Meshorep Horsenep

Meshorep Horsenep, the Veiled Warden, was a marsh tracker from Renhorra who became an Egyptian vampire slayer in 1363 BCE, hunted the Nile Valley by Nightsight for five years, and was killed by the mercenary Iti Rakaet in 1358 BCE.

The shrine keepers at Renhorra scratched their accounts on flakes of limestone, and one flake survives with an entry that has nothing to do with barley. Between a tally of oil jars and a complaint about the roof it reads: "The tracker Meshorep went up the path at dusk with his face wrapped. He asked for no bread. The dogs did not bark at him, which they do at everyone." The scribe did not sign it. He did, a few lines down, note that the roof was still leaking. Nearly everything we know of Meshorep Horsenep, the Veiled Warden, comes from scraps like this, the sort of record made by people who were mostly worried about their jars. He had been a hunter before the calling and he remained one after it, in what is now Egypt, in the age of the Bronze Vigil. He was born in 1389 BCE at Renhorra, a mountain shrine in the Nile Valley above the marshes, to a family that kept the shrine's goats and traded the hides downriver. As a boy he was sent to the reed beds to find strays and found them faster than anyone, which the keepers took for good luck. By his twenties he tracked for hire: lost cattle, runaway debtors, once a drowned priest's ring, which he recovered by feel from four feet of mud. He wanted very little. He wanted, in the account of his sister, a house with a door that closed properly, and he never got one. The ledger is blunt about what happened in 1363 BCE, when he was twenty-six years into his life and unready for it. His sister's cough had settled in her chest, and he climbed to the old shrine above the village to ask the keepers for the one remedy they guarded, a resin from the high junipers. He was given the resin. He was also kept three days in the cold inner room, and the keepers' own tally says only that he came out different. What he had been given, or had always carried, was Nightsight: in total darkness he saw as a cat sees, the world cut into pale greys, and every warm body glowed like a coal in ash. It cost him. Daylight hurt, noon was a hammer behind the eyes, and he took to winding a strip of linen across his face from the brow to the cheek. The villagers began calling him the Veiled Warden before he had done anything to earn it. This was the year he became a vampire slayer in the sense the old keepers meant, and the mantle, whatever it was, sat on him like a borrowed cloak. He had no teacher. The keepers knew the lore but not the craft, and no slayer lived within a month's walk. He answered to no one, neither the shrine nor the river lords, and when a headman offered him a post he is recorded to have asked what it paid in goats. What he built himself was a method. He slept by day in a dry cistern, hunted in the dark with a stone-tipped spear, and learned the habits of the thing he hunted by the same patience he had spent on cattle. A feeder left a pattern: a victim chosen from the edge of a household, a body laid where the river would carry it, a hush in the dogs. He took no pupils in his short career, and he said once, to a ferryman, that he would not wish this on a boy he liked. In the Slayerverse that kind of loneliness is not rare, but he made a habit of it. The ledger places the first meeting in 1363 BCE, at the reed landing of Sekhmere, a ferry stage three days' walk down the valley. There a cargo of port-lord grain had begun to vanish along with the men guarding it, and the lord's factor had hired a collector to find out why. The collector was Iti Rakaet, the Weeping Collector, a vampire who sold her skill with a blade to anyone who paid in advance and who carried the Obsidian Covenant's name on her like a receipt. Meshorep came down in the dark expecting a feeder and found her standing in the shallows with her hands open. She did not run. She lifted her palms and the water at her ankles went red and rose around his spear, a thing he later described to the keepers as the river deciding to bleed. Her gift, Red Tide, moved the blood in living veins and drew it out of wounds like a tide table, and her eyes ran with it while she worked, so that she appeared to weep. He lost two fingers' worth of skin on his forearm that night, and the grain-guards he had come to save lay half-emptied behind the sheds. He got away only because he could see in the dark and she, for all her strength, could not. For five years they went around each other. He learned that she took commissions from the lords and was punctual about them, that she came for her fee and left without feasting more than the contract allowed, and that the Weeping Collector paid her debts even to the dead. He disliked her for it more than for anything else, since it made her harder to hate. He learned also the knowledge his people had paid for in blood: hawthorn or ash-wood through the heart, iron nails driven into a threshold. Iron in those years was a rare and expensive metal, hammered from the odd meteoric lump, and he carried a pouch of four nails he had bought with a year's hides. He set them twice, in doorways she was expected to use. She went around both. The ledger records that he stopped sleeping in the cistern in the fourth year, which suggests he suspected she knew where it was. The end, in 1358 BCE, is the least documented part, and the oldest account of it is a ballad the ferrymen of Sekhmere sang for centuries, with a refrain that has lost its meaning. The ballad says he met her on the quarry road at Tep-Anu, at night, in the cold season, and that he had wrapped his face in two layers of linen so that she would not see where he was looking. The keepers add that he left the shrine alone and did not say where he was going. What the sources agree on is that Iti Rakaet killed Meshorep Horsenep there, in 1358 BCE, when he was thirty-one, and that she did it without drama: the Red Tide took the blood from his chest in a single pull, and the spear, which he had thrown and missed, was found in the roadside dust the next morning. Five years in the work. She walked on. The next feeding on the Sekhmere stage came after a gap of only a month. The keepers at Renhorra brought the body home on a sledge and buried him below the shrine, under a flat stone with no name. The spear they hung in the inner room, point up, over the place where he had been kept for three days. His sister lived, a fact the ledger records without comment, and she is the one who insisted on the house with the door that closed. A shrine boy wrote, in a later hand, that the dogs at Renhorra still would not bark at the path at dusk, and went on to note, as the first scribe had, that the roof wanted mending.