Qin Qin

Qin Qin, called The Wretched Shadow, was a granary thief from a hill fort in China's Yellow River Basin who was turned in 2398 BCE and lasted thirty-nine years as a vampire. He is remembered for a chipped black lamp, which he lost to a slayer in 2363 BCE and died trying to get back.

The lamp was black clay, fat-bellied, with a chip in the lip where it had once fallen off a shelf, and it was the only thing Qin Qin ever stole from his own house. He took it from his mother's hearth at Weilan, a hill fort in the Yellow River Basin in what is now China, on the morning he left for good. Qin was born there in 2436 BCE, the fourth son of a family that kept the fort's grain tallies, and he had the sort of luck that went wrong in small ways. It was the lamp that he lit when he was afraid, and he was afraid often. For the rest of his life he carried it in a bag of sheepskin, whatever else he lost, and it outlasted three roofs, one wife and his own heartbeat. Weilan taught him his trade, which was grain. A fort that stored millet attracted people who wanted millet, and Qin, who could not do sums and was not strong, found by his teens that he was patient at doors. He could wait at a granary vent for a whole night. He could carry a sack down a hillside without waking a dog. The gift for it was nothing more than a failure to be noticed, and he grew up thinking that this was a kind of personality. In The First Night a boy could do worse. His want, if he had been made to say it aloud, was an odd one for a thief. He wanted a granary of his own to guard. A big, quiet, well-roofed one, with nobody trying to get in. In 2398 BCE, at 38, he was ambushed on the hill road by men he had cheated and left in the ditch for the crows. Somebody found him before the crows did. Qin never named that somebody, and in all the documents of the Weeping Line there is no record of his maker, a silence that the rest of the Line took to mean either that he was ashamed or that he was frightened. He woke up in a cave with a hunger he did not recognize and a lamp-flame that seemed, for the first time in his life, to hurt his eyes less than the dark did. He walked back to Weilan after a month, found his mother dead, took nothing, and went down the hill. The Weeping Line had a custom of keening after a night's work, a high wail that served as a recognition call, and he joined them because he had nowhere else to be. His gift was the Nightfold, and it was a modest one. A trait of his body, rare enough that the Line prized it, he could pull the dark of a room in toward himself like a man gathering a sleeve, and in the process draw the light out of it. Lamps sank to red beads. Torches choked. Eyes that had been used to a lit room went blind for the count of a few breaths. It cost him a headache that came in waves and a tremor in the hands that lasted through the next day. Mostly he used it to rob. On the anniversary of his making he used it for a joke, lighting the black lamp in front of the Line and drawing the flame down into a bead the size of a seed and letting it back up again. It was his one party trick, and the Line applauded it every year as if they had not seen it. In the Vampireverse he was known as The Wretched Shadow, a title he took for an insult and later wore like a hat. He ran a night market at the quay of Qinshuming for most of his time as a vampire. It was small by the standards of the Line, and tolerably honest, as night markets go. He took a tenth of whatever passed through, and his men were not often violent. He counted the lamps in a room before he entered it, from habit, and was never comfortable in a room with more than eleven. He was not clever and he knew it. The Weeping Line forgave this in him because he was cheerful and kept his accounts, and because they had vampires who were cleverer and a great deal worse. The thing that undid him was a boy on a rope. In 2363 BCE he and a half dozen helpers went to empty the fish stores at the harbor of Xiuxiu, and found a young man on the wall, hauling up a timber. The boy was a new vampire slayer, though neither of them knew it yet. He looked at the boy, thought nothing, and went in. A drop bar fell on one of his men. He came back out into the dark and found the boy, who was Yutang Tang, and a mechanism of ropes and levers hung over the door. The lantern went to a red bead when he drew on it, and in the fight he lost the sheepskin bag and everything in it. He did not notice until he was back on the road to Qinshuming, with a split lip and nothing at his hip. Four years followed in which he lost nearly every contest and was not quite sure how. He never saw Yutang coming. A roof he had marked for a raid was suddenly hinged. A quay he had controlled for a decade was hung with clay bells. He grew to resent the engineer in the particular way of a thief who has met a locksmith, and, against his own interest, to admire him. He tried for the lamp twice. Twice it was a day too late. By the third winter he understood the lamp was a bait, and understood that it was still the only thing he wanted. He went to Weiwei in 2359 BCE anyway. The granary stood in a stand of poplars with a ferry landing, and the black lamp sat lit in the middle of its floor, with Yutang apparently asleep in a corner. Qin folded the dark in until the flame was a seed, and reached up to unhook the lamp, and the hook came down with a small click. The roof opened above him in eight panels at once and the first gray light came down onto a man who had not seen the sun for thirty-nine years. He had time to see a stake. It had a silver nail in its tip, and he thought, in his last moment, that it was a rather good piece of work. Qin Qin was destroyed at the age of 77, having been a vampire for 39 years of them. The lamp went to Xiuxiu. It hung from a nail in the harbor store until the nail rusted through, and then from another one, and was lit each night by whoever kept the watch, with fish oil, for as long as the store stood. The chip in the lip was never mended. One of the watchmen said it made the flame lean toward the door, as if it were listening for somebody's step.