Rai Itrenet

Rai Itrenet, called The Veiled Lantern, was a marsh hunter from a caravan stop who became a vampire slayer in 2926 BCE. Fast as a heartbeat and half deaf by choice, he spent sixteen years stripping thralls from the vampire Senet Kamenep before the market of Ankhrensetep killed him in 2910 BCE.

The boatmen of the Nile Valley told it the same way for centuries. The Veiled Lantern, they said, carried a lamp hung with a veil that no vampire could see through, and by its light he walked into the night market at Ankhrensetep and was never seen again; some added that he walks the reed beds still, and that on dark nights the lamp can be seen going away upriver. The lamp is true. The veil is not, and neither is the walking. Rai Itrenet carried a plain clay lamp with a hood of linen over it, which every marsh hunter on the river used so that the flame would not ruin his eyes or show a hippopotamus where he was standing, and he died at the market in 2910 BCE with that hood tied to his belt. The stories are better than the man. The man, plainly, was better at his job. Rai Itrenet was born at Hormeni in 2948 BCE, in the years of The First Night, in a caravan stop in Egypt where the oasis donkey trains met the river road, and from the age of seven he went into the marsh with his uncle, who cut papyrus in the dry months and speared hippopotamus in the wet ones. Hunting taught him to keep still, to read a bank at a glance, and to move only when the animal's attention was elsewhere. An ear infection at ten took most of the hearing from his left side, which the family regarded as a misfortune and which turned out to be the reason he lived. He grew into a hunter who paid his debts and kept a small chip of beeswax in his cheek, chewing it as other men chewed reeds. When he needed it for his ear he spat it into his palm and softened it, and he never lost the habit. What he wanted was a boat of his own, built right, and nobody to owe a fee. In the dry season of 2926 BCE, aged twenty-two, he was camped at Hormeni when a donkey string of forty beasts and nine drivers filed out of the caravan stop in the middle of the night and walked into the marsh in a line. They did not talk. They hummed, all in the same low note. Rai had wax in his good ear and nothing in the other, and he heard only the faintest edge of the sound, a pulse in his teeth, and it was enough to wake him. He followed them. He was not trying to rescue them; he did not know what he was looking at. He caught up with the last driver as the water reached the man's thighs and, without deciding to, crossed ten paces of reed in the width of a held breath, and had him out before the mud closed. Four of the others were drowned by morning. The man he saved remembered only the singing. Nobody taught him what he was. The Vigil of Nile Valley noticed him in the marsh a month later and gave him a place and a dagger, and the copper dagger was all he ever carried by way of tradition. He called the gift Heartbeat Step because it lived in the space between two beats: for the length of one, the world went still, and he moved. Dust hung in the air where he had been. It cost him a ringing in the ears, a sick stomach and a fast pulse for an hour after, and he never trusted it longer than three jumps in a row. Six years of hunting followed, the work of a vampire slayer in the lower river: lesser houses, small caravans, one nest in a derelict shrine. All of it, when he traced it back, ran toward a singing market. He met Senet Kamenep in 2920 BCE, in the lamplit lanes of the Ankhrensetep night market, which the vampire had run for eighty years from a back room behind the sellers of dyed linen. Rai went in with both ears waxed and the lamp hooded at his belt, looking for a particular thrall: a magistrate's agent who had been missing for a year. He found him, standing among the stalls with his hands slack. Then a chord went through the lanes, low and sweet, pitched from somewhere under the market floor, and a hundred buyers stopped in the middle of whatever they were doing. The wax kept most of it out. The planks under his feet carried the rest, a pulse in the soles that wanted to walk him to the back room. He stood in it as long as he could count. When the singer stepped out in his linen kilt, smiling, Rai jumped. He crossed forty paces of lane in the width of a held breath, drew the copper dagger across the vampire's palm, and left a bright scrape that closed almost as he watched. Then he ran. No one had ever walked out of the market before, and neither of them forgot it. The ten years after read like a long argument. He pulled thirty porters out of the quarry gangs at Sehtep in 2917 BCE by killing the drummer whose beat kept the hold alive once the singing had stopped, and he broke a contract on a magistrate's household by walking the magistrate out of his own house at dawn. Senet Kamenep, whom the boatmen called The Sable Choir, could not be fought and could barely be wounded; he could be annoyed. Rai took a small pleasure in annoying him. He never got closer than the edge of the market, and he never saw the vampire without a servant standing between them. In the flood month of 2910 BCE, he went back. He knew it was a mistake. Nothing in the lanes had changed except the planks, which were new and hollow and rang under the foot, and when the chord came it came through the floor in the rhythm of a pulse, until his own began to keep time with it. The Heartbeat Step runs on beats. He missed the first by a hair, and the second by a hand, and the third was the vampire's. He died quickly at thirty-eight, in the lane, with the copper dagger on the planks beside him. The Slayerverse's slayers took the dagger back to Hormeni. Someone left the linen hood folded on the stall where he fell. The lamp itself was never found.