Ramenu Kasetu

Ramenu Kasetu, the Thorned Lantern, was a levy soldier of Setkhetau who survived a bite in 1415 BCE and became an Exo-Human vampire slayer of the Nile Valley. She froze rivers and spears for thirty-three years, and the Sleepless Regent never quite caught her.

Setkhetau smelled of hot barley bread and dung smoke and lamp oil, in that order, from the baking street at the foot of the east wall where Ramenu Kasetu was born in 1448 BCE. Her father sold oil by the measure and her mother minded the ovens of the neighbours who could not mind their own, and the children of the street spent the winter mornings with their backs against the beehive-shaped clay, warm through. It was a smell she would have known in her sleep. She never ate anything cold if she could help it, not bread, not beer, not a handful of dates, and in the heat of Egypt this made her a figure of fun among the other spear-bearers. She did not mind. A person who has once been cold in a way that mattered is entitled to a rule. Setkhetau was a walled city-state on the Nile Valley floodplain in the age called the Bronze Vigil, a mud-brick town with a granary, a temple and a river tax that kept a levy of three hundred, and Ramenu spent her working youth in that levy as a spear-bearer. By her thirties she was the Soldier of her section: dry, steady, the one who got the men home along the embankment road with the right number of heads. Her want, as she would have put it, was small. She wished to hold the walls of Setkhetau with the granary seals unbroken for one more flood, and then another, and to be an old woman in the baking street. In 1415 BCE, aged thirty-three, she was bitten, and she became a vampire slayer without having been turned. Her patrol had found five men on the river embankment drained to the colour of candle wax, and in the dark, while she knelt over the last, something took her by the neck from behind. She never saw its face. She woke in the reeds at dawn with a hole in her throat that had stopped bleeding and a clay water jar beside her that had frozen solid in the heat. She was not turned. Nobody could say why, and the Vigil of Nile Valley, who came to her door some weeks later, did not pretend to know. What she had instead was a gift of the body that she named, with a soldier's economy, Glass Vigil: a way of pulling the heat out of water, a door, a spear shaft, a man's coat, until what was left went white and rigid and bright. She had no teacher for it. She had no mentor in the Vigil either, and set about learning the thing the way she had learned the spear, by doing it badly in private. The cost was heat, and it had to go somewhere, so it went into her. After a long freeze her palms blistered as though she had gripped a pot from the fire, her skin ran with fever, and for a day afterward her teeth knocked together in a noon that was hot enough to bake bread on a stone. A skin of ice on a canal in the afternoon sun took her a day to recover from. She learned to use it as sparingly as a soldier uses arrows. She carried a stake of olive wood wrapped in oiled linen, because the Vigil had learned over a long time that wood through the heart finished what ice only slowed, and she carried a clay lantern ringed with acacia thorns, because she walked at night. It threw a broken star of light that jumped across a wall. The Sable Assembly's people called her the Thorned Lantern, and later she knew why. She met the one who wore the thing out in 1412 BCE, at the night market that ran under the corn-measurers' quay at Mensenep. For three years she had followed the dead along the river. Bodies kept turning up near barges that belonged, on paper, to a perfectly ordinary grain broker. The broker, when she found her, stood at a tithe-table in a pool of lamp-light, a woman in her middle thirties with a patient face, in the middle of closing a sale. Ramenu walked in with the lantern held low. The woman looked up, and held her eyes for a three-count, and Ramenu tasted silver at the back of her tongue, a sensation like a copper bead laid on it, and felt something slip a loop around her ribs. Then the lantern swung, and the light broke across the woman's face, and the loop came loose. She would learn that Amunraep Tahoret, the Sleepless Regent, needed a steady eye on her prey, and that a thorn-broken flicker was as good as a hand over the face. What followed was brief and loud. Ramenu put her palm to the water of the market basin and drew, and the basin skinned over with glass in the space of a breath, the barges locked in it, five of the Regent's held guards sliding on their knees across it toward their mistress. Amunraep went down a temple stair with her sleeve on fire. Ramenu got a hand on the table and a stake as far as the cellar door, and no further. Neither was killed. She stood in the ice with her palms burning and found that the entire market was applauding, because the market had not enjoyed its tithes either. The Regent tried once more, in 1407 BCE, at Setkhetau itself, and that was worse. She turned a levy captain Ramenu had known for twenty years and walked him up the east wall at the head of thirty spears. Ramenu would not hurt them. She stood on the wall with her bleeding hands flat to the stone and froze the hafts of thirty spears to the ground in a single line, so that thirty men stood pinned to their own weapons, shivering, in the sun, until the Regent's gaze lost interest and left. Over the next years she broke eleven of the Sable Assembly's households along the valley, one at a time, by that sort of arithmetic. She was never close again. News of the end came by a boatman in 1401 BCE: the Regent had been taken upriver in her own barge, bound, by her own Assembly, and had not come back. Ramenu was told that the Assembly's treasurers had counted what she had cost them. She did not rejoice. She thought for some time about a woman who held a three-count and tasted of silver, and lit the lantern that night and left it burning until the oil ran out. Ramenu Kasetu lived nineteen more years, and the Slayerverse counts those among the quietest of the Nile Valley frontier. She was sixty-six when the flood of 1382 BCE broke the dike above Setkhetau at night, and she held the sluice shut with a wall of ice for as long as it took to get the baking street out. The fever came afterward, the way it always had. She died three days later in the house she was born in. A neighbour put a warm loaf in her hands, and she held it on her chest until it was cold.