Raasha Enraela

Raasha Enraela, the Rising Ward, was a cedar-convoy guard from a Lebanese mountain shrine who became a vampire slayer of the Slayerverse. With a copper dagger and a drill for breaking doors she dismantled a night market, and died in the fire that ended it.

Everything we know of Raasha Enraela begins in a ledger. It is a long tally of offerings kept by the steward of the mountain shrine at Elashzina, written on clay and baked by accident when the storeroom burned, so that the whole run of it survives in a dull orange. The steward, an old man named Ushmar who counted loaves the way other men count enemies, recorded what every visitor left and why. Raasha appears in it for all forty-two years of her life. Her first entry, made when she was small enough to be carried up the steps, reads: "Daughter of the gate-warden. One loaf. Asked for nothing." Her last entry is a good deal longer, and we will come to it. She was born at Elashzina in 2662 BCE, a mountain shrine in the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, where the cedar slopes drop toward the sea and a path no wider than a goat runs from the shrine down to the loading yards. She grew up carrying water to the pilgrims and learning which of them were lying about their ailments. At fifteen she went down the path with a convoy, and for the next twelve years she was a soldier, in the plain sense of a woman paid in barley to stand beside cedar logs on their way to the harbors and the boats for Egypt. She bought her copper dagger with her first full season's pay, a sum Ushmar entered with visible regret as "the price of eleven loaves of offering, not made." She kept it on her belt, and she kept a habit besides: every door she ever broke open, she cut a splinter from its frame with the dagger and put the splinter in her sleeve. In 2635 BCE, when she was twenty-seven, her convoy stopped for the night at a crossroads shrine two days from the coast. Something came out of the dark among the pack-donkeys and took two of her men before anyone understood what it was. It was a vampire, one of the many that fed along the cedar roads in The First Night, and she did not run from it. She held the line with the dagger and a tent-pole until it left, and she walked into Elashzina at dawn with her sleeve soaked to the elbow. Ushmar wrote it down. "Offering, none. She came bleeding and asked for the door of the Vigil." The Vigil of Levant gave her a mark in soot and juniper resin on the palm of her left hand, and a sentence of instruction that she remembered all her life, which was that she would find out the rest. No one trained her. A vampire slayer of the Slayerverse, in those years, did not often have a teacher to name. What she made of it was Breach Drill. A vampire in a mud-brick cellar or a cedar warehouse is hard to catch because he expects to be found slowly. Raasha's method was to be there before the sound of her arrival. Six people, a cedar ram bound in wet hide, a pair of fire-jars of pitch and oil, and one long sequence she drilled until the village children could recite it: ram, door, jars, line, hand. The hand was hers, with the mark on the palm. A vampire's skin blistered at the touch of it, which the Vigil had learned the hard way over many years and which she learned again at the cost of nine nights of sleeplessness at the first nest. She hunted ten houses out of the cities of the Levant coast over the next four years, and she had no gift for it beyond a stubborn memory and a fondness for logistics. The house she wanted most was the Winter Covenant, whose center was the night market at Yahtirsida. It was a lamp-lit bazaar of oil and gossip that opened at dusk and ran past the second watch, and its keeper was a woman called Zinela Zinyahon, the Ivory Shadow. In 2631 BCE Raasha went in as a buyer of lamp oil. She walked three circuits, bought nothing, and noticed a veiled woman at a stall of reed baskets who was then, an hour later, at a stall of dyes. A woman who changes her shoulders is still a woman who walks the same way. Raasha crossed the market at an even pace and took the veiled woman by the wrist with her left hand. The skin blistered under the palm. The woman came apart. Wing Storm was the name the Vigil later gave to what happened next: a body of flesh breaking into a cloud of small dry wings, each one a piece of the whole, with a sound like cloth tearing in a closed room. It took a long rake across Raasha's left shoulder and put out a hundred lamps at once. By the time she had dragged two of her own people out of the crush the market was empty and the keeper was gone, and Ushmar's entry reads only: "Offering, burnt cloth and a wrist-wrap. She would not say whose." The people along the coast had started to call her the Rising Ward, because she was always already standing when the sun came over the ridge. The next eleven years were a siege conducted in slow motion. Raasha cut the Covenant's supply of oil, then its boats, then its couriers, and every winter the ledger notes some small gift for the shrine, always a different sum, which suggests she was paying from whatever she had left. Zinela Zinyahon, for her part, kept moving the market's stores, and in 2620 BCE they were at Melenim, a wharf town on the coast, in a warehouse of cedar planks and pitch. Raasha Enraela took six people and the ram. The door went on the second blow. Inside, she found the keeper standing in a line of lamps with her arms spread, as if she had been waiting, and then there was only the sound. Raasha got the mark on her once more, across the face this time, and threw the jars. The warehouse took fire from the floor to the rafters. The vampire went up in it, wings and all, and Raasha, with a throat laid open and a shoulder opened again, died on the quay before the second watch ended. They had killed each other in one night. She was forty-two. Ushmar made the last entry himself, many days later, when her people brought her dagger up the mountain. "Dagger, one, copper, mended. Sleeve of splinters, forty-one. Offering: the dagger." Then, in a smaller hand: "Nobody could say which door was the first."