Mingqin Feng

Mingqin Feng, the Ashen Vow, was an Exo-Human vampire slayer of the Yellow River Basin who could feel an edge coming before it fell. Called in 1464 BCE, she fought the broker Lan Bo for eight years, and he killed her in 1456 BCE.

"Count your fingers when you shake his hand," she told the ferryman at Hanxi, "and count them again on the far side." Gu Hao repeated that to anyone who would buy him a bowl of millet beer, long after the ferry had passed to his nephew, and he always held up his own hand when he did. Several people remembered the sentence in other words. His version lasted because it had a gesture in it. Mingqin Feng was twenty-five years old when she said it, in 1462 BCE, standing on the landing with a stone-tipped spear and a smear of grey on both forearms, and Gu Hao said afterward that she was the only customer he ever had who paid the fare and then asked him to go home early. She was born in 1487 BCE in Mingyu, a river village in what is now China, three days downstream of the walled towns, where the reeds grew thicker than the millet and the houses stood on tamped platforms against the spring floods. Her mother mended nets and her father dug ditches for the lords of the bronze road for a wage of dried fish. As a child Mingqin was known for what the village called her itch. Her skin crawled a breath before a loft beam gave, before a heron struck, before the neighbour's ox put a foot wrong. It saved her a broken arm at six and her brother a drowning at nine. It also meant she slept badly, and she never stopped being a poor sleeper. What she wanted, as far back as anyone could say, was a plain thing: to know the names of everyone buried on the Mingyu platform and to see them cut into something that would outlast a flood. In 1464 BCE, when she was twenty-three, in the age the Slayerverse calls the Bronze Vigil, a feeding party came to Mingyu in the dark of the year and emptied her household. She survived because the itch screamed her awake in the fish-drying loft and she lay there, silent, while it counted the footfalls below her. In the morning the gift had changed. What had been an itch was now a hum in her back teeth and a cold crawl across the shoulders, a heartbeat ahead of any edge, whether it was a knife, an adze or a fish-scaler. She rubbed ash from her own burned house onto both forearms in front of whoever would watch, and she swore to put it on every one of them. That was where the Ashen Vow came from. Nobody taught her what to do next. She had no mentor, and as a vampire slayer in the making she walked to the Vigil of Yellow River Basin by herself and told them she would work alone and would not take pupils. The gift she named Blade's Whisper, and it was never a convenience. It came on at the sight of an edge a person might use and not at all for fists, teeth or falling roofs, and in a crowd of armed men it screamed so loudly she could not hold a thought. That was why she kept to a stone-tipped spear, when bronze was what any self-respecting fighter carried: stone gave her nothing to listen to. Long nights left her with nosebleeds that ran down the front of her robe, and a rule against sleeping within a bowshot of a smith. The Vigil filed her as a Stormer, a fighter who goes at the enemy through the middle. Over eight years she turned the gift into craft. She fought in crowds, at ferries, in the narrow lanes between granaries, anywhere an enemy's skill at blades was worth less than her warning, and she kept her company small, nine at most, none of them her students. In 1460 BCE she burned the reed warehouses at Sangpu where the Gilded House kept its hostages, and in 1459 BCE she drove its carters off the bronze road at Liuhe. Everything she heard about the Gilded House pointed at a broker named Lan Bo, called the Silent Choir. He closed bargains by finger-sign inside a sleeve, in a market that had learned not to ask about his hours, and the grain barges of three towns moved when he lifted a hand. That night at the Hanxi landing in 1462 BCE, the first thing she noticed was how ordinary he was: a tidy man in good wool with a string of cowries rolling between thumb and fingertip, arguing with a barge captain over a weight of millet. Her skin was quiet. He carried no blade. She walked up, offered her hand as a courtesy, and as his palm met hers she turned his wrist and pressed her ash-dark thumb against it. He screamed. Where her thumb had been, the skin went white and then raised and puckered into a thumb-shaped weal, and he threw her off with a strength she had not allowed for. His jaw dropped and lengthened. His shoulders bunched through the wool, grey fur broke along the back of his neck, and what stood on the landing was a wolf the size of a yearling calf. He did not fight. He went down the bank and into the reeds and the night took him. She stood on the landing with her spear still pointing at the water and Gu Hao told her afterward that she was laughing, which he said was worse than if she had wept. The mark did not heal. For four years it was the one thing about him she could count on, a pale thumb under a bronze cuff he never took off. It also taught Lan Bo something, which he applied. She learned of it only late: that he had stopped carrying so much as a paring knife, that he had paid a ferry captain to tell him what the Ashen Vow could feel, that the answer had reached him through seven gate wardens in Fengqin who owed him money. He had worked out her gift's limit. She noticed that men she questioned had begun to fall silent when she came into a room, and that her own people argued less. In the winter of 1457 BCE she told the Vigil she meant to go down to Fengqin, the walled city-state where his house kept its strongroom, and finish it. They tried to talk her out of it. They did not try hard. In 1456 BCE, aged thirty-one, she stood on the dike east of the Fengqin gate in flood season, in rain, with three of the company behind her and the strongroom wall in sight. Her skin was quiet, and she took that for a good sign. What came down out of the rain was a raven with a wingspan wider than her arms, and it did not carry an edge. There was no warning of any kind. It struck at the throat and the eyes from above and behind, and by the time her company reached her the wolf had taken over from the raven and she was lying on the packed earth with the spear still in her hand. The Vigil said later that Lan Bo washed his hands in the dike water before he left. It was said as an insult. Gu Hao thought it had a courtesy in it. They burned Mingqin Feng on the dike in the rain, and the ash went into the river. The Gilded House outlasted her by centuries, and Lan Bo was destroyed in 1071 BCE, but the ferrymen of Hanxi did not mark the date. Gu Hao hung the spear over the door of his shed, and it stayed there until the shaft rotted and the stone head fell and was used by a child to scrape fish. He kept the grey smear she had left on his oar for the rest of his life. Whenever someone stepped aboard with a stranger, he counted fingers.