Qinzhao Bo

Qinzhao Bo, The Crimson Vow, was a temple hunter from Zhaoyu in China's Yellow River Basin, called to the war at seventeen in 2372 BCE. A reed-shafted bow, a stalker's patience and a twelve-year truce set him against the vampire Jiayu Tang, and they died together.

In the house of Bo at Zhaoyu there was a bowl with a chipped rim, and the rule was that the youngest ate from it. Nobody remembered who had decided this. Qinzhao Bo, born in 2389 BCE, was the youngest for eleven years until a sister arrived, and he kept the habit regardless, long after he had a right to a clean bowl. When he was a slayer, with a dozen caches of dried millet hidden around the basin, he carried a chipped bowl in his pack, a cheap clay one that he replaced whenever it broke, and he ate from it standing up. His sister once said it was the only superstition he had. He said it was a bowl. Zhaoyu was a walled city-state on the Yellow River Basin plain in what is now China, a square of rammed earth with a temple on the north rise, and the family Bo had hunted for the temple for four generations. His job, as soon as he could draw a bow, was to supply the shrine with deer, hares and wildfowl for festival days. He was good at it in a way that annoyed the older men. He was patient where they were hearty, and he could cross a reedbed at dusk without the ducks lifting. What he later called Trackless Stalk was simply the sum of the tricks he had worked out for that: wading the last quarter mile up the stream bed so the mud took his prints, walking always with the wind in his face, rubbing his skin and clothes with crushed wormwood and river silt, and holding the bow, a hunting bow with a reed-shafted arrow and a copper head, close to his body so that it never knocked on anything. In The First Night a hunter's pay was whatever the temple could spare. Qinzhao Bo was paid in millet and the occasional dyed cloth. He was seventeen when the war arrived. In 2372 BCE a rival house marched on Zhaoyu and laid siege to its walls through a wet spring. Qinzhao held a stretch of the east rampart with a handful of other hunters, and on the nineteenth night he saw the enemy captain walk the line of the siege ditch alone, in front of the torches, with a sentry hanging from one hand like a wet coat. The captain drank from the man. He did it neatly, without hurry, and let the body fall into the ditch. It was nothing like a battle. Qinzhao went home at dawn and told his mother that the house was in worse trouble than it knew. The Vigil of Yellow River Basin, which met at an old well-house and had been looking for just such a boy, wrote his name down. He became a vampire slayer at seventeen, with no teacher and little patience for advice. The Slayerverse remembers him as The Crimson Vow, after the red cord he tied around his left wrist for every promise he made, and which he changed each autumn. The cord was not decoration. Qinzhao made promises the way other men made enemies, with care and apparently without limit, and he kept the ones he knew he could keep. He promised the temple he would watch the east field. He promised the dead ferryman's widow he would find what drank her husband. He had no gift beyond what his hands had learned. The edge he had was a hunter's: watching, waiting, being in the right place before the animal arrived, and giving no sign at all. The vampires of the basin had spent six hundred years frightening villagers who ran. They had not met many people who simply sat down in the reeds and waited for the dark to come to them. He met Jiayu Tang in 2368 BCE, at the river gate of Zhaoyu during the autumn fair. By then he was twenty-one and had killed three vampires, all of them stupid. Jiayu was something else, a tall, easy, grey-eyed figure in a good coat who moved through the crowd as though the crowd had been arranged for them. People drifted toward Jiayu without knowing why. Qinzhao followed from forty paces, in the wind and the dust, and watched Jiayu stop to speak with a gate-warden, who handed over a small pale bead. He put an arrow through Jiayu's sleeve. Jiayu looked at the arrow, laughed, and threw him across a wicker pen with one arm. He broke two ribs on a goat. When he stood up Jiayu was gone, and the gate-warden stood alone by the post, looking at his empty hand. After that he learned what the Vigil already half knew: that a line of salt laid across a doorway kept Jiayu on the far side of it, and that running water over a threshold did the same. He did not know why. He did not much care. A man who could not use the door was a man who could not be trusted to wait outside, and Qinzhao knew a lot about waiting. For two years he followed Jiayu's trail through the basin, and Jiayu followed his, or tried to. The Red Trail, the blood sense Jiayu carried, should have found him anywhere. It found a man who smelled like a streambed and wormwood and nothing else. In 2366 BCE he did the thing he was proudest of, and the thing the Vigil least understood. He called the three feuding houses of the river towns to a meal at a ferry landing and talked until dark. They agreed on a truce. It held for twelve years, enough time for marriages to be arranged and the fields to be sown twice over. Nobody quite believed it was working. Qinzhao did not believe it either, and he suspected whose hand was behind the first quarrel when it broke in 2354 BCE, with a headman found dead on a threshold and each house sure the others had done it. He spent his last three years undoing what he had spent his best ones building. He chose Boren for the ending. It was a river crossing, a ford with a ferry-shed on stilts at the water's edge, and in 2351 BCE he cut his own palm on the shed's doorpost on the eve of the new moon and let the blood run down into the wood. Then he dug a ditch across the threshold and let the river through it, climbed to the loft, and waited. He had waited for deer for longer. Jiayu came an hour before dawn, down the bank, along the Red Trail, laughing under the breath. The front was barred by running water and Jiayu did not cross it. Jiayu went through the thatch of the roof instead, and the roof post came with them. Qinzhao put a reed-shafted arrow through the heart of The Gaunt Collector as the beam came down across his own chest. They were found in the morning, the vampire pinned against the doorpost by an arrow and the man under the beam with a bowl at his side. He was 38. He had been a slayer for 21 years. His sister took the chipped bowl home. She never ate from it. She kept it on the high shelf, where the youngest could not reach it, and when Zhaoyu's children asked why, she said it was a bowl.