In the autumn of 2691 BCE Mutuas Kuyaipa paid two measures of barley for an oxhide shield, which was an extravagance for a broker, and he did not enjoy it. He had been born in 2724 BCE in Hatshaili, a walled city-state on the Anatolian plateau in what is now Turkey, and he had spent thirty-three years learning that the safest way to be rich is to look as though you are not. He brokered tin from the east and obsidian from the volcanic hills, took his share in silver by weight, and lived in a rented room above a tanner's yard that smelled so thoroughly of the work below that nobody ever tried to rob it. His one stubborn wish, in the first decades of The First Night, was to own a house inside the wall. Renters in Hatshaili could be put out at a magistrate's word, and he had seen it done.
What made him buy the shield was a night on the mountain road. A mule bridge gave way over a ravine while he was crossing with a train of tin, and he found himself holding the bridge's main beam in both hands, with eleven men and nine animals hanging from it, and the beam did not fall. He held it until they had all climbed up over his shoulders. His hands bled afterward through the knuckles, and the grip in them, which he named later Mountain Grip, did not go away. It was a plain, bodily thing. His fingers could close on a bronze ingot and leave their marks in it, and when he was tired he could not open them. The Vigil of Anatolia, a dispersed company of gate-wardens and caravan masters, got to him by the usual route, which was a rumor and then a visit. Nobody there could teach him anything. He taught himself the way a broker learns a new trade, by reading what other people had lost.
He was called The Silent Torch for two reasons that were not connected. He spoke so little that wardens kept looking at him for the rest of the sentence, and at night he carried a resin torch in the open, lit, in the hand that did not hold the shield. When he was asked why, he said that anyone who wanted to see him could.
The shield took its hole in 2686 BCE, in the grain yard behind the Tin Gate of Hatshaili. The woman he had followed through the market that evening was gaunt, wore a scribe's wrap, and was reading the granary tallies by lamplight with a stylus in her hand, and he knew before he spoke that the tallies were false, because he had made a living for two decades from knowing which numbers were. She turned and put a bronze awl straight through the oxhide. The point came out a hand's width from his eye. He caught her wrist with the grip, and the bone gave, and she looked down at it with polite surprise and then went over the wall. In the morning there was no blood in the yard, and a clerk swore that the woman with the stylus had come in for a bread ration at noon, her arm unbroken. That was Waruili Kuzius of the Winter Brood.
He fitted a copper plate over the hole and never replaced the hide. Over the next twenty years, he and the vampire worked against each other like two guilds in the same trade. He bought the silver for the Vigil's stake tips, because Anatolia had the mines and he knew the men who weighed them, and he had a silver-tipped stake in his belt for the rest of his life. She bought grain, and the clerks who weighed that. In 2684 BCE he finally got his house inside the wall, and he paid a mason to cut a shallow channel across the sill and bring a thread of spring water through it, which vampires like her could not cross. She walked past the house twice a month for the rest of his life. He heard her do it and did not look.
The Slayerverse's few written accounts of Mutuas Kuyaipa treat him as an odd sort of vampire slayer, one who never seems to have staked anyone, and the accounts are right about the staking and wrong about the rest. In the hard winter of 2679 BCE the Brood bought up the barley of three villages through a chain of thin middlemen, meaning to starve the hill passes and keep the Vigil's runners at home. He found the middlemen by the way they knotted their tally cords, outbid them on every sack, and sold the grain back at cost to the villages, and was ruined by it for a year, which he regarded as an acceptable price. That was how his war went. They did not kill each other, and the reason is mostly arithmetic. A broker who dies sets off a fight over his accounts. A spy who dies leaves her House to find out who killed her. In the Winter Brood's ledgers and the Vigil's tallies, the Silent Torch and the Gaunt Judge are shown as an item neither side would pay to remove.
He died in 2666 BCE, at fifty-eight, in his own bed, of a sickness in the chest that had been coming for two winters. A neighbor reported that the lamp on his sill burned all night, and that there was a figure standing on the far side of the water-channel for the length of it. The neighbor did not see the face. It stood quite still, like someone paying a bill.
The shield went to the Tin Gate, where the wardens hung it on the inner wall with the copper plate showing. It stayed there until a flood took that part of the wall. The house was sold to a tanner's family. The channel across the sill was never filled in, and the tanner's children learned early to step over it.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
