Paan Tzimayaic

Paan Tzimayaic, the Gilded Torch, was a marsh-village thief who took up the stake of the vampire slayers in 1589 BCE and bent witnesses' memories with a gift of the voice. He outlived his enemy Jia Ren, whom he destroyed in 1578 BCE, by eighteen years.

The stake was olive-wood, which was the first odd thing about it. Nobody in the marsh country of Mexico had seen an olive tree, or knew the name of the pale, close-grained wood that went smooth under the thumb and would not take a stain, and the trader who later looked at it sniffed it and said it had come a very long way over water. It was the length of a forearm, sharpened at one end and wrapped at the other with oiled leather gone black from handling. Paan Tzimayaic carried it for twenty-nine years. It was the only thing he ever stole that he did not try to sell, and it is the best way into the life of the Gilded Torch, as the Slayerverse came to call him, because everything else about him was borrowed, bargained or lied into place, and the stake was simply his. Paan Tzimayaic was born in 1617 BCE in Tzitzili, a marsh village in Mesoamerica where the houses stood on built-up mounds of clay and the roads were canoe channels. His people trapped eels and cut reeds. Paan was a quick, vain boy who found early that the quickest way to eat well was to be somewhere else when the owner came home, and by twenty he was lifting jade beads from canoe cargoes and shell strings from the temple stores. He was not a violent thief. He disliked blood, mostly because it was untidy, and he preferred to talk his way in. By his late twenties the marsh headmen had stopped trying to catch him and started trying to hire him, which is a different kind of defeat. He wanted a house with a plastered floor and he wanted to be asked to dinner without anyone watching the spoons. In 1589 BCE, when he was twenty-eight, he broke into a buried cache under a causeway shrine at the edge of the salt flats, expecting offerings. What he found was the stake, wrapped in leather with a row of tally cords knotted beside it, left there by someone in the Vigil of Mesoamerica who had not come back for it. That night a hungry thing came for the cache, found a thief standing on it, and Paan, who had no idea what he was holding, put the pale point into it by sheer fright. He had become a vampire slayer without knowing the phrase, and learned it days later from a fisherman, in what the Vigil's people would call the Bronze Vigil. No one trained him. He worked it out from the cords, from rumor, and from three more near-deaths, and he joined the Vigil of Mesoamerica only in the sense that its quiet people began leaving food and news at his door. Paan was an Exo-Human, and his gift, Court Enchantment, lived in his throat. When he dropped his voice into a flat hum and held a person's eyes, they felt it in the breastbone, like a drum two houses away, and for the next hour they would believe what he said had happened. A household could be made to swear that no one had come in. A guard could remember a long and friendly conversation about eels. It cost him a nosebleed and a day of fog afterward, and it never worked on anyone who was truly afraid, which was a disadvantage when his audience was a vampire. He used it mostly on the living, and mostly to clean up. He called it his manners. In 1587 BCE, two years into the work, he went to rob a cacao broker named Tomal at Xalchi, on the lake, and walked into the same house as a man sent to kill the broker. The man was Jia Ren, the Sable Marrow. Paan was already in the strongroom when the lamps went out one by one down the passage, as if someone was folding the dark and carrying it ahead of him. He hummed the household into a sleepy agreement that they were all asleep. Jia Ren came through the door anyway, and Paan, who was fond of his own cleverness, nearly died of it. The stake caught Jia along the ribs and skidded. Both of them left by different windows. Tomal woke the next morning to find his strongroom empty and his door barred from inside, and swore to the day he died that nothing had happened. After Xalchi Paan thought a great deal about silver. The Vigil's people said that Jia Ren could be hurt by silver-tipped weapons and by direct sunlight, and neither fact was any use to a man who met him in the dark. In 1584 BCE Paan traded a handful of green stone to a coast trader for a cap of beaten silver the size of a thumb and bound it to the point of the olive-wood with wet sinew. He spent the next six years tracking Jia Ren the way he had once tracked cargo, learning where the Ashen House slept, whose cellars were whose, and which landings were left empty at noon. He found that the vampire was punctual. That was the whole trick. The end came at Yachitl in 1578 BCE, a platform town with a long pillared hall whose roof Paan had spent a month quietly loosening. He used the voice on the whole street, getting a hundred and more of them to remember a festival that did not exist, and drew Jia Ren out onto the platform by leaving a door unlatched, a bead ledger open, and a rumor of a prisoner where the Ashen House would hear it. He waited until the sun cleared the roof. When the thatch gave, light fell across the floor and the vampire turned toward the hall's one dark corner, which was exactly where Paan stood. The stake went in under the ribs, and the sun finished it. The shaft cracked across, and Paan walked out with the leather-wrapped half in his hand and the silver cap still on the other. He lived eighteen more years in Tzitzili, in the house with the plastered floor, and trained no one, saying it was no inheritance to hand a child. He died in 1560 BCE of a marsh fever, at fifty-seven. The silver half of the stake had been lost in the burning of Yachitl. The wood half he kept under his sleeping mat, and when he died his sister's grandson used it to prop the door of an eel-smoking shed, where it stood in the damp for a long time and nobody asked what it was.