Ninmeshun Kienir

Ninmeshun Kienir, the Pale Hunger, was a river-trade factor from Mesopotamia who sought out the bite at forty-one and became a patient vampire broker of the Salt Cabal. He killed the slayer Tirasha Tirsidyahim in 2272 BCE and was himself burned out of the world in 2235 BCE.

Never eat where you trade. It was the oldest rule of the river factors of Mesopotamia, who meant it as a matter of credit: a man who sits at your table and then cheats you has already eaten your goodwill, and the same man who takes your sheep and your silver has no business also taking your wife. Ninmeshun Kienir had learned it at his father's knee in Ursarir, a caravan stop in what is now Iraq, where he was born in 2344 BCE. He carried the rule into a second life without changing a word of it. That a vampire might also be hungry in the marketplace he treated as a technical difficulty, and for most of his career he solved it by feeding elsewhere, far from his customers, among people he would never have to do business with again. He was a factor in the old style, which is to say that he lived between other men's goods. He bought barley and wool at one stop and sold it at the next, took a share for the carrying, and kept his reckonings in his head and on small clay tablets he pressed with a reed. His one vanity was a bronze steelyard with a set of stone weights, which he tested against his teeth by habit, tapping each stone on the same canine before he would use it. He wanted, in the plain way of someone who has watched his fathers die poor, a very long time to do his sums in. At forty-one he went looking for it. He had heard from carters that there were creatures along the river roads who did not age as other people did, and he made inquiries over two seasons, offering to carry their cargo and asking questions they did not answer. In 2303 BCE someone did. The making happened in a canal-side storeroom, and Ninmeshun never spoke of the maker, then or later; not to his Cabal, not to a lover, not to his own ledgers. Whoever it was is not in the record, and he seems to have judged that an excellent arrangement. In the long dark of The First Night he joined the Salt Cabal, a loose partnership of river-country vampires who traded in the guise of ordinary caravan houses, and he fit in at once. He was cautious and numerate and, unlike many of his kind, not given to display. The Cabal used him as its broker: a man who could set a price for a cargo, a favor or a life, and make each party feel it had been generous. His body gave him the Fang Mantle, an alteration of the flesh that he could call on when hard-pressed. It was a thing of the body, and not pretty. His jaw lengthened and his shoulders thickened; coarse hair ran along the spine; the teeth grew out of proportion to the face. He could hold it for the length of a fight and no longer, and afterward he was racked with hunger and a dull ache in every tooth, and he kept to his room. The rule was tested in 2287 BCE. A shipment of cedar for the river temples could not be had from the nearer sources, and Ninmeshun made the long journey west, a season or more by donkey caravan across the steppe and then down the wooded slopes, to the harbor settlement of Bahaa on the coast of the Levant. It was a different country, a different people and a different sea, which he did not care for. He kept the rule for most of the trip. On the evening a stevedore on the timber wharf collapsed in his hands, he did not afterward claim that it was the hunger alone. It had been a long road. The man happened to be standing where no one was looking. Tirasha Tirsidyahim, a vampire slayer of the Vigil of Levant, found him among the cedar stacks. Ninmeshun had heard of the Hollow Hand, a Levantine slayer who could make the ground stand up, and had assumed this was exaggeration. It was not. As the Fang Mantle ran over his frame, the slayer put a palm to the wharf and the whole quay rose around them in a hard heap of stone and packed gravel and broke the timber like kindling. Ninmeshun lost half of the cargo and an arm's flesh before he got away on a ship that had not been loaded for him. He made a note, as a trader does, of what had cost him and why. The man was strong, in a straightforward way, and the gift worked on solid ground. He wrote nothing down about the other matter, which was that he had been frightened. For fifteen years he stayed out of the Levant and made sure his trade went through other hands. Reports came to him of a slayer asking after a pale factor on the river roads, and he treated them the way he treated a bad harvest forecast. He arranged to be where the ground was soft. Ursarir was flat silt and mud brick, a country with almost no stone, and when Tirasha at last came east in 2272 BCE with a sack of olive-wood stakes, tired from a long caravan journey and unused to the clay, Ninmeshun was waiting at the caravan stop he had been born in. He was a broker to the end and did not fight any harder than the situation required. The mounds the slayer called up slumped before they could close. One olive stake split against a rib, and ash would have gone through. Ninmeshun Kienir killed Tirasha Tirsidyahim that night, and for once did not feel like a man who had got a good price. He lived on for thirty-seven more years, as the Pale Hunger of the Salt Cabal, and became more careful and more particular. The Vampireverse remembers him as the only vampire who ever kept a written account of the people he had spared. It was a short list. Fire found him in 2235 BCE, at the age of one hundred and nine, in the hands of a hunter whose name no one troubled to record. The steelyard was found in the ashes at the caravan stop, bent, with one stone weight missing a chip from the edge.