Praini Niardhaa

Praini Niardhaa, the Midnight Mask, was a vampire thief of Kataesh who broke walls with her bare palms for sixteen years in the Indus and Ganges Plain. She is known from a ferrymen's ballad, a granary tally and one hostile witness, all of which agree that she died at Deniesh.

Three records of Praini Niardhaa survive, and none of them was written to praise her. The first is a ferrymen's ballad, "The Mask at Deniesh", which the river people sang while poling and which was set down in three versions that disagree about everything except the ending. The second is a knotted cord kept by a granary-keeper at Kataesh, a tally of what went missing from his stores between 1493 BCE and 1477 BCE, reckoned in jars and in the keeper's temper. The third is a clay tablet of complaints, taken from the house of a lord named Vardhin, which names her once as the thief of the seal-stones. A biographer can build from these, and then argue with them. Praini Niardhaa, whom the river towns called The Midnight Mask, worked as a thief in the age of the Bronze Vigil, and a vampire slayer's work was to find her. She was born in 1515 BCE in Kataesh, a walled city-state of the Indus and Ganges Plain, in India, to a family of seal-cutters whose workshop smelled of soapstone dust and burnt bone. Her father cut the little stamps that merchants pressed into clay to mark their jars. The ballad has her born at a tomb door, which is a ferryman's joke, but the first stanza is nearer the truth than it knows: "She was born with a hinge in her hand, and every door she met she asked its name." As a girl she was bright and bored. When the family's debts were called, and Vardhin's stewards carried off the father's box of seals as payment, she was nineteen and furious, and she took to the desert road with a salt-trader's cousin, learning to open the graves of dead chieftains where the guards dozed. Tomb-robbing made her good at one thing, which was getting into places that wished to stay shut. She also learned a habit she kept to the end: she never touched a door she could go under. The cousin said it was cowardice. She said a door was a question and a floor was an answer. The Vampireverse remembers her as a thief first and a vampire second. In 1493 BCE, when she was twenty-two, a woman called Jadea Supraita found her in a roadside lodging south of Kataesh. The Velvet Throne wanted a thief of her talent, and Jadea, whom the faction's servants called the Bloodless Marrow, did not ask. She made Praini her own by the bite and the long night that follows it, and the ballad's second version is all it has to say on the subject: "She went in a cutpurse and came out a Mask." Jadea was her sire, and treated the arrangement as business. She taught Praini to feed on the great houses without waking the household, and in the years that followed Praini visited five noble houses of the plain in this way and left no witnesses. Jadea still lived, in her own halls, when this account closes. The thing that changed in her body was Stonebreak. It was a gift and not a trick, a rare quality of the hand and the long bones of the arm. When Praini laid both palms flat against stone she could feel its grain the way a weaver feels a warp, and with a push she could shatter it along that grain. A wall opened like a split loaf. A cistern wall went to gravel. It cost her. Her fingers cracked and wept, her nose bled, and she could not use it twice in a night without sleeping a day. She wore a mask of black-dyed cloth, not for fear of being known, as the ferrymen said, but because the dust of the stone got into her teeth. Her enemies knew what she was weak against, because they had learned it the hard way. A line of salt on the threshold stopped her, and so did the painted wards that the better houses had over their doors. A few iron nails driven into the sill, rare things made of sky-metal and worth a field of barley each, did something worse than stop her. They made her sick. The tally cord, which the granary-keeper knotted with some pride, records the first time the keeper met the woman who was robbing him. In 1487 BCE a hired guard sat for eleven nights in Vardhin's treasure room at Kataesh, a tall woman with a copper dagger who hummed the same four bars until the lamps burned low. On the twelfth night Praini came through the wall for her father's seal-box. She had waited ten years to take it. She got it, and the guard's dagger opened her palm to the bone, so that the hand scarred and ached whenever she laid it on stone for the rest of her life. She learned the guard's name from the lord's complaint tablet. The woman was Supraita Deniini, whom the plain called the Ninth Shield, and the tablet noted with some sourness that she had quit the contract without being paid. The ballad is better at the rest. At Lohita Ford in 1483 BCE, where the caravan camp lay ringed in salt and the doorposts of the toll hut had been nailed, Praini simply dug under the line, as she always did, and broke the causeway behind her to cover the retreat. Nine carts went into the water. The song says the Mask wept at the ford. It was the dust, her sire would have said. But the tally cord, which has no reason to be kind, records that she paid the toll-keeper's widow in full that winter and was never heard to say why. By 1477 BCE the two of them had been circling each other for ten years. Supraita knew every house that Praini fed on. Praini knew the dry-season routes the other woman liked best. She went to ground at Deniesh, a tanners' town of brick and cisterns, perhaps because she was tired. The ballad says that the Ninth Shield came at moonrise, laid salt across the door and pressed the nails into the sill with her own hands while a dog barked, and that the Mask stood up inside and saw the line. The tally-keeper had that part from a tanner's boy. It was the boy's account that there was a short struggle at the door, that the guard's dagger went into the vampire's throat, and that the vampire set both palms to the floor as she fell. The cistern wall went first. Then the beams. The roof came down all in one piece, and the dog stopped barking. In 1477 BCE she was thirty-eight years old. The ballad gives her a last line, "The Mask and the Shield lay under one roof, and neither would say who was first." The river people hung a cord of knots from the ferry-post at Deniesh for as long as the post stood. Her father's box of seals was found among the tanners' rubble, with the soapstone seals unharmed, and a boy carried it to Kataesh without being told who it belonged to.