Every morning in Rayahath, a marsh village in what is now Lebanon, Sidashon Melalalon's mother scraped the reed-ash out of the hearth before the neighbors could, because good ash made good lye and lye was currency. The girl born there in 2055 BCE learned early that a household was a small machine: ash became lye, lye became clean cloth, cloth became barley, and a hearth swept an hour late cost you a measure of grain by the end of the month. She was the sort of child who noticed that the leak in the roof came from the same course of bricks every year. She was the sort of adult who went up and fixed it. She was an engineer before she was anything else, and when the coast later called Sidashon Melalalon The Wretched Architect, the engineer in her thought the adjective unfair and the noun correct.
She became a canal builder, which in the Bronze Vigil was a trade that kept you wet, underpaid and indispensable. The marsh people dug their own cuts and dikes, but the great channels that fed the lords' fields needed a head who could judge a fall of a hand's breadth over a mile, and Sidashon could. By thirty she had a crew of forty men and a reputation for work that did not silt. She did not drink with them. She kept her tools in a reed basket lined with wet cloth, hummed a counting song under her breath, and hated, with a private and specific hatred, any job left unfinished for political reasons.
A man named Yahashon Eltiron, whom the marsh knew as a rich lord with no visible estate, hired her in 2015 BCE to design a set of cisterns under a house on the coast. She was forty. The plans required that the cisterns stay cold in summer and never be inspected, and it took her most of a season to understand what that meant. When she did, he made her an offer. Yahashon was the sire who made her, and the Vampireverse that Sidashon belonged to from then on began with that bargain: he needed a builder of the Levant who would not age out, and she needed to finish her work. She was not frightened as much as annoyed that she had been right about the cisterns. He remained alive for the whole of her long career, and the two met rarely. She did not think of him as family. She thought of him as a client who never paid in full.
Being made did not bring her the ease she had hoped for. Her body, after, did a thing no builder's body should: under stress it came apart into a flurry of small winged creatures, each no bigger than a thumb, that reassembled across a room in the time it took to blink. This was the gift the Velvet Circle valued her for, and she called it Belfry Scatter, after the first time she had used it, in a bronze-bell tower where a patrol had cornered her. It left her ravenous for hours and unable to feel her hands, and she kept a bowl of warm water by every working bench. She could follow a trail of blood a day old, which she regarded as a trade skill like any other. She learned the costs of her kind the way builders learn them, by what failed: salt laid across a sill stopped her cold, and a slayer's mark laid on the skin burned for a week.
Her first meeting with Enbaath Ramela was a quarrel over a sluice. In 1987 BCE she was reworking the Sabu weir between Rayahath and the neighboring village of Morraa, because the lord who owned it wanted the water redirected without telling the farmers downstream. She came in by night and found a soldier and eleven farmers waiting in the sluice-house with lamp oil and a line of salt. She scattered, lost the room, and fled through the rafters when the soldier shouted something that turned frightened men into a wall. He was, though she did not yet use the phrase, a vampire slayer, and the best she had met at holding a room. She had never seen anyone do that. She remembered it for a long time, because the weir, when she looked at it again the next night, was untouched. He had not even broken a brick. She admitted, in the one conversation she ever had on the subject, that she had been more insulted by that than by the salt.
The pursuit went on for twenty-nine years. She learned his habits as she would have learned those of a river: he hummed when afraid, he moved men well and himself badly, he never pressed a corner he could not hold. She left him a plumb-bob once, deliberately, on a ledge in a cistern under a fishing town in 1971 BCE, because she wanted him to know the work was clean. He took it. She counted that as a form of conversation. She never tried to kill him, and the record shows nothing to suggest she could have, though she could have taken a half-dozen of his men on any night she chose.
In 1958 BCE a bargeman told her that the soldier had died of a lung fever in a flooded ditch. She was ninety-seven and had been a vampire for fifty-seven years. She went to the burial, kept to the trees, and left a coil of cord with a lead weight at the foot of the grave, because it was the only thing she had on her that he had ever admired. Then she went back to the coast and built for another two hundred and seventy years.
She was prolific. She made a child in 1727 BCE, Elashai Ashenon, a brisk and difficult pupil who rose to be called the Crowned Judge and who was destroyed in 1666 BCE; Sidashon did not attend and did not discuss it afterward. The Velvet Circle bought her cisterns, her wells and her drains, and it is said that half the cellar-works on the Lebanese coast were hers. She was never captured in the open. In 1684 BCE, at the age of three hundred and seventy-one, she was taken beneath Tiralalim, in a vault she had herself designed, and walled in by a coalition of local keepers who had waited three generations for her to make one mistake. It was a bad mistake and an easy one: she had left the drainage plan in her own handwriting.
The vault is said to be perfectly dry. The people who sealed it noted, in the only account that survives, that the masonry was among the best they had ever worked and that it had been a pleasure to lay.
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