The shield hung on the east wall of her counting room for one hundred and seventy-three years, and it was the only thing in the building that was not for sale. It was a plain oxhide shield, round, with a rim of split cane and a leather grip gone black from another person's sweat. Suraa Javiini took it from the ford below Tania in 2700 BCE, and her servants hung it where she could see it from the cushion where she did her sums. The Hollow Choir's other members found this sentimental, which was the word they used for anything they could not price. She called it a receipt.
She was born in 3040 BCE at Yusuini, a temple town in what is now India, and she had been a hunter all her life before she became one in a different sense. The temple at Yusuini fed on festival days, and the festivals needed deer, so the temple kept two people on its payroll who could put an arrow into a running animal at forty paces, and Suraa was the better of the two. She was forty and a widow, with a limp from a boar and an unfashionable habit of counting every gate she walked through, when she was made a vampire in 3000 BCE. Who did it is not known. She never said, the Choir never asked, and the one time a young member raised it she looked at him until he left the room. A maker who is never spoken of, in the Vampireverse, is a thing a person is entitled to.
What she got was a body that mended. Knit-Flesh drew a wound closed the way a drawstring closes a bag, in the time it took to walk to the door, and an arrow that would have lamed a hunter left her with a damp tear in a sleeve. It was dull work, not dramatic. Her flesh needed blood to do it, and she was the first to say that the gift was less like power than a standing appointment with an old debt. After that she ran the dark side of Vitania. She came to be called the Crowned Regent because she wore a circlet of copper and reed at the market's head table, ruling in the name of a market-lord nobody had seen in a generation, and she ran the stalls, the debts and the quiet people who sat at the back of the dyers' lane for ninety years without once raising her voice.
She had one child, in her way. Suraa Javiini was not, by temperament, a maker; in all of The First Night she turned exactly one person, and she was irritated about it for a decade. In 2971 BCE she made Mamaan Karayuini, a salt-carrier's daughter with a good memory for faces, and trained her to keep the ledgers and the doors. They were not close. Mamaan watched her mistress the way a person watches a river she lives beside, with respect and an exact knowledge of where it floods. Later she taught her two things worth keeping: never cross running water that crosses a doorway, and never let anyone hold a heated stamp near your skin.
She learned the second from experience. In 2713 BCE a vampire slayer called Majaini Yuyuesh followed her through the dyers' lane in Vitania for most of an evening, a thin man with an oxhide shield, a coughing habit and a stake capped in notched copper. She noted that he did not look at her. He looked at the people near her, and then at the places where her people stood, and once at her mouth when she said something she did not mean. The lane ended at a stone channel laid across the dyers' door, running with water, and she stopped there and was too slow to hide it. He pressed the hot cap of the stake into the inside of her forearm. A slayer's mark does not knit. The skin around it stayed open and wet, and no amount of feeding closed it, and she wore long sleeves from then on in a climate where no one wore them.
The party that had emptied his brother's house in 2725 BCE was a gang of young Choir out of her own market, drunk on a festival, and she never found out whether he held her to account for it; she would have preferred not to be asked. For thirteen years she took the matter personally, in the cold way of a hunter. She left his villages alone and watched him closely. She learned that he could hear a lie as it was spoken and that what he could not hear was a sincere error. In 2700 BCE she found a fisherman near death and told him, gently and in full, that a nest of the Choir was digging in at the ford below Tania, a thing she had arranged to be true in his hearing and false in fact. He carried it upriver believing it. She was waiting for Majaini Yuyuesh in the shallows with the water running around her ankles, and she did not cross a threshold. She waited until he came to her. The stake went through her thigh before she took him, and it was quick, and she took the shield and left the body to his sister.
After that her long afterlife went mostly quiet. She had a hundred and seventy-three years left and spent them keeping the market solvent and her arm covered. The Vitania stalls grew larger and the lane grew cleaner, and the Hollow Choir spoke of her in the tone people use for an old building. In 2527 BCE she was destroyed, at the age of five hundred and thirteen, by slayers whose names the Vigil of the Indus and Ganges Plain did not trouble to keep. They came by the dyers' lane, as everyone did, and were met at the water.
The shield went to the Vigil along with the rest of the contents of the counting room. Nobody there had known Majaini, but someone remembered that his family kept a reed mat, and the shield was sent downriver to Tania with the mat, wrapped in a piece of clean cloth. The hide had been replaced four times in all those years. The grip was still his.
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