The sickle-sword cost three seasons of eel catches and the half share of a boat. Mingtang Tang bought it from a bronze-caster upriver, a man with a burned beard who said that a blade was only a decision about where the metal should stop, and then talked for an hour about where the metal should stop. It was a curved blade of the old Yellow River pattern, meant for cutting millet and, in a pinch, a rope. Mingtang had wanted it for the reeds. He wanted a tool that would open a path through the marsh grass on the flats below Minghanhan, the harbor settlement where he was born in 2502 BCE, and he wanted to stop losing knives in the mud.
He was a tracker by trade before he was anything else, and the trade was not romantic. He sold information on eel runs and missing animals and, occasionally, missing people, which in a harbor of mud huts and reed boats meant drowned relatives. He read the flats the way other men read faces. A bent stalk, a cracked crust of silt, a smear on a piling told him who had come through at what hour. It was a gift of patience, not of the body, and it made him an uncomfortable neighbor, because he noticed when a family's winter store was larger than it should have been. He hummed when he worked, a tuneless two-note thing he had picked up from his father, and he refused to eat anything from a vessel he had not seen filled.
In 2472 BCE, when he was thirty, a hall in the hills behind the harbor took his sister. People went missing from the settlement every few seasons, and the elders blamed the river. Mingtang had been tracking the pattern for years without a name for it, and he followed this one up a dry stream bed to a stone-footed hall that belonged to nobody anyone in Minghanhan would name. He went in alone, carrying the sickle-sword and a reed torch. Those who watched him go expected to see nothing more of him. He walked out at dawn with his sister over his shoulder, alive and silent, and with his clothes smoking. The hall was burning behind him, and he was not burned.
That was the calling, and the physical fact of it was Ember Skin. Mingtang Tang had become a vampire slayer of the Slayerverse without teacher, oath or anyone to tell him so. A day later his hands ran hot as cooking stones and the flesh over his ribs took a dull orange glow under a layer of gray, like banked coals under ash. Blades skidded. A torch laid against his arm went out. He steamed in the rain and scorched his bedding, and he slept on bare clay for a decade because of it. The cost was fever, a shortness of temper he had not owned before, and a constant thirst. He had no one to teach him what it was. Nobody in the Vigil of Yellow River Basin knew the mantle's craft well enough to say, so he worked it out by trial, which is a slow and expensive method.
He spent seventeen years as the Hunter the river villages needed, in the era later called the First Night, working the marshes and the reed channels from the harbor to the salt flats of the Yellow River Basin, in what is now China. He did not teach hunters in any organized way, but boys followed him, and he showed them how to read the flats and how to hold a torch against a vampire's approach, and a few of them survived. He took the work seriously and the glory not at all. When people called him the Storm Bell, for the ringing sound the sickle-sword made when it struck something that rang back, he told them that was a flaw in the casting.
In 2466 BCE he came upon Tangbo Qin at a ford on the river, a place the harbor people called the Pale Ford because of the salt on the stones. Tangbo was a vampire of the Winter Brood who worked for hire, and he had been paid to fix a grain dispute by fouling the wells of eight towns, which he did by walking at night with a jar. Mingtang found the jar first. He found the man second. They fought for most of a night in the shallows. The cold the other man drew out of the air stiffened Mingtang's joints, and the heat in Mingtang's hide burned a stripe across the other man's mask, and neither of them could finish it. At dawn Tangbo went into the water and did not come up where Mingtang looked.
After that Mingtang knew the name, and Tangbo knew his. They crossed paths a handful more times in the next eleven years, in the rain mostly, and Mingtang lost three of his boys to the quarrel. He started carrying the sickle-sword wrapped in oiled leather, because the cold made bare bronze brittle at the edge, a detail he learned the hard way when a chip flew off in his hand.
The end came in the winter of 2455 BCE, at Minghanhan itself, on the frozen mud flats where he had once learned his trade. Tangbo Qin killed him. It was not a long fight. Mingtang's hide burned itself low trying to hold off the cold that Tangbo drew in, and the sickle-sword, brittle and slow, did not reach. He was forty-seven. When the harbor people found him in the morning the flats around him were rimed white, and the sickle-sword was gone. Tangbo had carried it away. His sister buried him in the marsh grass, face down, as the harbor custom required for a tracker, so that he might read the ground one more time.
Nobody in the settlement ever saw the blade again. Years later a trader coming down from the northern hills said he had seen a curved bronze sword in the hands of a vampire in a good coat, a thing with a ringing edge, but he could not say where, and the harbor people had no one left to send to look.
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