Raseti Ratara

Raseti Ratara, The Pale Thorn, was a temple dancer from Egypt's Nile Valley who became an Exo-Human vampire slayer at eighteen in 2327 BCE, answered to no faction, and died at twenty-five on the wall of Raamunu. Her great enemy, Niesh Bhasudeini, outlived her by two and a half centuries.

On the wall of Raamunu in 2320 BCE, in the last week of her life, Raseti Ratara was spitting date stones over the parapet in a line. This was a habit she had kept since childhood, one stone for every ten paces of wall she had walked, and by the end of the siege the line of them ran from the water gate to the corner tower. A sling stone had already taken her below the ribs. She did not know it was a death wound; the man who bound it did not say. For three days she sat against the wall with her reed-shafted bow across her knees and called targets to the boys who still had arrows. She was twenty-five. She had been a vampire slayer for seven years. What she did not know, and never would, was that the one enemy she had wanted most to see destroyed had been upriver and leaving, and had not even heard the siege had begun. Raseti Ratara was born in 2345 BCE at Raseti, a mountain shrine in the limestone cliffs of the Nile Valley in what is now Egypt, and the place gave her its name, as places did then. The shrine kept dancers for its festivals, and she was one of them, and her father cut reed pens for the scribes on the side. As a child she was sickly, and at nine or ten she had a fever that took three weeks to leave. When it broke, the world looked different to her. In certain faces the air seemed to smear, as it does over a hot hearth, a shimmer that sat close to the skin and did not move with the wind. She learned not to mention it. The elders called it the Wrongness Sight when she finally did, in the unaffected tone of men naming a mild rash, and told her to keep her eyes on the floor. She did, for years. In The First Night a dancer's training was mostly the study of how a room is moved, and she was good at it. The shrine had a name for such people, in the flat Nile idiom, which was charmers: a dancer who could take a crowd of tired pilgrims and make them laugh, weep or empty their purses at the right moment. She put it to a use the shrine had not planned. At eighteen she was sent downriver with the festival troupe to the port of Raamunu, and she spent her first evening there in a beer house near the quay, where she saw a man at the back table whose face was smeared like heat. She did not decide to do it. A table leg had come loose, and she took it up, and the man looked at her with mild curiosity just before she broke his skull with it. This was 2327 BCE. The bow was out of reach in her pack. She was left standing in a beer house with a piece of furniture in both hands and the room staring at her, and she understood, very clearly, that she had done something that could not be undone. The shrine elders, when they heard, called it a sign. She had not asked for a sign. She was not a member of any Vigil or any other body, and when they offered to take her in she answered that she would take the work but not the oath. She answered to no one, then or after. The Slayerverse remembers her as The Pale Thorn, pale from the limestone dust of her cliffs and a thorn to anyone who crossed her. There was no teacher either. She went where the smear went. The second thing she noticed that night was the woman in the doorway. She was a stout, patient figure in a good traveling coat, standing quite still with a look of mild professional interest, and the air around her was a blur from head to foot. This was Niesh Bhasudeini, though Raseti would not learn the name for a season. The woman had come a long way. She had traveled from the Indus plain by reed ship down the Gulf coast, round the headlands of Arabia, up the Red Sea in short hops, and then across the dry valleys by donkey caravan to the Nile, a journey of most of a year. Raseti knew nothing of this. She knew that the woman looked at her, and then the room was full of the woman. A dozen of her, standing shoulder to shoulder in the doorway, every one smeared with the same wrongness. Raseti dropped the table leg, took up the bow, and put an arrow through the third from the left. It went into the doorpost. The real one had already gone, down the quay to a boat. That was the first clash, and it taught Raseti the thing she would spend the next seven years on: that her sight was not a cure for the trick but a way to be fooled more completely. The copies carried the smear too. Eventually she learned to watch the feet instead. The real one raised dust. Over the years she hunted five vampire lords out of the cities of the Nile Valley, working through her gift and her charm: a joke at the right quay, a dance at the right festival, a kind word to the right ferryman. She spat date stones when she was thinking and counted them when she was angry. She slept badly. She treated her eyes with cold compresses of river water and a bitter paste of acacia, and woke with the headache that came from looking at a crowd. She met the woman again, in the third year, at a limestone quarry above Hatnebu, and again nearly had her, and again watched a dozen identical women walk past her into the dark. She came to know the pattern of the other's travel better than she knew her own: a courier, an envoy, an agent of a thing called the Winter Brood who wanted to open the river. She did not know what the Brood wanted. She knew that every time she closed a door on it, the other woman went around. They never fought to a finish. By the autumn of the seventh year the work had slowed. A rival river city had decided to take Raamunu, and Raseti, who had fought in its streets and loved its beer, went back to the wall. She was on it for eleven days. She called the targets, she shot the targets, she spat her stones. The sling stone came on the ninth day, in the dusk, from the dark below. When the boys who followed her took the bow from her knees at the end, they found it smelled faintly of acacia, and that the grip was worn pale where her left thumb had been. They did not know what to do with the line of date stones along the parapet. They left them there for the rain.