The girl broke the man's skull with a table leg, and Niesh Bhasudeini, standing in the doorway of a beer house at Raamunu with her traveling coat still dusty from the river road, thought: that is going to be a problem. It was the spring of 2327 BCE. The man on the floor was a vampire of the port, a rather dull one, whom she had crossed three seas to meet. The girl was eighteen or so, in a dancer's linen and a lot of kohl, with a bow slung on her back that she had forgotten she was wearing. She stood in the middle of the room with a piece of furniture in her hands, breathing hard, looking at the thing she had done. Then she lifted her eyes and looked at Niesh. It was not the look of someone who had seen a stranger. It was the look of someone who had seen exactly what the stranger was.
Niesh had not expected to be recognized, which was the whole of her profession. She was the Velvet Envoy to the Winter Brood: a go-between, a messenger with a good escort, a woman whose business was to arrive in a strange city, say pleasant things in the local language and leave with an agreement. She had come to Raamunu from the Indus plain by a route that took most of a year. She went by reed ship down the coast and round the cape of Arabia, then up the Red Sea in short hops, sleeping in fishing camps, and the last of it by donkey caravan across the dry valleys to the Nile. It was three regions and three languages. She had been on the road long enough to have forgotten what her own village sounded like.
That village was Takaa, a river village on the Indus and Ganges Plain in what is now India, where she was born in 2396 BCE. In The First Night a woman with a strong back and no land hired out young, and Niesh became a mercenary, a shield for the port lords' goods, an unglamorous job of standing beside bales at a quay and looking as though she would mind. She did it well. She was the kind of person people hired twice. Over the years she acquired the manner that the Brood would later find useful, a way of waiting for the other person to finish speaking, and she acquired a cough, and a mild contempt for people who asked her to hurry.
In 2362 BCE, at 34, she was escorting a river caravan when the road was blocked at a ford. She remembered the ambush mostly as a series of sounds. She was left in a ditch for the crows, and someone found her first. This was Tangbo Qin, the Velvet Mask, who had come south from the Yellow River Basin of China along the jade road, in no hurry, and was the patient sort. The journey took him two seasons, and he made her on the third. He did not stay. He did not say why. She woke alone with the hunger and the name of a faction in her head, the Winter Brood, which had sent a messenger after her within the month. She took the velvet part of the alias from her maker. She was not sentimental about it. It was the only gift she had.
What she had of her own was Mirror Legion. It was a trait of the body, a rare thing in the throat and the eyes, and what it did was make watchers see her where she was not. She would breathe in, tighten her jaw and hum a note at the edge of hearing, and the air in front of her would fill with copies, a dozen or two, each walking and turning a half beat behind the last. They were not solid. A strong gust of wind or a thrown cup would pass through them. But they confused a crowd, and a crowd needs only a second. It cost her a nosebleed and an hour of double vision after, and she carried a smooth river pebble from Takaa under her tongue whenever she used it, because the cold of the stone steadied her.
In the doorway of the beer house at Raamunu she let the pebble slide, hummed her note and made twelve of herself. The girl dropped the table leg, slung the bow and shot the third from the left without taking the time to aim. It went into the doorpost, and the arrow was feathered with plumes she could not have named. Niesh was already gone by then, down the quay to a hired boat, an arrow-nick in her ear that bled all the way to the next landing. She sat in the boat and laughed until it hurt. It was the first time a stranger had picked the right target on the first try.
That was the beginning of seven years. The girl, whose name she learned as the Pale Thorn and later as Raseti Ratara, hunted the vampires of the Nile cities one after another, a vampire slayer who treated the Vampireverse as a list to be worked through, and Niesh, whose commission was to make friends of them, found her contacts disappearing at a rate that could not be explained by bad luck. She tried everything. She tried flattery and she tried Mirror Legion, and was caught out each time because the copies were smeared with the same strange wrongness, and the girl simply watched their feet. The second time they met was at a quarry above Hatnebu, where she held the dust-colored hillside for a day with an army of herself and lost nothing but two hours' sleep and some pride. She gained a respect she had not intended. The girl answered to no order and no master. Niesh had seldom met such a person, and they were always trouble.
She was upriver, on the road to the coast, when Raamunu was besieged by a rival city in 2320 BCE. She heard of it from a trader in a harbor town on the Red Sea months afterward, along with the news that the dancer on the wall had died of a sling stone, three days after taking it. Niesh bought a jar of beer and sat on the quay for most of the afternoon. She had thought of the girl as a problem to be solved and not as a person who could end. She sailed for home the next week with the Brood's business unfinished and a grudge that had nowhere to go.
Her long life after that was an exercise in endurance. She outlasted eleven hunter cells sent to end her, outlived Tangbo Qin, who was destroyed in a coven purge in 2132 BCE, and kept the Winter Brood's trade going on the Indus plain. She was sealed in 2059 BCE, at the age of 337, in a brick-lined vault beneath Jajataan by hunters who had learned her limits, silver and hawthorn and ash, and who preferred to lock her up than to take the risk of a stake. She had been a vampire for 303 years. Niesh Bhasudeini had the pebble with her in the vault. Nobody had thought to take it, and it stayed under her tongue, cold as ever.
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