Renep Khemesi

Renep Khemesi, the Sleepless Sovereign, was a vampire of the Nile Valley who answered to no one, an assault trooper turned in 1304 BCE who ruled a river town with dread. Renep fought the slayer Menkara Itkai to a standoff, outlived him by four centuries, and was destroyed upriver in 864 BCE.

On the evening they died, Renep Khemesi carried a linen headcloth long enough to cover to the waist, folded in four. They carried a copper armlet stamped with the wall-mark of the city-state of Hormenseni, a leather pouch holding seven dried dates, three small lumps of silver weighed out for passage, and a hand's length of split acacia timber, planed square at one end and gone black with handling. They carried no weapon. The scribe of the river post below the Second Cataract, who wrote the list afterward on a clay docket, remarked that this was strange in a traveler and set it down with the other strange things. The spears that ended the matter belonged to the garrison. They had silver heads, bought the previous dry season at a price the commander still complained about, on the advice of a rider who had come down the river with a warning and not stayed to see it proved. The year was 864 BCE. Renep was four hundred and seventy-six that year, a figure the river post could not have reached and would not have believed. The pouch had held eight dates that morning. One had gone to the ferryman, as one had gone to every ferryman for centuries, because Renep Khemesi had never in all that time crossed water without paying the man who poled it. They had been born in 1340 BCE in Hormenseni, a walled city-state in the Nile Valley, in Egypt, to a family that supplied the walls with rope. Renep grew into the work that walls produced, which was storming them: a Stormer, one of the wall-troops sent up the ladders first and paid in grain. The habit that followed from it was a small one. Renep counted rungs aloud, every ladder, every stair, under the breath, and went on doing it for four hundred years after the last ladder that mattered. The want that followed from it was larger and had little to do with the work. Renep wanted to be a person whom no one could close a door on. In 1304 BCE, at thirty-six, they were left at the foot of a wall that had not fallen, on a night when their own captain called the retreat and forgot to count the dead. Meni Rameset, the Ashen Shroud, found them there before the carrion birds did. She made them what she was. By the time Renep could stand, they had understood two things: that she was patient, and that she was not going to stop being patient. They were gone within the season. The Vampireverse has a good deal to say about what a maker is owed, and Renep paid none of it. They joined no coven and wore no name but their own, and for the length of their life they answered to no one. Meni Rameset, who is still alive today, never sent for them, and nobody has ever found out whether she minded. In the long years of The Bronze Vigil the gift was what people remembered. It came with the change, or arrived soon after it. Renep could feel what others felt, which is a poor description of the trait, and could throw it back at them doubled. The Vigil called the output Threshold Terror, because it worked best in a doorway, where people were already deciding whether to enter. A man standing on Renep's sill felt his own fear arrive from outside himself, large and sourceless, and generally he did not take the next step. It cost Renep as much as it cost the man. What they threw they also felt, which is the reason for the alias, the Sleepless Sovereign: they had not slept properly since the night at the wall. A second sense, a hunter's sense, told them the heartbeat and breath of anyone within a room. The known ways to end them were silver-tipped weapons and iron nails driven into a threshold, which kept them in or out of a house the way a barred gate keeps a goat. For about a hundred and forty years they held the ferry house at Menmesep, a river town in the Nile Valley, where the quay and the boatmen's bargains made the place a short step from every kind of commerce. Nobody ruled the ferry house. The Sovereign simply sat at the doorway on certain nights and the town learned to cross the road. It was a tidy arrangement. It was lonely, but it was tidy. In 1280 BCE a vampire slayer walked in, and he was a boy. He was, Renep thought, about twenty, which was not young for a slayer in that period but was young for the other thing he had: a mind that felt from the outside like a hand on a shoulder. This was Menkara Itkai, called the Gilded Bell, with an older man behind him driving iron into the sill. Renep threw the full weight of the doorway at him and watched his knees go. Then the hand reached in, and Renep felt something they had not felt in a long time, which was that somebody was on the other end. He pushed through the fear a picture of a river dike at dawn, with water laid along it like a cloth, and it was so plainly not a threat that Renep forgot to be afraid of it. They stood. They looked at each other across the nails until the sky began to thin. Then Renep went down the water stairs into a covered barge and out into the current, because it was the only door left. Three more times in the following three years they met. The boy came for them each time, and each time he first measured the doorframe with a knotted cord, with the vampire watching, and wrote nothing down. Renep had been hunted by angry people. This one was hunting in the same way a man tests a wall. It was disconcerting, and Renep found that they had begun to wait for the cord. In 1277 BCE the river took him at the Menmesep sluice, and Renep was a mile away, and by the next evening they were at the breach. They stood on the dike in the dark. The gate lay broken in the mud, acacia and rawhide. Renep took a hand's length of the timber, planed on one end, and could not have said why. Nobody had ever beaten them in a doorway before. Nobody, now, would have the chance. They stayed at Menmesep until the quay was nailed shut by the town, and then they went south, ferry after ferry, paying each man in dates. The Slayerverse had them marked as a threat that nobody had destroyed, and for centuries it stayed that way. The scribe at the river post, listing the dead traveler's property, counted the acacia stick last. One stick, he wrote, planed at one end. A boy from the post put it on the cookfire that night.