Tangbo Qin took his pay before the work and never after. It was the one rule he had carried unbroken from his life as a hired shield for the harbor lords, and he said it so often in the Winter Brood that younger members imitated it as a joke. Work first, pay later, was how men got robbed. Pay first, work after, was how a mercenary lived to the end of the season. In 348 years as a vampire he broke it exactly once, and he never decided afterward whether that counted as a failure or a gift.
He was born in 2500 BCE at Yuyu, a mountain shrine in the Yellow River Basin, in what is now China, where his father kept the lamps and his mother sold wool to pilgrims. The shrine's people were poor but orderly, and he grew into a young man of no great talent and a good deal of nerve, the sort whom harbor lords hired to stand behind them at negotiations. He was a hired shield for four or five years. He took the job seriously and himself less so, and he was good with a shield made of ox hide on a wooden frame. He had a gambling habit, which is why he was running from debtors in 2480 BCE, at twenty, when he took shelter in a salt merchant's cellar in the wrong house.
The cellar already had a tenant. Tangqin Zhao, called the Midnight Widow, had been a vampire of the Vampireverse since 2529 BCE, and she made him there, in the dark among the salt jars, in a night he remembered mostly as noise. She left before he had finished being sick. He never saw her again, and he heard decades later that she was alive, which did not surprise him. He joined the Winter Brood because it was the nearest roof and because it paid.
The gift was cold. The harbor people called it Frostbound Oath, and the name came from his method: he took the hand of a debtor or a client to seal an agreement, and the cold went through the grip, drawing warmth out until the palm froze to the leather of his glove and the breath of both men turned to white grain in the air. It worked on a wider scale too, if he stood still. It cost him heat of his own, and his fingers grayed and went numb afterward, so that he had to feed to recover them. He was not a clever man, and he knew exactly what his gift was worth, which in a world of copper and early bronze was a great deal. The weak points were what anyone would guess. Silver-tipped weapons hurt him, which was rare metal brought down from the west by trade. Nails of meteor iron driven into a threshold kept him from a house.
He wore a mask of dark felt in public, the finest wool the shrine could weave, and it was the reason he was called the Velvet Mask long after the felt had been replaced. His reasons were practical. A scar from his early years ran from the corner of his mouth to his ear, and clients paid more when the face behind the contract was unreadable. In the age that came to be called the First Night, Tangbo Qin took contracts from the port lords for three centuries. He fouled the wells of eight towns once, for a grain dispute, because a coven that was feeding wanted its dead blamed on the water.
In 2466 BCE he met the vampire slayer Mingtang Tang at the ford the harbor people called the Pale Ford, where he was meant to be doing exactly that. Tangbo had been paid in advance. The slayer, a marsh tracker with a bronze sickle-sword and a hide that glowed like banked coals, found the jar he was using and then found him. They fought most of the night in the shallows. The cold stiffened Mingtang's joints, and Mingtang's skin burned a stripe across the felt of the mask and into the cheek beneath it. Tangbo thought for a long moment that he would lose. He went into the water instead, and came up downstream, hurt and pleased in a way he did not like. He had never had a client's enemy refuse to stay beaten before, and he started to take Mingtang Tang personally, which was bad for business.
They crossed paths a handful of times in the eleven years that followed. In the winter of 2455 BCE Tangbo went to Minghanhan, the harbor where the slayer lived, because the Brood had ceased to pay him for anything and the harbor lords had stopped asking. Nobody had hired him. He killed Mingtang on the frozen mud flats at dawn, in the open, with the cold drawn through every bit of the slayer's hide, and he took the bronze sickle-sword off the ground because it was the only thing there worth anything. It was the one job he did without being paid first, and it was the one that stayed with him.
He kept the sword on a peg in his rooms for a long time, and he did not use it. In 2387 BCE he made a vampire named Jiayu Tang, whom the Brood called the Gaunt Collector, and gave the sword to the new one as a present. Jiayu was destroyed in 2351 BCE, and the sword was not found afterward. In 2362 BCE, during that gap, he went with a jade caravan to the Indus and Ganges Plain, in what is now India, and there made another, Niesh Bhasudeini, whom the Brood called the Velvet Envoy. That was the last stretch of his life he talked about with any warmth.
Someone else destroyed him in 2132 BCE. The Brood never learned the name, and Tangbo had not seen the end coming. He was three hundred and sixty-eight. Those who cleared his rooms found the peg where the sword had hung, worn smooth, and a bowl of grain on the sill that he had apparently set out every winter for a mouse.
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