Pishaipa Tutartuas

Pishaipa Tutartuas, the Crimson Warden, was a temple hunter of Anatolia who carried a storm in her blood and turned it on the Ivory Court. Called in 2325 BCE, she was dead four years later at thirty-five, killed by the one enemy who made her think hardest.

On the last night of her life, Pishaipa Tutartuas drove the fourth nail into a doorsill with the flat of a copper dagger, and the dagger sang. Static Halo had been building in her since dusk, and every blow threw a small blue spark across the mud floor of the grain-house at Mutuili. Iron nails were dear in that country. Each had come down from the northern traders at the price of a good goat, and she had spent four goats of the Vigil's credit on a single threshold. It was 2321 BCE. She was thirty-five years old, she smelled of wet reed and scorched barley, and she believed she had thought of everything. Most people believe that on their last night. She had been born in 2356 BCE at Titaryaa, a temple town in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, in the house of the man who kept the god's hunting stock. As a girl she was the one who went out before light to bring down duck and gazelle for the table of the god, and she was good at it in the plain way of a person who has never been told she might not be. Her hair crackled when she combed it. Wool stung her. The temple cooks forbade her the copper pots because she made them hum. She wanted, more than anything, an upland pasture above the town with forty sheep and a door she could bar, and she hummed a flat, tuneless hunting song while she counted her arrows in threes, touching each one. Before every hard job she spat on the blade of the dagger. She never explained that either. The change came in the winter of 2325 BCE, in the long dark of The First Night, when she was thirty-one. An under-priest was found in the temple cistern, dry as a husk, with two small punctures at the throat that the cooks wanted to call a snake. Pishaipa followed the drag marks to a store-chamber and found a man with a priest's last blood on his chin. When he came at her, the thing that had been tingling in her all her life came out entire. Her hair stood from her head in a ring, fine blue light crawled along her arms and down the dagger, and the man locked rigid at her touch like a hare in a snare. That was the Static Halo, and she paid for it afterward the way everyone who carried it did: numb hands, a nosebleed that went on for an hour, a ringing in the ears for a week, and sleep like a dropped stone. Nobody taught her. There was no mentor and no teacher, only the elders of the Vigil of Anatolia, who came to look at the scorched floor, called her the Crimson Warden for the red ochre she painted on her brow when she hunted, and gave her a mantle to carry. She was the only one in Titaryaa who knew what she was looking at, and for a while that was lonely. Her working method was a hunter's, which is to say mostly waiting. She learned that the Ivory Court did its killing through ordinary business: debts, grain, favors, the quiet purchase of a steward. So she sat at watering places and granary doors and listened. She noticed that one pale visitor, who did his dealing at the temple warehouses, always stopped and went around when a smith had left iron tools across a threshold. It was the sort of thing you only learn by watching a hundred doorways. From that, and from a dying creature who talked more than he meant to, she assembled what the Vigil came to rely on: iron driven into a doorsill would keep a vampire out, and a mark burned by a slayer's own hand into his skin would not close. Her first clash with Piipa Tishashaili came in 2324 BCE, in the barley store behind the temple at Titaryaa. She knew who he was before he spoke, a courteous, narrow man with the manner of a steward's guest, who called her by name and offered her a drink of beer. He was the Silent Shadow of the Ivory Court, a broker of grain and debts, and he never raised his voice. When she went for him, the Halo lit the jars along the wall and froze him for three breaths. It was enough. She pressed the hot copper dagger to the inside of his left forearm and left a burn the length of her hand. He healed everything else in front of her, the cuts and the cracked ribs, and that one mark stayed open and black. He looked at it with real interest. Then he thanked her, which she found worse than a threat, and was gone through the roof thatch. After that he did not fight her. He bought her. Over the next years the debts of her father's house, of her cousins and of half the herdsmen she drank with were quietly purchased by men she could not name, until a surprising number of her friends owed the Ivory Court and had begun to look at the ground when she walked by. She could not burn a debt with sparks. She went after him anyway, up the marsh road to Mutuili, which she had learned was his birthplace and the place he went to ground. The old grain-house there had a single door. She spent the Vigil's goats on the nails and waited inside with the dagger, humming, and put a second mark across his jaw when he finally came, because he did not use the door. He came through the reed roof. He was hurt, and she was tired, and the Halo was nearly spent by then. He killed her, and it was not quick. The marsh women who found her at dawn said the floor was scorched in a ring and the doorsill was whole, all four nails still standing in it, as though the house had been robbed of a different thing. She was thirty-five. Pishaipa Tutartuas left no apprentice, which was a failure of the Vigil rather than of her, since nobody had ever sent her one. Piipa Tishashaili walked out of the Anatolian record in the end: he vanished in 2043 BCE and has not been seen since, and in the slayer tales of the Slayerverse the Crimson Warden remains the only vampire slayer who ever left him a mark that would not close. Her copper dagger was carried back to Titaryaa and hung in the temple where she had first drawn it, and the cooks, who had once banned her from the pots, took to leaving it a share of the first bread. When the Mutuili grain-house was pulled down in a later generation, a woman gathering brick found four bent nails in the sill, put them in her apron to sell, and asked no one what they had been for.