Supraita Deniini

Supraita Deniini, called The Ninth Shield, was a hired spear of the Indus and Ganges Plain who survived a camp fever in 1491 BCE and spent fourteen years hunting vampires for barley, copper and little thanks, until a house at Deniesh fell on her and her enemy together.

The people of the plain told it this way: Supraita Deniini died of the camp fever, was carried to the burning ground, and sat up on the pyre as the first reed caught, and that is why nothing could kill her afterward. It is a good story and it is wrong in every part that makes it good. She never reached the burning ground. She was laid out on a cart of fever dead at a well-station in 1491 BCE, and a boy sent to count the bodies noticed that one of them was breathing, very slowly, the way a sleeper does in a cold room. She was killed in the end, by a falling roof, in 1477 BCE. The rest of the legend is only the plain's habit of improving its heroes. The Ninth Shield was the name the barley towns gave Supraita Deniini, and she lived and fought in the age of the Bronze Vigil. She was born in 1512 BCE at Bhaara, a hill fort in India's Indus and Ganges Plain, where the wall was mostly rammed earth and the well was the only thing worth defending. Her father kept goats. She left at fourteen with a caravan of salt-sellers because the caravan master needed bodies to stand beside the carts and she was tall for her age. By twenty she was one of nine shield-bearers who guarded salt carts from the western pans to the river towns, and she was the ninth, which meant the last to eat and the first to take the night watch. That position gave her the name. When the others died, the name stuck to the one who was left, and nobody who used it thought it was a joke. The fever took the other eight over six days at a well-station she never named afterward. She was twenty-one. She lay among them on the cart, and the healers who passed through said the same thing, that she was cooling, that there was no use in water. Then she woke, thin as a rope, and found that she was no longer afraid of the dark between the carts but unable to bear it, because her body told her things. Her breath stopped by itself. Half a heartbeat before a thrown stone or a shifting blade, her chest locked and her lungs went still, and in that stillness she knew which way to step. The people who later learned to call it The Held Breath misunderstood it as calm. It was closer to a cramp. It left her dizzy, sometimes with blood in her nose, and after a hard night she could not hold a cup steady until noon. Nobody taught her what to do with it. No teacher is recorded, and she told two separate caravan masters she had none. She learned by being hired. The work was ordinary mercenary work, paid in barley by the measure and copper by the ingot, and she turned down the contracts that would have made her rich because they involved sitting. Her one weapon was a copper dagger, short and honestly made, which she kept sharp with a river stone and a mouthful of spit. She hummed a cattle-driver's song while she worked, always the same four bars, and she counted her companions twice before any march, by touch and then by voice, because she had once counted wrong. What she wanted was small: enough barley to have the fort at Bhaara rebuild its well-head in stone before she was old. She did not expect to be old. The vampire lords of the river cities found her in her second year. A merchant at a ford hired her to guard a wedding party and she noticed that the hosts did not eat. By her own count, in the fourteen years that she held the work she broke thirteen of the great houses that fed on the plain's cities, and each time she walked away she asked for the fee in full. Her faction, the Vigil of Indus and Ganges Plain, could not command her. It sent her messages and she sent back the dates she would be free. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as a vampire slayer who hated being thanked. The one she could not finish was Praini Niardhaa, whom the river people called the Midnight Mask. They met in 1487 BCE at Kataesh, a walled city-state, where a lord named Vardhin had hired Supraita to sit in his treasure room through the dry season. She sat there eleven nights. On the twelfth the floor under her feet shuddered, and the wall opened as if a hand had pushed it from the inside, and a woman in a black cloth mask stepped through the dust. Supraita's breath locked a heartbeat early. A flake of the broken wall opened Supraita's forearm, and her dagger opened the thief's palm to the bone, and the masked woman went out the way she had come, carrying a box of seal-stones she had no use for. Vardhin accused her of letting the thief go. She quit the contract and kept the scar. After that they could not stop. At Lohita Ford in 1483 BCE she ringed a caravan camp with salt and drove iron nails into the doorposts of the toll hut, tools she had begun to carry after hearing what such things did to the maker's kind, and for one night they held. Praini did not cross the line. She went under it, and the ford's stone causeway broke in the dark, and nine carts went into the water with their drivers. Supraita pulled out five. She came to hate the sound that a split stone makes, and for a long while she did not pass over bridges where she could wade. Between those years she tracked the thief by what was missing: a sacrificial ram from one house, a locked ledger from another. They met often enough that each could read the other's habits. The masked woman always left by the floor. Supraita always arrived early and sat near the door. Late in the dry season of 1477 BCE she learned that Praini was resting at Deniesh, a tanners' town of low brick houses and cisterns, and she went there with a bag of salt, a handful of dark nails worked from sky-iron, and her copper dagger. She laid the salt across the threshold of the house where the Mask slept and set the nails by hand while a dog barked at her. When Praini came to the door the line stopped her, and for a moment she was only a woman in a mask. Supraita put the dagger in her throat. The house came down anyway. The Mask, dying, put both palms to the floor, and the Stonebreak she had so often used on walls went through the cistern wall and the beams. The roof fell in a single piece. They found Supraita under a post, one hand still on the haft, and the other woman beside her. It was 1477 BCE, and she was thirty-five. The well at Bhaara was rebuilt, in stone, about thirty years later. A tanner at Deniesh kept the dagger. He said it was an ugly thing and could not be sold, and when asked why he never melted it down he said only that it was still sharp, and that he hummed four bars of something every time he oiled it, though he did not know where he had learned them.