Nikthoes Nikdema

Nikthoes Nikdema, called The Silent Arrow, was a hired shield of the port lords of Kakaes who survived a plague that had been declared fatal and rose in 1944 BCE as a vampire slayer. They broke stone with bare hands and destroyed the vampire Kachil Tzitzian in 1937 BCE.

The household in Kakaes owned one cooking pot with a handle, and the handle was cracked. Nikthoes Nikdema was born into that household in 1964 BCE, the third of five children, and spent a good part of childhood watching the pot being mended with a plug of bitumen and a strip of wet leather. Whoever stirred was told to hold the pot by the rim, not the handle, and generations of arguments over who had forgotten that rule gave the family its main form of conversation. Nikthoes did not forget. Nikthoes was a quiet child who held things by the rim, and who noticed at nine that the hands of the neighbors' wives were gentler on the clay than their own. Kakaes was a walled city-state of the Aegean, in the Greece of The Bronze Vigil, a place where a hired spear was a fixture like a fishing net, with a stone harbor, a market that stank of fish-oil and resin, and a class of port lords who paid for strong people to stand near their cargo. Nikthoes took the work at fifteen, and Nikthoes Nikdema, mercenary, was soon a known name on the quay, a calm presence in the crowd of porters. A hired shield was not a soldier. The post paid in barley and a few weights of tin, and it asked for good eyes, a steady back and no opinions. Nikthoes had all three. They carried a bronze sickle-sword whose edge was nicked in six places, stood on a wharf for three seasons, and learned that a harbor was a town where people did not look at each other much, and that this made it a good place for other things to go unseen. At twenty, in 1944 BCE, a sickness came into the harbor on a grain ship. It killed quickly, with a fever that took the eyes first, and it took the household with it. Nikthoes lay for three days in the death-house by the south wall, laid out on a reed mat with the others, and the healer who looked in on the second morning wrote them down, with a knot in a cord, as gone. No one had expected otherwise. On the third night they sat up, with a headache, an enormous thirst, and the plain understanding that the sickness had decided to leave. Healers swore afterward that no one lived through that fever. Nikthoes was proof against it, and stayed so for the rest of the years. What else the fever left behind was found out the same night. Reaching for the water jar, Nikthoes closed a hand on its neck and the clay ran to powder. In the black of the death-house, by the dim light of the one lamp, someone else was standing at the far end of the room, in the doorway, bent over a body. He straightened when the dead woke. He had an ordinary harbor face, a hunter's thin neck, and an expression of such open surprise that Nikthoes, still half sick, did not feel afraid. The man said, in a low and careful voice, that he had been listening to this room for three hours and that every heart in it had stopped, and that he did not understand. That was Kachil Tzitzian. They fought in the death-house for as long as it took to knock the door off its post. Nikthoes took a cut across the forearm and a bite across the shoulder, and they broke his collarbone with a grip that they did not know they had. He went out of the building into the dark and did not hurry. It was the Vigil of Aegean that sent a woman from the hill shrine at Palathes to find the survivor of the death-house, because the story was already moving through the quay, and she gave Nikthoes the name for what they were: a vampire slayer of the Slayerverse, called by no teacher and tied to no house, and the quay, which liked a short name, began to speak of The Silent Arrow, since Nikthoes never answered a taunt. Nikthoes took no instruction. The Vigil had none to give a body like theirs. But Nikthoes learned the things any hunter learned, and learned them by doing: that salt along a sill would stop a vampire at a door, and that moving water across a threshold did the same. The power, which they called Mountain Grip, was a plain physical thing, a closing of the hand that left stone cracking in a pattern like frost. It also broke their fingers if they pushed it, and they carried a splint in the sickle-sword's scabbard for that reason. They burned out three nests in the years that followed: a flooded tomb, a cistern under a priest's house, a rock cellar at the end of a salt road. They did it alone, with a lamp and a hired boy to hold it. The boy changed each time, because Nikthoes had a habit of paying generously and then never hiring the same one twice. They did not like to be known. The port lords stopped asking for their services once they understood what the services were. Kachil Tzitzian kept coming back. He had a gift for hearing a heart through a wall, which meant that hiding was seldom enough, and Nikthoes took to sleeping in the open with a ring of salt, grumbling at the cold. They crossed each other perhaps nine times in seven years. The last was in 1937 BCE, at Euthereues, a harbor town to the south, where he had gone to ground in a rock-cut cistern. Nikthoes diverted the spring that fed it so that water ran across the threshold, then walked in with a lamp and the splint in their belt. The fight, at the end, was short and wet. A man with Kachil's ears could not hear the stone that Nikthoes was pulling down on him until it was already moving. They lived another twenty-seven years, out of the war's way, in the stone house at Kakaes where the cracked pot had once hung. The handle of the pot was still cracked. They died there in 1910 BCE, at fifty-four, of a slow failing in the chest, with the pot hung by its rim on the nail by the door.