Rakheep Mesmentai

Rakheep Mesmentai, the Crowned Tyrant, was a palace assassin who was turned in a wine cellar in 2795 BCE and ran the Crimson Throne's night roads along the Nile. They spent twenty-four years being stopped at sunrise by one irritating human soldier, and never stopped admiring it.

The first place Rakheep Mesmentai worked was the palace at Nebutep, and the first thing they killed there was a steward, with a bad knife, in the grain stores, for a debt that was not even theirs. They had been born in 2823 BCE at Hormeni, a river village in the Nile Valley of Egypt, to a family that mended skiffs and owed money to everyone who sold reeds. The village was a place one left. At nineteen Rakheep took a place in the palace household as a runner and found that the work they had a talent for was not running. A palace in the years of The First Night had many people who wished other people unemployed. A person with a quiet hand, a good memory for the corridors and an ordinary face could be useful. They were an assassin by their middle twenties, and a good one: patient, tidy, interested in the cost of things. They kept the steward's circlet, a plain copper band, and wore it laced to their head with a leather cord, tightened three times before every job, the way another person checks a lamp wick. The debts caught up in 2795 BCE. A moneylender's men had been told where Rakheep slept, and they ran, at twenty-eight, down the back stairs of the palace and into the wine cellar, because it had a door that locked. It was the wrong cellar. Someone was already in it. Whoever it was is something that Rakheep never said and the Vampireverse's rolls never recorded, and when asked, in later centuries, they would reply that the introduction had been brief and that they had not stayed for the reference. They woke on the cellar floor with a taste in the mouth and an aversion to the lamp the moneylender's men carried, and the first thing they learned about the new body was that a cup of blood on the cellar flagstones, from a dropped jar of the cellar-master's, had risen in a thin red thread to meet their hand. The second place was Setem Landing, a barge-yard on the river where the Crimson Throne kept its night trade. It was a good place for a person of Rakheep's gift. The Red Tide, as the Throne's clerks called it, let them take blood that was already spilled and make a weapon of it: a thin whip, a sheet, a wave, depending on how much there was. It cost them. After a big use they were dizzy and unreasonably hungry, and needed to be near fresh blood to start it. They knew their weaknesses as exactly as their debts. The sun, of course. Silver, driven into them by a hand willing to be close. They arranged Setem Landing so that nobody would have to find out. The barges worked by night. The overseers wore the Throne's red cloth. Over the years Rakheep rose through the Crimson Throne until the river traders called them the Crowned Tyrant, partly for the copper circlet and partly for the manner in which they did not raise their voice, and Setem's accounts balanced to the grain. They wanted, above all, a house on the water with no neighbors. They never got it. The third place was Khenut. In 2739 BCE the Throne gave Rakheep a host of hired men and told them to take the walled river town of Khenut by the bend, where the grain was stored. They stood in the ditch below the river gate on the first night with the town's slaughtered goats spilled in the mud around them, and saw on the parapet a woman with an oxhide shield on her arm, humming. The soldier was not especially large. Rakheep lifted the blood in the ditch into a sheet as tall as a man, the best they had ever done, and broke it over the wall, and the woman took the shield in front of her face and was knocked down and got up. She had a stake. Rakheep felt it before they saw it: a silver cap on the end, driven into the thigh. She did not stop shouting. Her voice came in a rising bellow with a held beat, and the town's men, who should have been asleep, held their line behind her. At sunrise Rakheep had to go, and in the tent afterward counted the cost of it, which was a wound to the thigh that took three weeks to close. The woman, they learned, was Raet Tasetu, the Ninth Spear, a vampire slayer of the Vigil of Nile Valley, from the hill fort of Meshorsetu. They fought for twenty-four years. Rakheep did not try to stop it. In 2733 BCE the soldier came down the river with a levy and burned the barge-yards at Setem Landing, and Rakheep got a knife into her shoulder in the smoke, and lost a season's grain in the fire. They found it hard to be angry. She was tiring, stubborn and entirely reliable. She always held the wall until sunrise, and Rakheep had come to rely on this in the way a person relies on a bad neighbor. They called her the Spear, as though it were a name that suited. In 2720 BCE they stood opposite each other across the ditch at Khenut at dawn, thirteen years after the last time, she grey-headed and Rakheep not, and Rakheep stood for a long minute without moving, looking at what time had done to her, and then stepped back into the tent. Neither of them ever killed the other. Raet died in 2715 BCE, of a fever, in her hill fort, and Rakheep had it from a bargeman. They put off sending any message. Then they sent a jar of river barley to the fort with no seal on it and no explanation, which the garrison decided to keep and not to eat. The Throne used Rakheep for another two and a half centuries and began, in the end, to find them too old to enjoy. In 2449 BCE, at an estate upriver called Iunemmet, a rival coven turned on its own members in a purge, and Rakheep Mesmentai was among the destroyed. They had been a vampire for 346 years and had lived 374. Among the things found in their rooms was the copper circlet, laced shut. The cord was new.