Menkara Itkai

Menkara Itkai, the Gilded Bell, was an Exo-Human engineer and vampire slayer of the Nile Valley who could push pictures into other minds. Called at nineteen in 1282 BCE, he fought the fear-casting Renep Khemesi to a standoff and drowned at a failing sluice five years later.

The door of the Itkai house at Kakaep had never closed properly. It was a slab of warped acacia hung on rawhide, and in the flood months it swelled until it had to be kicked, and Menkara Itkai's father, who tended the cisterns of the mountain shrine and had opinions about water, refused to replace it on the grounds that a door which announces itself is a door you can trust. At nine Menkara took a bronze adze to it on a morning when nobody was home. He planed the edge for most of a day, taking off a hair at a time, and when the household returned that evening the door swung shut with a sound like a held breath. His father said nothing for a long time. Then he said that the hinges would have to be done next. Kakaep was a shrine set in the dry hills above the Nile Valley in Egypt, a place of cisterns and stairs cut into limestone, and Menkara, born there in 1301 BCE, grew up among things that either held water or did not. He became an engineer the way other boys became fishermen: the family needed it. He carried a cord in his sleeve knotted at the length of his forearm, and he measured everything with it, steps and lintels and the slope of a drain, and he muttered the counts under his breath. His want was a cistern with a proper vault that would still be holding water in a hundred years. He was rarely without it, and rarely satisfied. In 1282 BCE, when he was nineteen, a feeding party came up the stairs of the shrine on a night in the dry season and found a household of fourteen with the door unbarred. Menkara was in the lowest cistern, checking a seam. By the time he climbed out, they were gone, and what they had left was the family. He sat on the top step until dawn. Sometime in that sitting, the Vigil of Nile Valley would later decide, the change in him arrived, though he never described it as arriving. He described it as a pressure behind the eyes, as if he had been holding his breath under water for years and had finally let go. What he gained was Whisper Bridge, and it was no more mysterious than a rare trait of the body, like a man who can hear a pitch no one else can. Looking at another person and wanting it, he could place a picture in their mind: a stair, a wall, a door that would not open. He could put in a command as a picture of a hand and an action. It cost him. Nosebleeds came first, then headaches that sat behind the left eye for a day, then, over the years, small holes in his memory, a word, a name, once the whole of a morning. He kept the knotted cord partly to have something to count when the words went. In the years of The Bronze Vigil the Vigil of Nile Valley could spare few teachers, and it sent Menkara Itkai one. Hormian Shataad, called the Sunlit Blade, had been called in 1303 BCE on the Persian Plateau, and he reached the Nile Valley in the autumn of 1282 BCE after months on the road: up through the cities of the Two Rivers, down the Levant coast with a salt caravan, and across the desert in the care of a grain merchant who was never told who his passenger was. Hormian carried a pouch of iron nails, which he valued above his sandals. He taught Menkara the bronze sickle-sword, the discipline of fighting from a doorway, and the fact that the Gilded Bell, as people were beginning to call him for the sound his blade made on a bronze rim, would not live long if he went on spending his head as freely as his arm. They worked together for three years. In 1279 BCE Hormian was recalled east by his own Vigil, and the two parted on the quay without ceremony. Hormian died in 1270 BCE of a fever that had nothing to do with the war. The first time Menkara met his enemy was in 1280 BCE, at Menmesep, a river town whose dike he had been sent to inspect. The ferry house on the quay was open at night and its doorway was a place nobody would stand in. Menkara stood in it. Renep Khemesi, the Sleepless Sovereign, was inside, and as Menkara crossed the sill the room tried to kill him by itself: a dread so complete and so unreasoning that his knees went before he decided anything. This was Threshold Terror. Hormian, behind him, drove two iron nails into the sill. Menkara reached for the vampire with Whisper Bridge and found nothing to take hold of, no thought, no memory, only a flat white fear, like a field after it has been salted. He pushed through it a picture of the dike at dawn, with water sliding quietly along it, and he felt Renep stop. They stood and looked at one another across the sill for most of a night. Dawn was near enough that Renep took the water stairs down into a covered barge and was gone. Three more times in the next three years they met, at Menmesep and once in the hill road below Kakaep, and each time it came out the same: a long standoff, a picture exchanged for a dread, a door neither could pass. Menkara came to think of it as a negotiation that had no terms. The Vigil of Nile Valley wanted the vampire destroyed. Menkara wanted the dike to hold. Over the years these became the same wish in his mind, because it was Renep's presence at the ferry house that kept the town's labor away from the river works. He died in 1277 BCE, in the flood, at the Menmesep sluice. The gate was acacia, planed by his own hand and bound in rawhide, and the river rose a day earlier than the priests had promised. A drifted palm trunk jammed the channel. Menkara went down to clear it and the gate gave while he was under it. He was twenty-four. He had worn the mantle of a vampire slayer for five years, and the Slayerverse, which keeps the Vigil's roll, notes that Renep was not within a mile of the quay that night. The body was found two days downstream with the cord still in the sleeve. A hand's length of the broken gate timber was never recovered. The people of Menmesep rebuilt the sluice using his cord for the measure, knot for knot, and the new gate swung true. Renep Khemesi outlived him by more than four centuries and was destroyed far upriver in 864 BCE. A carpenter at Kakaep, years after, planed the old Itkai door one last time and found a hair's width left to take off.