Sardama Sarzua

Sardama Sarzua, the Eternal Duelist, was a grain merchant from a mountain shrine who became the Obsidian Choir's best broker in Mesopotamia. A small blue cylinder seal made his contracts law until a thief took it in 1639 BCE. A slayer ended him at Enzuun the next year.

The seal was the length of a man's thumb and the width of a finger, cut from dark blue stone with gold flecks, and pierced end to end for a cord. Rolled across wet clay, it left a scene in relief: two small figures with spears, facing each other across a gap, one slightly taller than the other. Sardama Sarzua had owned it for more than fifty years, and he had bitten the top edge of it so often, when thinking, that there was a notch the size of a lentil where the stone had given way. He was born in 1711 BCE at Enmeshum, a mountain shrine in the hill country of Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, where his family kept the shrine's stores and traded the surplus down to the river towns. As a young man he found he had a head for grain: how much a field would give, who would pay for it, how to make two strangers sign the same tablet. He had the seal cut at twenty with the first real profit he made. He chose the design himself, two spearmen facing each other, because he said every deal was a contest and the only question was who knew it. He was a merchant for thirteen years before he was anything else. In 1678 BCE, at thirty-three, he was turned. In the Bronze Vigil's middle years the Obsidian Choir had a problem that grain solved: its members fed on the noble houses of the river country and needed someone to sell them as customers, to arrange who was owed what and who would be silent. Sardama was a man whose seal was trusted in a dozen towns. They chose him. No maker was ever recorded, and he never said, and the Choir's elders went quiet when the matter was raised in his hearing. He kept the seal. Some accounts say it was the first thing he reached for after he woke and the second thing he reached for was a cup. The war gave him a title. The Vampireverse had its own jokes about brokers, and the one told about him was that he had never lost an argument. Sardama began to challenge other brokers to contests of terms, a day or a night of bargaining over a single clause until one side gave way, and the stakes were houses and territory. He won so many that the other brokers began to call him the Eternal Duelist, and the Choir let it stick. Over the next forty years he fed on ten noble houses across Mesopotamia and never left a witness, not through force but through contract: each house had signed something, in advance, that bound its servants to silence. The body helped. The trait the Choir called Wing Storm let him come apart. From the shoulders down, his body broke into a dense mass of small winged forms, each about the size of a palm, and reassembled wherever he chose within a room's length. The trick was in the reassembly, which took a breath and a half and left him cold, dizzy and naked, since clothes did not travel. He kept spare cloaks at the places he worked. His second gift was a steady low hum in the chest that, held under direct eye contact for a count of about ten, made a person agree to nearly anything within reason. It drained him badly. He needed a day of rest after using it twice. He knew what could kill him, as all of them did, because the knowledge had been paid for in funerals: silver at the tip of a blade or arrow, and a slayer's mark laid on bare skin, a paste of ash and resin that burned. He did not fear those things in the abstract. What he feared in the autumn of 1639 BCE was the loss of a thumb-length of blue stone. It was taken from his strongroom at Enzuun, above his counting-house on the canal, by a marsh girl he had never seen, who would become the vampire slayer Urkium Meshluir, as the Choir's informants told him by the end of the week. He came down the stairs at the noise and found his clerk, a vampire of the Choir who had kept his books for nearly forty years, dead at his own table with a broken table leg beside him, and a girl on the roof hatch with the seal in her fist. He broke into the swarm and went after her across the canal roofs. At the edge of the town, where the reeds start, she went into the water and the water lit up. A blue arc went through his flock in a line and a good part of it fell, burning, into the shallows. He came back together on the bank, very cold and very angry, and with a patch of scar on his back that never closed. His contracts began to fail within the month, since a seal that sells itself to a thief is a seal that anyone can say was lost. Sardama Sarzua wanted the seal back more than he wanted her dead, though he would have taken both. He told himself that over the winter. When word came in 1638 BCE that she would sell it to him at an abandoned grain-house at Enzuun at dusk, he did not take escorts, because he was the Eternal Duelist and a duel was something you attended. She was waiting on the threshold with a strung bow and one palm held out of sight. He broke apart as he stepped through the door, and she let loose the charge down the line of him, and every part of him found itself dragged back into one shape in front of her. A hand with ash and resin on the palm closed on his neck. The arrow tipped with silver went in a moment later. He was seventy-three. His last expression, according to the only witness, was of a man who has found a flaw in the terms. The seal did not go to the Choir. It hung from a cord around the neck of a woman who lived on a reed mound at Galgalbaa until she died in 1612 BCE, and afterward the marsh women kept it. On feast days a child was allowed to roll it across wet clay, and the small spearmen came out of the stone, facing each other, with a tiny notch bitten out of the margin above them.