Every ninth day Senet Kamenep scours his own cups with river sand and a twist of reed. He has done so for longer than any town in Egypt has had a name, because a servant would have to be taught to forget what the cups had held, and he finds he likes the work. The cups are plain clay, thick-walled, bought from a potter in the delta who thinks they are for wine. A tray of dates sits on the table beside them for the use of guests, who do not come. He sets it out afresh every week anyway. It is an old courtesy and nobody has ever told him to stop.
He was born in 3040 BCE, in the early years of The First Night, at Mentataep, a marsh village in the Nile Valley where the houses were built on reed rafts and the children learned to swim before they walked. His father cut papyrus and his mother mended nets, and he sang in the chorus at the little shrine on the one dry hummock, because he had a voice that people stopped to hear. Everyone said so, and the river later gave him the name The Sable Choir for it. It was the one useful thing about him. He wanted to be listened to, in the wide sense: to have a room go quiet when he drew breath. At thirty-nine he was the lead voice of the shrine and the best-liked man in a village of four hundred, which he was inclined to count as a failure.
The change came in 3000 BCE, at forty, on the last night of a harvest feast, when he went to his bed full of beer and woke at some hour before dawn to find a guest in the room whom no one else had seen arrive. He was taken from the bed. What was done to him is a matter on which Senet Kamenep has said nothing in five thousand years; the maker is unknown, and any story about who it was is somebody's invention. He woke changed, long-lived and hungry for blood, and found that the voice he had always had was now a different instrument. The Pale Table, which was then the only company of its kind on the river, took him in as a charmer and put him to work.
The gift is called Thrall Chord, and it is physical and plain and takes training. He sings a chord, low and sweet and pitched in the chest, and the people who hear it lose the will to be elsewhere. The chord entrains the listener's pulse, and a drum keeping the same beat can hold the effect for a week after the singing has stopped. Wax in the ears helps against it; the deaf are immune; a stone floor carries it badly and a wooden one carries it well. It costs him a sore throat and a day of silence afterward, and it does not work on anyone whose heart he cannot match. He is also strong and hard to wound, which he regards as a luxury. His weaknesses are what the Vigil learned the slow way: a silver-tipped weapon, or hawthorn or ash wood through the heart. Every vampire slayer who worked this out the hard way did not live long afterward.
He ran the night market at Ankhrensetep for eighty years from a back room behind the sellers of dyed linen. It was a good market. He held guards, magistrates and the occasional lover by the chord and a drummer, never for long and never in great numbers, and he fed from them in the manner of a landlord taking a little of each tenant's crop. He thought of it as management, and the Vampireverse, which has never been short of landlords, called it a model. In 2926 BCE his people sent a donkey train out of Hormeni into the marsh, nine drivers and forty animals, for supply, and four drivers drowned in a way he had not intended. He did not send to find out why the last man got out.
In 2920 BCE the man himself came to the market. Rai Itrenet walked in with a hooded lamp and wax in both ears, to find a magistrate's agent standing slack among the stalls, and Senet came out from behind the linen to sing and found that the wax was not enough. The man stood in the chord for as long as a count of forty. Then he crossed the lane in a single held breath and drew a copper dagger across Senet's palm. The scrape closed before he had finished looking at it. Senet smiled, which was his mistake, because Rai Itrenet was gone before the smile had properly arrived. Nobody had ever walked out of the market. He remembered thinking that this was a serious person.
For ten years the argument went on. Rai pulled thirty porters from the quarry gangs at Sehtep in 2917 BCE by killing the drummer who kept them held, and Senet, who had been fond of the drummer, took longer to forgive that than the porters. He changed his drummers. He laid new floors. He learned to hate the lamp, a plain clay one under a linen hood that the man set down at every stall like a challenge. Rai never got close, and he never stopped coming. Senet, who was long-lived and bored, found himself looking for the light at the end of the lane. He had never been respected by an enemy before. It felt like being owed money.
He built the last floor in the dry months of 2910 BCE: hollow, resonant, thin boards laid over empty jars, a sounding box that rang to the foot. In the flood month the man walked into it. The chord came up through the planks in the rhythm of a pulse, and Rai Itrenet, whose gift ran on the space between two heartbeats, found his own beat taken from him one count at a time. It was over in the width of a hand. Senet did it himself, quickly, and sat beside the body for a while. He sent the copper dagger to the Vigil at Hormeni with a porter who was not told what it was. He folded the linen hood on the stall. The lamp he kept.
The market is long gone. He made five others over the centuries and regards that as restraint: Amunra Menmenu in 2676 BCE, Meni Rameset in 2490 BCE, Amunraep Tahoret in 1418 BCE, Eriu Toyayae in 283 BCE, who went south to the Horn of Africa, and Khaled Fawzy in 1828 CE. He is not sentimental about any of them. The lamp stands on the shelf above the cups, and once a year he trims its wick, though he has never lit it, and has never quite decided why.
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