Setu Amunsetra

Setu Amunsetra, the Eternal Sovereign, was a Nile Valley mercenary turned vampire who lasted 438 years on the strength of one trick: he could not be moved. The Vampireverse remembers him as a poor planner and a superb doorstop, undone at last by a Levantine spy.

Setu Amunsetra squandered almost everything a long life is supposed to reward. Money went first. A man who lives for four centuries ought to end up rich, and Setu ended up with a copper armband, a debt to a grain-factor in a city that had since been flattened, and a standing contract he had never read. He was bad at remembering faces unless they had hit him. He was bad at lying, which is a serious handicap for a vampire, and bad at patience, which is a worse one. He disliked plans and said so. When the Obsidian House first handed him a map and a list of names he asked whether the names could be done in any order and the answer, he took, was yes. What he was good at took up less room on the page, though it was enough to carry him through The First Night. He could stand. He was born in 3025 BCE in Khemesra, a walled city-state on the Nile in what is now Egypt, the son of a boat caulker, and by his teens he was working as a mercenary, hiring out as a spear and shield to the donkey caravans that crossed the western desert with natron, salt and copper ore. The work paid in barley and bad beer. His one talent then was that bandits found him tiresome. He would plant his feet at a narrow place in a trail and the donkeys would pass behind him while the raiders thought about it. People said afterward that you could have tied a rope to him and pulled a barge. He was turned in 3000 BCE, at twenty-five, in the dry season, on the bank of a canal outside Khemesra, where his own company had left him with a spear wound after a quarrel about a wage. He was found, as the saying goes in Nile Valley, by someone who did not want to be named. Setu never named them either. In four hundred years he mentioned his maker exactly once, to a drunk scribe, and what he said was that the man had been in a hurry and had left the gate open. No sire is recorded in any House tally, and the Vampireverse has long since stopped asking. What Setu received from the turning was a body that took blows rather than avoiding them. The skin on his forearms and back went thick and pale-grey, a hide as tough as a hippopotamus's, and a blade laid across it left a white line and no cut. He called it Unbowed, and it was exactly the gift for a man who disliked plans: he could walk into a fight with no scheme and let the fight tire itself. It cost him heat. He was always hot, always parched, and could not stand a roofed room with no air in it. For four hundred and thirty-eight years he held a place in the Obsidian House that nobody else wanted. He did not run its councils. He stood in front of the people who did. Between about 2800 BCE and 2600 BCE he fed on three noble houses in the Nile Valley without leaving a witness alive, and he did it by the simplest method available, which was to wait in a hallway until everyone had left a room. He made no fledglings. The House offered, more than once, and he said he preferred the company he already had. His real hobby was counting. He tallied the masts on any river he sailed, the loaves on any table, the exits in any room, and he never said why. The House sold his services in 2565 BCE. Cedar from the Levant was the great luxury of the Nile cities, and the rafts that brought it down the coast needed a guard, and a House that dealt in cedar liked to have its own on the water. He went north in a reed boat with eight rowers who were afraid of him and arrived at a ferry station on a river he had not seen before. Something was wrong with the light in the hall. That was the first thing he noticed: a thin woman had walked in, a courier by her bag, and there was a flatness in the way she looked at him, as if she were reading from a tablet. He told her to go home. He remembered the table leg because it hurt, which was rare. She was Elashim Sidrahaon, the Crimson Thorn, and she was the first thing in his long life that could not be bribed, outwaited or ignored. A vampire slayer, they called her, and he had heard the word before without caring. The three years that followed were the only time he ever had to think. She seemed to know what he meant before he said it. When he lied about where he had been, she corrected the detail. When he took the long way round a village, she was already there with salt across the threshold, laid so thin it looked like dust. She followed him down the coast road, tired and cold, with an olive-wood stake and nothing else that frightened him, and he found, to his discomfort, that he admired her. She never begged and she never ran. She kept humming the same four bars, flat, as she walked. In the third year he decided he would kill her at a time of his choosing and stopped sleeping in rooms with only one door. It came in 2562 BCE in a cedar press-house at Baashon, a long low shed at the foot of the hills that smelled of resin and old rope. The place was empty and the lamp was lit and the doors, one after another, were salted. He walked in through the only open one because walking in was what he did. He heard her breathe above him. He broke her ribs against a press beam and closed his hand on hers and felt two fingers go, and he thought, with a kind of surprise, that he was winning. Then the stake went in under the breastbone, and it was not wood he felt but a cold bright point of silver, which he had never in four centuries met on purpose. He had been four hundred and sixty-three years old. His last coherent thought, if it was one, was that he should have counted the beams. The Obsidian House sent no one to ask what had become of Setu Amunsetra, the Eternal Sovereign, as its own scribes had styled him for the last four centuries of The First Night's long run. A tally in the archive at Khemesra, years later, lists his name against an unpaid cedar fee and the word "pending," and the entry was never struck out.