Nefep Raraet

Nefep Raraet, called the Pale Oath, was a river-village hunter of the Nile Valley who became a vampire slayer in 2121 BCE after a burned granary failed to kill him. His danger sense carried him through twenty-seven years of vigils and one long, unfinished feud.

Every morning at Nefmesra, before he touched water or bread, Nefep Raraet turned his drinking bowl face down on the windowsill and then, a moment later, set it upright again. His mother had told him that a bowl left open all night collected whatever walked past, and he had never been able to decide whether he believed her. He kept the habit for sixty years. It is the first thing the village remembered about him, ahead of the shield and the stake and the title, and it tells you most of what you need to know about a man who trusted nothing completely and obeyed small rules anyway. Nefmesra was a river village in the Nile Valley, in what is now Egypt, a scatter of mud-brick houses on a bend where the flood left good silt and bad mosquitoes. Nefep was born there in 2154 BCE, the second son of a reed-cutter, and he grew into a temple hunter, one of the men who supplied the nearest shrine with river hogs, geese and the occasional pole-thin gazelle. He was good at it in a plain way. He knew where the animals drank, he kept still longer than other men, and he never talked on the march. He wanted what most hunters wanted, a house with a dry roof, a son to hand the work to, and an old age in which his knees were someone else's problem. The granary ended that plan in 2121 BCE, when Nefep was thirty-three. The village store was fired in the night, with the grain still in it and, as it turned out, three men from a travelling household chained inside, set aside for a purpose nobody liked to name afterward. Nefep went in after them and came out of it with his hair burned to a pale stubble and his skin the color of ash. He was left for dead by the people who had done it. He was found at sunrise, sitting upright in the cinders, alive and unable to stop shaking. He swore there, to the three who had not come out, that whatever had fed on them would be followed. The village called him the Pale Oath from that morning, partly for the ash and partly for the promise. Nobody taught him anything. He was called to the vampire slayer's work with no master and no manual, and he learned it from his own mistakes. What he had that other hunters lacked was a gift of the body that he called Cold Spine. Moments before danger arrived, a line of cold ran from the nape of his neck to the small of his back, as if someone had drawn a wet reed down it, and he moved without deciding to. It saved him from thrown spears, from falling beams and, more than once, from friends. It also cost him. He could not sleep in a crowded room, because the spine woke him every time a stranger turned over, and by the end he slept alone in a hut at the village edge with the door tied open. He wore an oxhide shield on his left arm and carried a hardened stake in the right, and he fought as a hunter does: waiting, then very quick. He served the Vigil of Nile Valley, the loose company of watchers who kept the river towns through the long middle centuries of The Bronze Vigil, and in his twenty-seven years he held ten sunrise vigils over besieged towns, standing on a wall through the last dark hour until the light made it safe to put the stake down. His reputation in the Slayerverse rests mostly on one such vigil, at the river town of Imenshet in 2116 BCE. A house of feeders had cut the town off from its own wells, and the elders were ready to open the gates and pay. Nefep sat on the gatehouse roof for four nights. On the fourth, the cold came up his back and he rolled off the roof into the street a heartbeat before the beam that held the gate-bar fell where he had been sitting. He then did what he always did, which was to wait. At dawn the attackers were gone and the town kept its gate. He asked for a measure of barley and a night's sleep, got the barley, and left before the elders could finish thanking him. The enemy he could not settle with was Baon Tiryahashim, the Crowned Envoy, a soldier of The Gilded Choir out of the hill fort of Raalon in the Levant, in what is now Lebanon. Nefep and Baon lived in different regions and would never have met had the grain trade not carried the trouble north. In 2109 BCE a barge master from Nefmesra told Nefep that wells were failing in the hill towns above the cedar coast. Nefep, then forty-five, took passage on a grain barge, rode the coast road, and arrived at the well-town of Mezrat in the same season. Baon was there, in a bronze circlet and a wool robe, negotiating with the headman, and the two faced each other across a threshold nailed with scarce iron. Baon's Breaker's Blow took the door from its frame. Cold Spine took Nefep a half step to one side, and the oxhide shield split from rim to boss against the stone behind him. Neither landed the finishing stroke. Nefep drove the stake into Baon's forearm, Baon lifted him off the ground and threw him into a cart of dung, and each walked away to count the damage. That was the pattern afterward. They met four or five times in the next few years, always by accident and always at a door, and neither could ever close the matter. Nefep Raraet told the people at Nefmesra that the Levantine was a soldier first and a monster second, that Baon fought as if paid by the day, and that this made Baon harder to kill, not easier. He did not hate Baon. He was simply never able to leave. In 2104 BCE a different problem arrived. A canal-builder from the walled city of Baartaad on the Persian Plateau, called Taes Tahorush and newly marked by the war, sent word asking whether the Pale Oath would take on a student. Nefep, then fifty, said he would not, then said yes, then did the bowl business twice before breakfast. Taes came down through the river lands in 2103 BCE with an engineer's roll of cord and bronze tools, and stayed until 2099 BCE. Nefep taught Taes what a person with no gift must have in its place, which was patience, a habit of sleeping near an exit, and a flat refusal to be impressed by oneself. In return Taes taught him that a wall was only a slow kind of weapon. The two argued for four years about whether a plan or a spine was the better thing to carry into a dark room. He thought of Taes as the only person who ever corrected him. He died at Nefmesra in 2094 BCE, at the age of sixty, in his own bed, of nothing in particular. Before that he gave the stake and the mantle of the Vigil to a young hunter from the next village, an unremarkable girl whose name the river has kept better than the history has. The bowl was found on the sill the morning he did not come out, turned face down.