Nefet Amunmeni

Nefet Amunmeni, called The Dawnborn Hound, was a baker's son and hill-fort soldier of the Nile Valley who became a vampire slayer at thirty-four, with no gift but a drill he invented. The Shield-Wall Doctrine held doors against the assassin Khera Menamunu, and a river fever ended him before anything else could.

The people along the Nile below Ankhsetsetu said that the man they called The Dawnborn Hound had been born in the first light of the first day of the flood, nursed by a desert hound that wandered into the birth room, and that he could never be killed by anything that came at night. Every part of this is wrong. Nefet Amunmeni was born in 2699 BCE at Ankhsetsetu, a hill fort in what is now Egypt, in a baker's house that happened to be firing its ovens at dawn, and the only animal in the room was the baker's cat. The name came later, from a sergeant who watched him walk a riverbank in straight, patient lines, nose down, checking every reed bed twice. Anyone who has seen a dog work a field knows where the name came from. The claim about night he did nothing to discourage. It frightened the right people. He became a soldier because the garrison fed its recruits and his father's ovens did not feed him. He spent his twenties in the fort's spear company in The First Night, standing on the wall with a copper-tipped spear, drilling in the courtyard, learning that most battles are lost at the moment a line of men decides to look at each other. What he was good at was the drill itself. He was not strong or especially quick, and he said so. But he could take forty men who hated one another and teach them to stand in a pattern, shield edge over shield edge, so that the whole line moved like a single animal with forty feet, and he could do it in an afternoon. He baked bread on his days off. Nobody in the barracks mocked it twice. In 2665 BCE, aged thirty-four, he found a barge at the landing below the fort with eleven dead crew aboard and nothing taken. Not the grain, not the copper, not the lamps. He stood on the planks for a long time. It was a feeding party, and it left no wounds worth the name, and he understood two things quickly: that the garrison had no word for this, and that the people responsible would come to the fort next. The Vigil of Nile Valley had heard of him within the season, through an old river warden who had been watching the landing for years, and offered him a cup of beer and a place. He had no teacher. Nobody in the Vigil could have told him how to fight what he had seen, so he decided to use the one thing he knew, and turned the drill into a doctrine. He called it nothing, officially. Others called it the Shield-Wall Doctrine, and it was simple enough to insult a priest. A vampire was faster than a man and stronger than a man, but a vampire coming through a door still had to come through one door. So he made doors narrower. He taught villagers to hold a stair or a landing in two ranks, shields locked at the rim, the rear rank pressing spear-butts against the front rank's backs, salt scattered on the sill, a single torch on a pole to keep the interior bright. It held. It held for people who had never held anything. He carried a copper dagger for the close work, which he said was for cutting rope, and he did not carry any other. Ankhsetsetu was where the doctrine was first tested. In 2663 BCE a figure came along the causeway at dusk, and the sentry on the wall, who had been told what to look for, reported a visitor who walked at an angle, as if the ground were crooked, and who did not cross the irrigation cut at the gate. It was Khera Menamunu, an assassin of The Velvet Throne, who had been sent to kill the fort's water-reckoner. Khera stepped into the dark under the wall and out of the dark in the granary and was met, in the second chamber, by a double rank of baker's sons and a lantern. Nefet held the stair himself. He put the copper dagger across the back of Khera's hand. Khera left, bleeding, by the same crooked way. Over the next eight years he saw Khera three more times, always at doors. He learned the pattern. Khera never rushed. Khera came to the weakest hour, tried the edge of the threshold with a foot, and went away when the salt was down. In 2659 BCE he followed a lead to Senamuni, a river village downstream, and found a house where bread was left each evening on the sill. The old woman who left it said only that the child had liked the crust. He did not ask whose child. He ate none of it, and he did not tell his comrades. Some information is more useful kept than spent. Neither of them wanted the other dead as badly as they wanted a clean outcome. Nefet wanted his garrison alive and his stairs held. Khera wanted, by every account, to be given a different assignment. Late in the dry season of his tenth year, the fever came up the river from the south and took half the landing. He was one of the half. He died in 2655 BCE, at forty-four, of the river fever, in the bed above the oven he had grown up beside, having been a vampire slayer for ten years and nothing grander than a competent sergeant for the remainder. The Slayerverse records Nefet Amunmeni as a human among the gifted, which is the whole point of him: no hands that could bend copper, no mind that heard lies, only the arithmetic of a doorway and a line of tired men. The Vigil left no successor. The doctrine had no secret to pass on, only a way of standing, and it spread by being useful. For generations the garrison at Ankhsetsetu took the evening watch in two ranks, shields overlapping, one torch on a pole, and the cook on duty put a loaf on the sill of the stair, and nobody ever said who it was for.