Taes Tahorush

Taes Tahorush, the Hollow Wall, was a canal engineer of the Persian Plateau who became a vampire slayer in 2104 BCE with no gift but mirrors, water and nerve. Trained on the Nile, Taes spent twenty-one years of the Bronze Vigil building traps for the thing that eventually killed them.

The night that made Taes Tahorush began with a leak. In the spring of 2104 BCE, a twenty-five-year-old canal foreman was walking the north sluice of Baartaad with a lamp and a coil of cord, trying to find where the water was going, when the lamp showed something else: a stranger crouched in the culvert, holding a drover by the neck. Taes had a plumb-line in one hand and nothing in the other, and stood in the culvert for the better part of an hour talking, steadily and about nothing, until the stranger's grip loosened. What was done there is mostly lost. The drover lived. The thing in the culvert did not come back to that sluice. By morning Taes had a stake whittled from a table leg and a conviction that the walls of the city had been built wrong. Everything afterward grew out of that one night. The Bronze Vigil was an age of bronze states and canal-fed cities, and Baartaad was a walled city-state on the Persian Plateau, in what is now Iran, with sun-dried brick, a temple of water and a rule, older than the walls, that nobody dug a canal without asking the gate-wardens first. Taes had been born there in 2129 BCE to a family of ditch-diggers and had grown up on the canals, learning levels and gradients and the surprising behavior of silt. They were an engineer by temperament before any trade had a name for it. They counted steps without noticing. They hummed the same four bars of a digging song whenever a measurement came out right, and went quiet when it did not. The want that drove all of it was small: Taes meant to make one thing that never failed. In the Slayerverse, where most records are of fights, Taes is remembered for the buildings. The old accounts say Taes was no fighter, and the old accounts are right. Taes had no gift of the body, no strength to speak of, a tidy hand and poor nerves. The Vigil of Persian Plateau accepted this new vampire slayer into its ranks in 2104 BCE, at twenty-five, mostly because the sluice had already shown what the foreman could think of in an emergency. What Taes brought was Sun-Rig Design, a method of building into ordinary walls. The principle was ugly and clever. Polished copper plates, set on pivots in hollow channels in the brick, caught the noon sun on the outside of a building and threw it down a shaft into a cellar, a granary or a culvert, so that anything sheltering from daylight in that dark room was suddenly standing in a bar of it. Taes tuned the angles with a plumb-line and a sack of lime. Wall-builders began to call the result the Hollow Wall, and the name stuck to Taes. Beside the rigs, Taes kept an olive-wood stake, bought from a western trader at more than it was worth. Knowing how little was in the hands, the foreman went looking for hands that knew more. In 2103 BCE, Taes joined a tin caravan that wound down through the river lands of the south and took ship up the Nile to the village of Nefmesra, to ask a slayer called Nefep Raraet for lessons. The old hunter said no, then yes. For four years, until 2099 BCE, Taes slept in a reed hut by the river and learned what an engineer must also be: patient, light on the feet, always sitting nearest the door. They argued about everything. Nefep trusted a cold line down his back and Taes trusted a level, and each thought the other was risking too much. When Taes left, the hunter gave over a worn hide strap for the stake and said only that the day they stopped being afraid of a dark room was the day to retire. The work in those years was of an unglamorous kind. Taes Tahorush rebuilt the sluice-gates of two canal towns so the culverts could be flooded or lit at need. They fitted copper plates into the grain-store of a temple city in the south and into a caravan inn where a family of drovers had been disappearing in twos. Eleven times in twenty-one years, the rigs drove a feeder out into daylight and the watchmen did the rest. Taes took no pay beyond bread and the commission, and kept every plan on clay tablets stacked under the cot, so that anyone who inherited the walls could understand them. The vampire arrived in 2097 BCE. Amunra Menmenu, the Bloodless Duelist, was a stormer of The Velvet Throne, sent by that house from the Nile Valley across two regions' worth of road to open a tin route on the plateau and bring its canal towns under the Throne's feeding. Her caravan reached the canal town of Kharsat in the late summer. Taes met her on the lock walk there, at dusk, with a rig half-built and a crew of six. What came across the stones was not a sound but a feeling: a long, slow trembling that began in the knees and rose through the chest, which Amunra Menmenu called The Long Shiver and which emptied the crew off the wall in the time it took to wipe a brow. Taes stayed. The foreman had one plate aimed and kept the plumb-line steady through the shaking, and the beam caught Amunra across the shoulder and sent her off the wall into the canal. She came out of the water in a rage and did not return that season. Taes spent the winter learning that running water at a threshold bothered her, and then rebuilt Baartaad around that fact. It took her fourteen years to come back, in the sense that nobody in Baartaad remembered the first fight as the first. In 2083 BCE, in the dry months, Amunra returned and waited out the long drought until the canals ran low and the sluice-water stopped crossing the threshold. Taes had the rig room, the plates and a last night of preparation. The foreman died there, at forty-six, in the hollow of the wall they had made. The copper plates were found scorched and bent, one facing the roof. Amunra Menmenu walked away down the north road in the morning with a cut across the shoulder that took a month to close. Baartaad kept the walls. A mason who knew nothing of slaying rebuilt the lower courses, and in the third autumn after, noticed that the pivots still turned. The plumb-line, a plain lead bob on a flax cord, was found in the rig room tied to the lowest plate, and it hung dead straight.