The sling was woven from her mother's flax, and it was the only thing Nikaini Takakaini ever owned that she did not break, lose or give away. It was a plain cradle of braided cord, eight feet from loop to tail when pulled straight, with a pocket of soft goat leather that she re-stitched every spring. She oiled the cords with sesame oil and kept the knots tight. When she was a girl in the walled city-state of Araran, in the Indus and Ganges Plain, in what is now India, she had used it to clear crows from the barley. By the time she was forty she could put a stone through a clay lamp at sixty paces.
She was born in 2447 BCE, in the age that is now called the First Night, to a family of brick-layers. Her father died when a wall came down on him, and the family went hungry for a season, which is how she ended up on the gate watch of Araran at fifteen, a Soldier with a copper-headed spear and a worse temper than the city needed. She was never a gentle woman. She was patient, though, in the way of someone who has held a wall up for a long time, and when she spoke it was usually to say what was wrong with the proposal in front of her. She hummed no tunes. She had a habit of tapping each stone of a gateway as she passed through, a thing she had picked up as a child and never dropped, and she wanted more than anything to see her sister's children grow up in a city with a gate that did not need her.
In 2415 BCE, at thirty-two, she was inside a brick kiln when its dome fell, pressed into the off-season kiln gangs like every soldier of the city. Four men had been loading it, and three of them were killed outright. The fourth was Nikaini. She spent two days under the rubble, in the dark and the heat, and on the third a work gang digging for the dead heard her tapping the bricks, and when they pulled the last slab away she climbed out, unmarked and gray to the elbows, as if she had been dusted with ash. The fall should have killed her. It had not so much as broken a nail. That was Ironhide, the ability the chroniclers of the Slayerverse named later, and it was a physical thing: her skin and the bone beneath it had gone dense and hard to cut, like fired clay, and what struck her glanced or shattered. The cost was a body that cracked in the dry season and could not sweat in the wet.
Nobody taught her. The Vigil of Indus and Ganges Plain recruited her anyway, because the gate captain, who had seen her emerge from the kiln, wrote to them, and because they were short of people who could survive a night. She worked out the craft with the Vigil's few clay tablets of rules, which were wrong, and with the sling, which was right. She had silver beaten thin and wrapped over her stones, so she could tell her stones from river pebbles in the dark, and the Vigil heard of it and began to call her a vampire slayer who used her sling the way others used a bow. She never explained that the silver was an accident of thrift, since pebbles were cheap and silver foil was left over from a temple repair.
Over twenty-one years Nikaini Takakaini, whom the river towns called the Ashen Warden for the gray dust her hide shed, broke eleven covens of The Hollow Choir along the river plain, each in a different way. She sealed one in its cellar with brick and salt, burned one out in a dry month, and in two cases simply stood in the doorway all night until the occupants lost patience and came out into the sun. It was dull work, and she was thorough at it.
In 2405 BCE, in the courtyard of a temple in Araran, she met Mamaan Karayuini for the first time. He crossed the paved square from the north door to the south in less than a heartbeat, and she realized she had been watching an empty space. She hit him with a silvered stone anyway. It cracked a rib and she heard it crack. Then she drove him back toward the east wall, where the sun was coming over the roof, and he took a burn along one arm, and he left by the gate, quick and angry. Both of them understood that the first round was hers, and that he would not give her another.
For eleven years she kept him out of the city, with salt in every doorway and watchers on the walls at dawn. The Hollow Choir sent him in again and again, because he was the best at getting through walls. He was never sloppy, and she was never fast enough, and every time he failed she thought it a small win.
He killed her in 2394 BCE, on the river steps below Araran. She was fifty-three. He came at dawn, which was clever of him, because he had tested the east wall and found where the sun fell late, and she had made the mistake of believing he could not use it. It went on a long time. Her hide held. At the last, in a gap, she put a silvered stone in the sling and sent it at his face, and he plucked it out of the air with his bare hand and held it, his palm split to the bone, and she knew that was all she had. The steps were wet. He was gone before the sun hit the water.
They found the sling coiled on the third step with eight silvered stones still in its pouch. A ninth was missing. Her sister took the sling to the gatehouse of Araran and hung it from a peg, and left the oil on the shelf below it, and each spring someone re-stitched the pocket, though nobody ever used it.
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