Nian Tabhaesh

Nian Tabhaesh, the Black Tyrant, was a temple astronomer who became a vampire scientist of the Velvet Throne and wrote her experiments down in two clay jars of ledger. She held the Aryunian hills for six years until a hunter with salt on his palm took them away.

Two jars of her ledger survive, broken at the shoulder and mended with pitch by some later hand, and they are the only thing in this account that Nian Tabhaesh wrote herself. The script is small, regular and appallingly neat. It begins with star counts. It continues with the weights of things, the numbers of her wings, the pinches of salt that stopped a door, and the prices of goats. Everything else in her life, the biographer must take from the villagers, who disliked her, and from the Vigil, who disliked her more. The ledger does not seem to have disliked her at all. She was born in 3036 BCE at Yuvidean, a temple town on the Indus and Ganges Plain in what is now India, in the first long age of The First Night, and she was good at counting. The temple there kept a platform on its roof from which the keepers watched the rising of a certain red star and made predictions about the flood. At thirty-six she was the best of them. The first legible entry records, in her own words, a disagreement: "I count thirty-one nights without the star. Tuvir counts twenty-nine. His count is the one the priests have heard." Tuvir was her lover, and he reported her sums as false when the flood arrived two weeks late. The temple ordered her sealed in the dry cistern beneath the platform, as a lesson to the other keepers. She was lowered in with a jar of water and a lamp. Something came down the shaft in 3000 BCE. The ledger does not say who. The second hand on the tablet, which is Nian's own and was added many years after, reads only: "I do not give his name. He did not give it either." The Vampireverse has no record of who made her, and she never volunteered one. What she wrote is the bargain: "Grave or bite. I had thirty nights in the cistern to consider, and I made the decision in about four." She was turned, climbed the shaft before dawn, and the keepers found the lid forced from below. Her place in the Velvet Throne was never in doubt. It needed a mind more than a blade, and she was a scientist in the plainest sense: she wanted to know how the new body worked. The ledger gives her gift in numbers. The Wing Storm parted her flesh into some three hundred winged pieces, each the size of a palm, that flew as a cloud and rejoined where she chose. Each crossing cost her about a handspan of her own weight, which she had to feed back on. A second trick, which she called the thinning, let her go pale and nearly bodiless for ten breaths. She was proud of these. She weighed herself before and after. She also recorded what stopped her, with the same pleasure: a salt line at a doorway, a mark laid on her skin by a slayer's hand. A palm of salt and ochre, pressed flat, and the part of her beneath it stayed flesh and could not scatter. In 2773 BCE she took the hills above Aryunian. The ledger entry for that year is matter-of-fact: "Terrace shrines empty. Barley and goats from six villages, delivered at night by persons who walk as if asleep. The goats are better." The villagers called her the Black Tyrant, and the name was not unfair. She drank from the ones who came up the path and sent the rest home with a fixed expression. For six years she was the law of the hills, and she kept the books. In 2767 BCE, an entry: "A visitor with a basket of salt and a spear. Palm marked, red. He took the lintel stone in his hand. I did not know a man could." This was Jaa Dejaesh, whom the Vigil of that plain did not have, because he had never joined one. He was unaffiliated, a hunter, and a vampire slayer in the estimation of everyone who had to climb the ridge after him. His gift was Mountain Grip. He tore the doorframe of her terrace shrine out of the wall and swung it. She broke into wings around the stone and reformed against the far wall, and he crossed the hall and pressed his palm to her wrist. "The mark holds," she wrote. "Cannot scatter. Left a strip of arm. Note: do not repeat." By morning she was off the ridge and the hill villages were lighting their lamps. She did not hold the loss against him, and that was what the Vigil never understood. She studied him. In 2759 BCE, at Yuvidean, on the very platform where she had counted the red star, she let him find her; he pinned her to the boards for the length of a breath, and she left him a cut across the shoulder that took a season to close. In 2748 BCE she sent a bundle of dead grasshoppers to his door with his handprint pressed into each in red clay, and entered it as an experiment: "To test whether he reads a sign. He does. He did not laugh. Noted." It was the nearest to a friendship that either of them ever allowed. She wrote of him in the ledger more than she wrote of any other living creature, always by the same name, the Wall. The ledger of Nian Tabhaesh notes his death in 2737 BCE without comment, in a line of sums: "The Wall has stopped. Count again." Neither had ever killed the other. She spent the following four centuries pursuing smaller matters, in the lower river country, and in 2351 BCE she was destroyed in a fire at Bhayua, far from the hills she had once kept, after 649 years as a vampire and 685 years of life. The fire left the jars. A child of the town pulled them out of the ash, and they held lentils for nearly a century before anybody read the lid.