Ruinna Pachaqui

Ruinna Pachaqui, the Bright Reaper, was a young vampire slayer of the Vigil of Andes who learned to cross high country without leaving a mark. In four years she followed the Whispering Hunger across three places, and in 831 BCE the two of them killed each other.

Ruinna Pachaqui worked in three places, and the order matters, because each one taught her something the last had not. The first was her home, the walled city-state of Mamaqui in the Andes of what is now Peru, which taught her how to be quiet. The second was a string of springs and wells to the south, which taught her to count. The third was a stretch of terraced hills above a town called Mataqui, which taught her what it cost. She lived twenty-three years in all, and for four of them she was a vampire slayer, in the age that came to be called The Classical Dark. Mamaqui first. She was born there in 854 BCE, in a city that sat on a shoulder of the mountains with its back to a cliff and its walls of fitted stone facing the only road. The temple kept hunters, and her father was one, and she went up the slopes with him from the time she could carry a bundle. They hunted vicuña for the feast days. A vicuña can hear a heel on gravel from a long way off, so she learned to walk on stone and not on soil, to put her weight down slowly, to wrap her feet in wool and leave the grass standing as she found it. She was good at it before she knew it was a craft. Her father called it a gift, and she disagreed. She said it was only a matter of caring more about where your feet had been than where they were going. In 835 BCE the war reached the walls. A league of highland towns laid siege to Mamaqui, and for the first month the defenders thought it an ordinary siege, the kind that ends in bargaining. Then sentries began to turn up at dawn emptied of blood, with no mark on them but two small cuts. Ruinna was nineteen. She left the walls at night by a goat path, as quiet as she had learned to be, and she crawled round the besiegers' camp until she found the one tent where the lamps never went out. A woman physician worked there, tending the league's wounded, who moved without hurry and never seemed to sleep. The woman was Yucu Tasara, the Whispering Hunger. Ruinna saw the glint of her eyes in the lamplight, saw the guards at the flap look past her as if the place had no door, and drove an olive-wood stake, a rarity that had come up from the coast and cost her father two fleeces, at the physician's back. It went through her flank and missed the heart. Yucu broke her wrist with one hand and let her go, with a look that Ruinna remembered afterward as being almost respectful. A courier from the Vigil of Andes reached her three days later with a pot of paste and a drawing of the slayer's mark. He left before dark, and the Slayerverse never explained itself further. No one ever taught her anything else, and she worked out the rest alone. The second place was the springs. After the siege broke, in the cold months, she walked a circuit of eleven towns and asked a single question in each, which was whether anyone had been sick in the week before the dead were found. They had. In every town, a bitter-tasting root had gone into the water, so that the people sick with a flux did not question the people who died of something else. She followed the pattern for two years. It was slow work, and she hated it, because there was nothing to chase. She learned to keep a cord of knots in her belt, one cord for each town, and she tied a knot for every well and spring and every death, until the cords made a sort of map. When she laid them out on the floor of a goatherd's house, she saw that every one led to the hills above Mataqui. She told no one, because she did not trust anyone near enough to tell. She also made something close to a companion, an old pack-llama named Sullu who belonged to nobody and who followed her from town to town, spitting at strangers. The llama turned out to be useful. Animals were not fooled by the Velvet Veil, whatever the people were, and Sullu would flatten her ears and refuse a doorway when the guards at it were looking right through her. Ruinna learned to read her. It saved her life twice and it was the closest thing she had to a method. The third place was Mataqui. The hills above it were terraced for potatoes, with long drying houses on the upper rows where the harvest lay frozen and thawed for weeks, and for nine years the area had been a place people did not go after dark. The Whispering Hunger's coven worked there, under the banner of the Velvet Line, and it had a long habit of it. In 831 BCE, Ruinna went up the terraces on a night with a thin moon, wearing her wool-wrapped feet, with the stake in her belt and Sullu left tied at the lower wall. She used the Trackless Stalk for the whole climb. The frost kept no print of her. Four years of slaying had taught her to look at the ground and listen, never to meet an eye, and when the Velvet Veil rolled down over the drying house like the warmth of a fire, she kept her gaze on the frozen potatoes and let the warmth wash past her. Yucu was waiting at the far end, grinding something in a green stone bowl. She did not look surprised. The Bright Reaper, as the hill people called Ruinna by then, had the stake out before the veil had finished settling, and Yucu came at her faster than a woman of her size should have been able to. She hit Ruinna in the head with the pestle, once, and Ruinna went down on her knees on the frozen floor and put the heel of her marked hand against Yucu's throat. The paste in the mark burned like a hot stone. Yucu screamed once. The stake was already in her. Ruinna Pachaqui and the physician were found the next day by a boy bringing potatoes up the hill, lying side by side as if they had been laid out. Ruinna was twenty-three. Sullu had slipped her tether in the night and walked back down to Mamaqui by herself, three days of mountain road, and was found standing at the city gate in the morning with her ears up. Nobody could make her leave. They fed her barley, and the old woman who kept the gate said later that the animal waited for a week, looking up the road, before she gave in and went to graze.