What survives of Shatias Mushaili is mostly a storekeeper's tally. It was kept on notched sticks at the Vigil house in Shahatas, a harbor settlement on the Anatolian coast of what is now Turkey, and some time later a patient scribe copied the notches onto clay. It is not a biography. It records salt, oxhide, sharpening stones, bread and the cost of mending a shield, and it is a better portrait for that. An entry in the early years reads: "Shield, mended. Again." Another: "Salt, three baskets. She says it is for the doors." A third, much later, in a different hand: "Beer, one jar, for the girl from the south. She does not drink it. Leave it." The rest of this account is built around those lines and the stories that cling to them.
She was born in 2289 BCE at Shahatas and worked the salt pans there as a child, raking brine in shallow clay beds under a hard sky, which gave her forearms like a man's and a lasting knowledge of what salt does to a wound, a hide and a doorway. She was a quiet girl who looked, people said, at the back of your head. It was worse than that. At times she could hear what the people around her were saying to themselves, the plain top layer of a thought, the sentence behind the sentence, and she had spent her whole girlhood learning to behave as though she could not. She hummed no tune, kept no charm, and had a single habit: she never sat with her back to a door. Her want was to be left alone with the salt, and for twenty-seven years she nearly was.
It ended in 2262 BCE. A neighbor who had lived three doors from her mother for as long as either of them could remember came to buy salt one evening, and while she was weighing it Shatias heard, quite distinctly, a thought that was not human: a plain, patient, appraising hunger directed at the back of her neck. She did not scream or run. She picked up the rake and hit the woman in the face. The woman did not stay down. Shatias was twenty-seven and had never been taught to fight, and she held her off with a bed of brine, an oxhide mat and an old mooring stake until the harbor guard arrived with lamps. Nobody from the Vigil of Anatolia had to explain what she was. She went to the Vigil house herself the next morning and asked what the rules were, and was told, in effect, that nobody was going to teach her; there was nobody to teach. The tally records her first purchase: "Oxhide shield, one. Stake, one. Paid in salt." By the autumn Shatias Mushaili was a hunter in the plain sense of the Slayerverse, a vampire slayer with a shield, in the middle of The First Night. The Open Book, as the Vigil named her gift, allowed her to read the surface of a mind at close range. It could not read memory or intention in depth. It cost her sleep, and a stiffness in the neck, and afterward she could not abide a crowded room.
She was good at the things a hunter must do, and she was a fixture. She patrolled the salt roads and harbor lanes of Anatolia for forty years in the role, mostly on foot, with the shield and a short stake. She learned that vampires disliked a line of salt across a threshold, and she taught the Vigil to lay one. She also learned that few of them could lie in her presence, since she could hear the lie coming; she learned to stand where she could be seen and let them talk. The Vigil, which had its own bad habits, gave her the alias the Ashen Wall for the grey that came into her hair early and for the way she stood in a doorway and made it hers.
In 2256 BCE she met Tuas Tutarzius, the Bloodless Architect of the Winter Brood, in a stone grain-store at Arzias, a trading town in the hill country above the coast. He was a vampire scientist, a physician before he was made, and the first of his kind she had heard thinking in numbers. She stood in the door with the shield and listened and heard a slow count, steady as a pulse, running under every other thought. He moved in a blur, one step that left an after-image across the room. She had been told it could not be hit. She hit it, because she heard the count and knew the step before it came. The shield took the blow and the stake went wide. He left by the roof, shaken. She went home and wrote down the number he had been counting, which the tally records as a row of marks, and for several nights could not stop counting it too.
The war that followed ran twenty-two years. Tuas was the better planner and she the better listener, and each wore the other down. He built houses with no threshold she could salt. She learned to lay the line a pace inside the door. He ran messages through the harbor towns in bursts of speed that no runner could match. She learned the count, and what the count meant. A good enemy teaches you what you cannot do, and he taught her patience, which she had not thought she was short of.
They ended it at Arzias in 2234 BCE. The grain-store had been rebuilt, with a doorway she did not like, and she laid a line of salt across it that evening and stood behind the line with the shield and the stake and a lamp. He came in counting. She heard it, step by step, and stepped sideways in the dark at the number, and the stake went into his heart as he arrived. The ash-wood held. She took his body outside into the light and stayed with it until it was done. That evening she was fifty-five.
That same year a young woman from the Levant came up the coast by boat, Ashraai Morzinyaha, the Crimson Hand, called in 2234 BCE and in need of a teacher. She had heard that the Ashen Wall had taken a vampire without losing the door. Shatias took her in, for one season, and then another, and taught her the salt, the shield and how to stand. The tally records the girl's beer, which went untouched. Shatias died at Shahatas of the ordinary failures of age, in 2222 BCE. Her pupil outlived her by eight years, took the salt and the shield home to the south, and died in 2214 BCE. The last line on the sticks is the one in the strange hand: "Salt, one basket. For the door."
Occult IncUniverseIn development
