Shaardius Rarabaush

Shaardius Rarabaush, the Storm Warden, was a marsh-village levy soldier of the Persian Plateau who became a vampire slayer in 2139 BCE. His grip could crack a mountain ledge, and in 2125 BCE the Crowned Tide of Ramiares, a woman who never hurried, outwaited him.

The stake went in with a sound like a boot in mud, and the woman looked down at it. It was a night in 2132 BCE at the market of Ramiares, under torches, with the stalls of the dye-sellers and bead-sellers still open and a crowd already beginning to drift away from the trouble. Shaardius Rarabaush had driven the olive-wood stake into her chest with both hands and his full weight behind it. She said, in a pleasant voice, "That is the wrong wood." Then she took hold of the shaft and drew it out, and the wound closed behind it like water closing over a thrown stone. He remembered the fact that she had not hurried. He remembered it for the rest of his life, which was seven years. He was born in 2164 BCE at Bamiad, a marsh village in the Persian Plateau, in what is now Iran, to a family who cut reeds and dried fish. It was a place of mud, mosquitoes and boats. He grew up poling a flat skiff through the channels, learning the habits of water the way other boys learned a trade, and he had a plot of reed-ground in mind from the age of twelve, a particular bend of the marsh where the cutting was thick and the current slow. He never got it. The lord of the valley took every third son into the levy, and at sixteen he stood in a line with a spear, and in time he stood in a longer one. He was a spear-bearer, a soldier of the humblest sort, who marched when he was told and ate when there was food. He kept a pinch of marsh mud in his belt pouch and touched it before any fight. The calling came to him in 2139 BCE, when he was twenty-five, on a march through the hills. He had a dream, and he told nobody about it for years: a figure made of dawn-light, standing at a bend in a dry stream, who did not speak and did not need to. He deserted that night. It was not a decision he understood, and he walked uphill until midday and found an unmarked shrine, a ring of stones and a stone basin half full of rain. He had no teacher, no order to apply to, and no one to ask. The Bronze Vigil was well under way across the plateau by then, and a number of people were fighting the enemy in their own fashion; he did not seek them out. He was a vampire slayer of the Slayerverse who answered to no one, and he went on that way for the fourteen years that were left to him, a gruff figure the villages learned to call the Storm Warden, since he arrived with the weather and left before it cleared. He was an Exo-Human, which meant a difference in the body, not a blessing. The thing he could do was called Mountain Grip, and it was a matter of his hands. Closing them on a ledge, a wrist, a yoke or a doorframe, he could hold with a force that no ordinary man could break, and he once hung by two fingers from a cliff for the length of a long prayer. When he used it, the fingers locked, and for an hour afterward he could not uncurl them. He slept with his hands in warm water. The weapon he carried was an olive-wood stake, bought from a trader in the south for more than he cared to say, since olive grew poorly on the plateau and the wood was thought to carry a blessing. It did nothing the common stake did not. It broke covens just the same. In his tenure he ended eleven of them, in cellars and tombs and the dry wells of ruined farms, and he never took a pupil because he never stayed long enough to be asked. Urbaes Miardbaius was not a coven, and she was the hard one. She ruled the night market of Ramiares, a place where the dye-sellers, the bead-sellers and the tin-traders came to deal after dark, and she did it so quietly that most of the market believed the real owner was her steward. She wore a circlet of blue stone beads, and the people of Ramiares called her the Crowned Tide, because the crowd rose and fell around her and she did not seem to notice. She belonged to The Gilded Line, a vampire house that dealt in tin and favours. She was said to have been there for thirty years, which was about right, and nobody could say what she had been before. Shaardius learned most of this from the dye-sellers, whom he paid in dried fish. The night in 2132 BCE had begun with an ordinary stake. When she drew it out, he watched her. He noticed that she paused before the door of her house, where a narrow stone channel ran across the threshold and had been choked with clay. It was a marsh-man's observation. He had spent his youth steering around water that was moving the wrong way, and he knew a dam when he saw one. He kicked the clay away. The river, which had been held up behind it, came across the threshold in a sheet. She did not run. She walked through it, slowly, with her chin up, and the water took the skin off her soles. She went on walking until she was out of the market. He was left standing in a doorway in the dark with a stake in his hand and a fact, which was that the Crowned Tide could be made to walk. He spent the next seven years on other covens and on one question. He heard in the second year that she had had the channel rebuilt, with a sluice, and that she had taken to bribing the water-keepers upriver to shut the sluice in the dry months. In 2125 BCE, when he was thirty-nine, he went to Ramiares in the driest week of the year. He had weighed it carefully. He had no better plan and no help. The channel was dry, the clay dam was back in place, and she was waiting in the doorway with the blue beads in her hair. She had learned to use the other gift, the one that she did not like to talk about. It was something in the blood. As his hand closed on her wrist, with all of Mountain Grip behind it, she looked at him and the blood in his arm stopped moving. He felt the arm go cold to the shoulder. His grip locked, as it always did, and for once it was a trap. She stood very still for the length of several breaths with a nosebleed running down her lip, and then the other arm went the same way, and then the heart. Shaardius Rarabaush died on the threshold of the Ramiares house, at thirty-nine, after fourteen years of fighting, and the last thing he felt was the mud in his belt pouch. They found the olive stake on the step the next morning, unbroken, beside a pool of drying blood and a smear of wet clay where a woman had walked out of the house without hurrying. The stake was taken back to the unmarked shrine in the hills, and left in the stone basin, where the rain filled it to the brim.