cut across the ribs, under a collapsed fish rack. The third time she was gone before he could lay the salt. The third place was Arikalos, a harbor town with a fortified granary, where in the winter of 1749 BCE he followed a rumor of a headman's death and found the Collector working there. He did not follow her in. He waited for six days by the granary stairs with salt on his boots, and on the seventh, when the lamps were out, she came down to the strongroom beneath the grain, as he had calculated she would, to collect what the dead man had worn. He was already at the door. Melykon laid the line across the sill with his foot and threw the Lantern into the room at the same moment, and the walls of the strongroom turned white. She had been fast. She was fast still, and she hit the doorway so hard that the line scattered, and he reached out in the blind roar of his own light and put the copper dagger into her. It was over quickly, and he did not like that either. When his sight returned, three days later, the strongroom held only grain dust, a circlet and a smell of burned hair. He took the circlet to the harbor and sank it. He lived nine years more and did not hunt. He was forty-five when he died, in 1740 BCE, of a winter fever on the salt shore, in a house with a southern window. His dagger was found beside the bed, its blade worn bright and thin as a leaf.