Meni Rameset scraped her one good bowl with sand every dawn, and she did it even after she stopped eating from it. Her mother had taught her that a spear-bearer who let a bowl go dirty would die dirty, and she had kept the lesson through a levy, a fever, a death of sorts and forty-five centuries of rooms with better tableware. The bowl was a plain thing of Nile clay, chipped at the rim. It sat on the shelf of each place she lived. She did not know why she kept it, and she did not discuss it.
She was born in 2530 BCE at Mesrenra, a caravan stop on the edge of the Nile Valley in what is now Egypt, in the age that came to be called the First Night. The place was a well, a trampling ground and a row of mud-brick sheds where donkey trains unloaded, and she grew up among drovers and dust. At sixteen she was carrying a copper-headed spear for the river lord's levy, standing watch on grain stores and escorting tax collectors, and she was steady at it. She did the work without enthusiasm or complaint. It taught her how to stand in a line, hold a position and ignore an order she thought was foolish while looking as if she were obeying it, which she later regarded as the whole of military science.
In 2490 BCE, at forty, she took a fever that did not break. She lay for nine days in a drover's shed with a wet cloth on her face, and on the ninth a visitor sat down beside her and offered a different ending. The visitor was Senet Kamenep, who had been a vampire of the Vampireverse since 3000 BCE and who was known in the Velvet Throne as the Sable Choir. It was an uncomplicated bargain on both sides. Meni accepted, and Senet made her that night and was gone by morning, and the two did not meet again. Senet is alive today. Meni has heard it said, and does not much care.
Meni Rameset, whom the court would later call the Ashen Shroud, woke to a body that no longer aged, a thirst for blood that she learned to manage, and a faculty the Velvet Throne's people called Glass Vigil. She could draw the warmth out of the air within arm's reach. Water in a jar skinned over with ice. Her breath turned to white powder. If she stood still long enough, a clear shell formed on her sleeves and shoulders, as smooth as glass, and she could watch from inside it for hours without moving, which is what the name meant. It cost her. Her hands numbed and grayed, her lips cracked, and the feeding afterward was more urgent than it ought to have been. And it was not unconditional. Silver-tipped weapons hurt her, and so did a slayer's mark laid on her skin, a thing she learned about one afternoon in 2445 BCE.
She rose in The Velvet Throne by being reliable. Others in the court were cleverer or crueler, but Meni was a Soldier, and what the Throne needed was somebody who would be where she was told to be at the hour she was told. She led the guard of a river lord's household upstream of Ittau, and in the third year of the lord's reign she took four spear-bearers of her own to a mud-brick granary above that harbor settlement to collect grain, and, as an afterthought, the granary-keeper.
The woman standing in the doorway was Amunet Ankhraep, the Dawnborn Blade, a river-guard turned vampire slayer. Meni disliked her on sight, for the plainest of reasons: she was loud. She stood in the door with a reed-shafted hunting bow in one hand and held the frame with the other, and she was exactly the kind of person who spoils an operation. Meni drew the heat out of the yard. The beams of the doorframe whitened and went brittle, and the woman did not let go. She got a hand through the cold, onto Meni's shoulder, and cut a notch pattern into the skin with a chip of flint. That was 2445 BCE. The marked patch would not freeze. It never has, and the scar it left has never faded.
Over the next three years Meni took Amunet seriously, which was the opposite of her instinct. She learned the woman's habits: that she hated waiting, that she tied a knot in a strip of linen each night she survived, that she was clumsy and was sick on boats, and that she held a post long after sense would have told her to let go. She noticed that she herself had begun to arrive in the flood season, when the quays were wet and the water carried cold well. She did not mind admitting that.
In 2442 BCE, at the Ittau landing, Meni killed her. The arrow went into her thigh first, silver-tipped, from a bow the woman should never have been able to string. Meni drew the warmth out of the river around Amunet's legs until the water locked solid, and she kept drawing until the quay post split and the woman, still gripping it, went quiet. It was neither quick nor pleasant. She did not enjoy it, and she walked away with the arrowhead still in her leg because it would not come out until the following winter.
She made three after that, at long intervals. Renep Khemesi in 1304 BCE, in the Nile Valley, whom the court called the Sleepless Sovereign and who was destroyed in 864 BCE. Kilua Totoe in 1021 BCE, down the river in the Horn of Africa, in what is now Ethiopia, a trading trip that took most of a season, destroyed in 627 BCE. Khaled El-Sayed, in 1768 CE, back in the Nile Valley, who lasted thirty-five years and was destroyed in 1803 CE. Nobody she has made is alive.
She is alive today. She lives in Egypt, in a town on the river whose name has changed twice, and keeps the chipped bowl on a shelf above the stove, which she lights each morning for no reason a guest could name.
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