The sword cost a season's wages and Qinren Bo's father's good opinion. It was a bronze sickle-sword, a hooked blade as long as a forearm with a flat back, bought from a western trader at the Jiaxiu river market for the price of everything Qinren had earned guarding one summer's grain barges. His father, who had hoped for a son in the temple granary, did not speak to him for a month. The sword was too long for a boy of fifteen and too heavy at the hook, and it had a fault in the casting that the trader swore was ornamental. Qinren kept it all his short life. He wound the hilt in oiled hemp cord, replaced the cord every spring, and slept with the blade under the mat. It is the one object in his story that can be traced from beginning to end.
Jiaxiu was a temple town on the Yellow River in the basin that the Slayerverse files under the Yellow River Basin region, in the country now called China. Qinren was born there in 2538 BCE, in the age called The First Night, to a family that mended fishing nets and expected him to mend them too. The town was rammed earth, millet fields and jade carvers, with a ferry landing where the port lords took their tolls, and the lords paid for shields. A boy who was big for his age and stubborn about it could be hired out at thirteen to stand at the end of a gangplank and look dangerous. Qinren found he did it better than looking was meant to demand. He was hired as a mercenary in everything but name, and by sixteen he had a reputation among the ferrymen for one strange habit. He would not step onto a wharf in the dark without first standing still at its edge for a count of ten.
What he was waiting for, it turned out, was the cold. In the spring of 2521 BCE, at seventeen, he came down with a fever that took four days and was supposed to be fatal, and he woke up able to feel what he had always half felt. There were places in the air that were colder than the air around them. A spot the width of a doorway in a sunny courtyard would turn his teeth to ice, and his fingertips would go white if he stood near it long enough. The Vigil of Yellow River Basin, which found him through a ferryman who had watched him count his ten, called the knack Cold Spot. It meant he could pick out a vampire in a crowded market by the chill that sat on the person. It left him with permanent chilblains and a dread of cellars. The Vigil wanted a vampire slayer and could offer him no teacher. Its only tutor in that stretch of river had died the winter before, and Qinren taught himself, which is to say he learned by getting things wrong and not dying of it.
He met Tangqin Zhao that same year, at the Nine Reeds Ford below Qinbo, a river village a day's walk downstream. The ferry lords had hired him to guard a barge crossing, and halfway across a bank of fog came up the river faster than any fog he had seen, and Cold Spot nearly dropped him where he stood. The fog had a shape in it. It came onto the barge like a long white sleeve, thickened into a tall man in a mourning cloak, and took the ferryman nearest the rail. Qinren got the hook of the sickle-sword into the man's forearm, dragged it open, and pressed the ochre-and-ash mark that the Vigil gave its people into the wound with his thumb. The man screamed, once, a surprisingly young sound, and was gone into the fog with a trailing sleeve and the barge still turning in the current. The Midnight Widow, the ferrymen decided afterward, since nobody had seen the mourner's face and everyone had agreed it was in mourning.
The nine years that followed were a long game of rope and river. Qinren learned that the fog was not a trick of the weather and not a spirit but a quality of the man's own body, which he could loosen into mist for a few breaths and slip under a door or between a guard's arm and his ribs. Qinren put salt across thresholds. He stationed himself at fords and ferry landings and stood in the cold, and he kept a tally of every night the Cold Spot came near and went away again. The port lords gave him a title they did not mean, the Steadfast Wall, and an uneasy peace for a season or two while the vampire kept to the upstream villages. It was a good record, and he knew that it wouldn't last. Every winter the sword went into the corner of the hut with a new cord on the hilt, and every spring he sharpened it on a river stone, and said nothing to anyone about the way his hands shook.
It ended for Qinren Bo in 2512 BCE, at the same Nine Reeds Ford, on a night when the fog came down thick after a warm day. Qinren was twenty-six and had been standing at the landing since sunset. He felt the Cold Spot arrive on his left, and then on his right, and then all around him, and understood that the mist had stopped hiding the thing it was. Tangqin Zhao had spent nine years nursing a scar the shape of a thumb, and this time he did not take a ferryman. He took Qinren, with his bare hands, through the sword-guard, at the end of a long and quiet fight that left reed stalks flattened for a hundred paces. The sickle-sword fell in the shallows and stayed there until the vampire, wading in at dawn, picked it out of the mud.
It is the sword's later life that has kept the story alive. Tangqin Zhao, who is alive today, did not melt it down and did not throw it away. The Vampireverse's own archivists record that it hangs on the wall of one of his vaults, bronze gone dark, the hook still keen, with a fresh hemp cord on the hilt that somebody has replaced every spring for four and a half thousand years. Nobody has asked him why.
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