Shaa Arrutias

Shaa Arrutias, the Velvet Architect, was a marsh tracker left dying in 2889 BCE and made into a vampire hunter of the Winter Brood. He fought the Gilded Blade for four decades without either killing the other, sired fifteen childer across four thousand years, and is alive today.

"Stop talking," the vampire said, "and I will think about it." Shaa Arrutias has remembered that sentence for roughly four thousand nine hundred years, mostly because it was the last order he ever obeyed. He had been lying at the edge of a barley field with a spear wound through his thigh, the remains of a quarrel between two rival caravans in which nobody had won anything, and he had been talking for most of a morning to no one: about his debts, about the price of salt at Mumulaa, about the man who had speared him and whether his mother would have approved of the man's family. The stranger who stopped beside him had walked a long way along a trail of his blood and was not in a good temper. The stranger was Tiwaus Arsharuus, the Cold Choir. Shaa shut his mouth, and he has been fairly quiet since. He was born in 2932 BCE, in the first night of the war's long history, at Mumulaa, a caravan stop in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, and he made his living as a marsh tracker, finding lost animals and, sometimes, lost people in the reed country behind the stop. He was good at it because he was patient in a way that was nearly rude, and because he had a gift for sitting still. At forty-three he had a bad knee, a quarrelsome wife who had left him, and a debt to a salt-trader that he mentioned a great deal. In 2889 BCE, on the day of the field, he was turned. That was how the Vampireverse records it. He would have put it differently, and did not, being a poor judge of his own story. The Cold Choir was not a talkative sire. He answered questions with a nod, and sometimes not even that, and for eighteen years Shaa learned the Velvet Throne's ways by watching a man who did not explain them. Then Yaa Shayaipa, the Thorned Sentinel, put Tiwaus out with a flooded drain at Pitara in 2871 BCE. Shaa heard of it from a drover three days later. He walked to the town and stood in the yard for a long while, and he kept the flat river stone from the Arzizia stream that Tiwaus had once handed him without a word. He carries it still, or one he says is the same. The gift he learned from Tiwaus was no gift at all, or so he thought, until he used it. He called it Heartbeat Step, and it has never been described to the satisfaction of the Vampireverse's scholars. He listened to the person in front of him. When he had their pulse, he could place his feet in the pauses between the beats, and in those pauses the world moved at about half its pace. He crossed a room, he cut a throat, he withdrew, and the victim's heart, arriving at its next beat, was already finished. To a watcher it looked like a smear in the air, a pair of afterimages and a crack where the air had been displaced. The cost was a flat, shaken blankness afterward, a few moments in which he forgot where he stood and who was in the room, and it did not work in a loud place. He learned to hunt in quiet hours and quiet towns. The Winter Brood took him in for it, and as the Velvet Architect, the name the Brood gave him for the quiet houses he left behind, he made a kind of career of being the one member of that faction who preferred a conversation to a fight. He first met Latiipa Tikuili in 2880 BCE, in the pass of Huruna, at a herder's hut that he had been meant to empty. Latiipa, a mountain man called to the work of a vampire slayer four years earlier, was alone in the hut and had driven three black nails into the doorframe that afternoon. They were iron, which in those years was a thing that fell out of the sky and was worth a flock; Shaa smelled the metal from the path and did not like it. He could not cross. He said hello. The slayer said hello back, which was not what he expected, and the night was spent talking through a doorway about weather, sheep and the price of nails. At dawn Shaa left a long clean cut across the hut's door at about the height of a man's throat, to prove he could have, and Latiipa, who had not moved all night, grinned and said that was a thin stroke for a man who could not come in. It was the finest conversation Shaa had had in years. He knew at once that he would be seeing the man again. He did, for thirty-seven years. They met at the siege of Artupias in 2861 BCE, where the slayer held a breach for three nights and Shaa, who was meant to open it, took a spear in the shoulder from a man he rather liked. They met at a salt mine, a ford and, once, a wedding, at which both pretended to be friends of the groom. Shaa was never more than half sure what he wanted from the quarrel. It was not victory. A hunter who can step between heartbeats can kill a man who does not pay attention, and Latiipa always did, in the stubborn physical way of a man who had learned to stop at doors. When Shaa heard in 2843 BCE that the slayer had died in his bed at Titias, of nothing in particular, he went up to the shrine, and found the nails still in the lintel and the keepers sleeping through the evening. He stood on the step, did not cross, and left before it was light. Neither of them ever killed the other. It is the one thing in his long life that he regards as unfinished. After that, he made childer, with a certain absent-minded generosity that his own sire would have found baffling. Tituili Armuili in 2837 BCE came first, a tracker he found in the reeds, and Waruili Kuzius followed in 2710 BCE. Piipa Tishashaili was turned in 2336 BCE, Tuas Tutarzius in 2286 BCE, and Fadarad Kafafaes in 1925 BCE, on the Persian Plateau, in the one decade he spent away from Anatolia. Muipa Lamuus came in 1499 BCE, Shaa Shamua in 1112 BCE, and Kakala Kalstois in 1062 BCE on the Aegean coast. Sardrous Dekmiia, in the Carpathians in 469 BCE, was followed by Zizias Shatuus in 117 CE, a quiet Anatolian under the Romans. On the steppe Kodraov Svydraslav was made in 248 CE and in the Carpathians Zalrasa Zaldereb in 341 CE. Thoon Zenkalon was made in 613 CE, Zennikon Demzenos in 1183 CE, and Kokoslav Vervlaka in 1262 CE. Most of them were destroyed, and some vanished, and he mourned the ones he remembered. He has made no one since 1262 CE. Shaa Arrutias is alive today, as far as anyone on the Winter Brood's side will say, and keeps well out of the sight of the Slayerverse. He says very little. When a friend speaks of the weather he waits to hear the answer. He has a habit that nobody has explained to his satisfaction: before he steps through any doorway he runs his thumb along the lintel, feeling for nails. He has done it in Ephesus and in Prague and in a multi-storey stairwell in Leeds, in rooms where nobody has driven a nail for his sake. And now and then, when the lintel is clean, he smiles.