Tangqin Zhao's rule is that an injury is repaid once, exactly, and then forgotten. Not doubled, not nursed, not carried round the world for a few centuries as a hobby. His sire put it to him in the first season, in the grave tones of a woman reading out a price, and he took it as the best advice he had ever been given. It has been tested several times a century ever since. Most of the tests were simple. Somebody struck him, he struck back, and the account closed. The one that did not close was a boy of seventeen with a bronze hook in his hand who pressed a thumb of ochre and ash into his forearm one foggy night in 2521 BCE, and then, instead of being satisfied with that, kept coming back.
He was born in 2561 BCE in Qinbo, a river village on the Yellow River, in the Yellow River Basin region of what is now China, in the age the Vampireverse remembers as The First Night. His father hauled reeds for the thatchers and he did the same until he was big enough to be of more use as the front rank of a raid. The river villages of the basin fought one another over fishing weirs and millet fields, and a young man who could get his shoulder into a gate and keep going was valued for it. That was the work of a stormer, the shock warrior who broke the first line so others could follow, and he was good at it in the unlovely, quick, bruised way of a man who did not think about the second step. He wore a length of white funeral linen over his shoulders on raids, taken from a river burial because it showed well in fog and frightened the other side. The ferrymen who saw it from a distance, and never saw the face, decided that the figure was a widow, and the Midnight Widow he has been ever since. He has never corrected it.
In 2529 BCE, at thirty-two, he was made. The vampire who did it was Mamaan Karayuini, who had come a very long way. She was from the Indus and Ganges plain in India, and she had traveled east for two years along the jade and shell tracks with traders who did not ask what she carried, because she paid in silver. She arrived at a feast in Qinbo, sat down uninvited beside a man she judged was wasting himself, and by the end of the night had decided to waste him on better terms. He woke changed, as people say, with a thirst, a lighter step and a body that no longer felt entirely fixed in place. Mamaan stayed for a single season, taught him what she thought he needed, and then left on the next boat south. She vanished in 2280 BCE and has not been sighted since. Tangqin does not mention her. He keeps the second room of his oldest vault locked, and no one but he has the key.
What she gave him, or what the turning drew out of him, was the thing that the Velvet Circle calls Fogstep. It is a gift of the body. He can loosen himself into mist, a bank of cold vapor at the height of a man, for the length of ten or twelve breaths, and move through it, under doors, between a guard's arm and his ribs, round the edge of a sword-guard. The change hurts coming back. His joints ache as though he has been left out in frost, and afterward he is thirsty for a day. He is also very strong, and the pairing is what made him a feared hand of the Circle in China. He is a creature of fog and river. The weaknesses are known: salt across a threshold, and a slayer's mark laid on the skin, which burns for decades, and which he took, that night in 2521 BCE, in the left forearm.
The boy was Qinren Bo, called the Steadfast Wall, and for nine years he was the only vampire slayer on that stretch of the Yellow River. They met at the Nine Reeds Ford below Qinbo. Tangqin came onto the ferry barge in the form of fog, as he usually did, and took shape beside a ferryman, and the boy stood up in the cold and cut him with a sickle-sword. Then he pressed the mark in. Tangqin fled with his arm smoking and a feeling he could not at first identify, until he decided it was respect. He had not been surprised in eight years of feeding. He went on being surprised, in small ways, for the next nine.
The account closed in 2512 BCE, at the same ford, on a night when he did not trouble to hide. Qinren was twenty-six. It was a long, quiet fight in shallow water, and the boy was good, and Tangqin won it by being heavier. He picked the sword out of the mud himself at dawn. He did not know why he had done it. He oiled it, wrapped a new cord on the hilt, and hung it in his vault, where it stays. He renews the cord every spring. By his own rule, that is a thing he should have stopped doing in the second year.
Everything else is the ledger of his making, which he keeps as a bailiff would, with names and years. Tangbo Qin came first, in 2480 BCE, and the name was a joke. He split his own and gave it to the boy. Yu Yu followed in 1653 BCE, and Via Bhaarini in 1592 BCE, then Jadea Supraita in 1516 BCE, Weitang Shu in 1418 BCE and Yuraita Arbhaan in 1054 BCE, the last of them on the Indian side of the mountains. Tuverslav Gorborka was made on the steppe in 257 BCE, and Yuwei Lan in 237 BCE, in his own basin. Then came Astild Inghalild in 101 CE in the far north, Ma Kama in 288 CE and Rensa Sa in 390 CE in Japan, Qinbo Han in 558 CE, Fengshu Tang in 846 CE, Taha Ki in 871 CE, Jian Xu in 1394 CE, Ren Nakamura in 1416 CE, and last, Yusuf Mansour in 1991 CE, in Mesopotamia. Most have been destroyed. He does not attend their ends and does not ask how they came about. It does not seem to occur to him that he has made seventeen people and not one of them has outlived the fashion for saying his name.
Tangqin Zhao is alive today, in China. He is quieter than he was, and he has stopped hunting in the fog altogether, which the Circle regards as a mercy and a worry. The sickle-sword is oiled on the first day of spring. The rule has not been repealed.
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