Meos Kalstoos

Meos Kalstoos, the Storm Arrow, was an Exo-Human hunter and vampire slayer of the Aegean who felt a patch of cold on her skin wherever a vampire stood near. Called at seventeen in 1196 BCE, she was killed by Kanikis Phidemes at Kaaria four years later, aged twenty-one.

The river villages of the Aegean said the Storm Arrow had been struck by lightning as a baby, and that her arrows flew truer in thunder because the sky owed her. It is a good story and it is wrong in every part. Meos Kalstoos was born in 1213 BCE at Thodemos, a river village in what is now Greece, on a clear night in a dry month, and the nearest thing to a storm in her childhood was a fever at seven that her mother treated with cold cloths and bad temper. The name came later, from the sound. Her father cut the reeds for her bow along the bank, and the arrows she made from them left the string with a rising whine like wind finding a gap in a reed bed. The shepherds heard it before they saw her. After a while they stopped telling which came first, the sound or the squall, and the myth set itself in the gap. She was a hunter in the plain sense: ducks on the river, hares in the stubble, once a boar that came into the village at harvest and got into a quarrel with a loom. She had a habit that her sister used to mock. Before she trusted an arrow she held the nock to her lips and blew across it to hear whether it hummed true, and she did it so often that her lower lip carried a small permanent crease. What she wanted was modest. She wanted a plot by the river large enough to keep a goat, two nets and a loom house for her sister, and then to be left alone. The war found her in 1196 BCE, when she was seventeen. Her younger sister was taken from the washing place at dusk and carried to a wine store on the quay of Alyke, a harbor town two days downriver, where the Obsidian Brood kept a hall. The men of Thodemos formed up and then thought better of it. Meos went alone, at night, with the bow and eleven arrows. Somewhere between the quay and the cellar steps her skin began to hurt: a patch of cold the size of a palm, on her forearm and then her neck, and then, as she went down, a half-dozen of them at once, each pointing at a different dark corner. She fired at the cold. Two of the cold patches stopped. She came up the steps with her sister, alive, white, and unable to speak for a month. The Slayerverse would later list the date of that night as her calling. What she had was Cold Spot, and it was nothing more mysterious than a trait of the body, like the odd ear of a musician. Wherever a vampire stood within about a bowshot, a patch of chill appeared on her skin, and the closer the thing came the bigger and sharper it got, until in a small room it covered her like a wet sheet. It was precise enough to fire by. It cost her too. Her fingertips never fully warmed again, and by the winter of her second year two of them had gone numb to the first joint. She had no teacher, and nobody ever claimed to have been hers. The Vigil of Aegean was a loose thing of sea-traders and ferrymen, who sent her a rumor and a place to sleep, and left it to her to learn the rest. For two years of The Bronze Vigil's long war, Meos Kalstoos, vampire slayer by nobody's appointment, cleared the river road of the Obsidian Brood's traders, one wine store, one salt barge at a time, and in a hard season she became the person other people stopped on the road to ask for help. She disliked this. Mostly she disliked how many of them wanted to be told that it would stop. In the second year she began to notice that the Brood's killings were getting tidier. A house emptied of its sleepers without a door forced; a barge stripped before the crew woke. Something among them was listening. This was Kanikis Phidemes, the Gaunt Marrow, a vampire who had been a temple astronomer and now acted as the Brood's counter of heartbeats. Meos never saw her until the salt pans. The Storm Arrow thought of her afterward as a puzzle with a face, a scholar who treated a war as an experiment and had only the one reader in mind. They first met in 1194 BCE at Halmyra, where the river's last bend turns into a marsh of salt pans, long square tanks of brine dug into the flats. Meos went there because a barge had been stripped on the far bank. She was careful. But the brine lay in her skin like a cold bath: every tank was cold, the whole flat was cold, and the Cold Spot she relied on went from a pointer to a fog. An arrow came out of nothing and went through the meat of her bow arm above the wrist. She shot back at the one place where the cold seemed thickest, and caught a woman in the left hand and pinned it to a post. The woman did not shout. She looked at the arrow, then at Meos across two hundred paces of salt, and said something to herself, and then there was a swirl of small dark bodies in the air where she had been, like a flock of swifts, and it flew off over the marsh. Meos mended. Two years later, in 1192 BCE, she took a pot of salt and a bundle of fire arrows up the hill to Kaaria, the fort where the vampire was said to keep her records. It was the sort of plan that works against one enemy and fails against the one who has made a study of it. At dusk, on the stairs to the observatory terrace, Kanikis was waiting. She had heard the salt being poured at the gate from the far side of the wall. When the Cold Spot flared, there were suddenly a dozen of them, in every corner, and Meos fired at the biggest and found it empty. The fighting was brief. She was twenty-one. The shepherd who saw the terrace afterward said that the stairs were swept clean, and that the bow had been left on the third step, unstrung, as if set down by someone with respect for it. Kanikis Phidemes lived on until 1103 BCE, when a fire finished her, and no slayer ever did. Meos was carried back down the river in a reed boat to Thodemos. Her sister, who had learned to speak again, hung the bow on a nail in the loom house, and strung it each spring.