Tangzhao Jia

Tangzhao Jia, called The Bloodless Hunger, was a grain merchant from a Yellow River caravan stop who became a vampire in 2964 BCE and a broker of debts for the Pale Circle. She spent a decade losing to the slayer Wei Han and was destroyed in 2946 BCE.

Close every account before sunrise. That was the whole of Tangzhao Jia's creed, and she repeated it to apprentices, to clients and to herself, because a vampire who left a bargain open at dawn was a vampire who might have to finish it in the light. For eighteen years she kept the rule and prospered. It was tested twice that anyone remembers, and the second test is the reason there is a record of her at all. Tangzhao Jia, whom the river towns later called The Bloodless Hunger, was born at Jiaming in 2987 BCE, in the years of The First Night, a caravan stop on the Yellow River Basin trade road in what is now China, where her father kept the weigh-house. As a girl she learned two things on his scales: how to read a weight to a barleycorn, and how to nudge a pan with a knuckle so that nobody saw. She became a grain merchant at nineteen, and a good one, as the trade was practiced then, buying forward against failed harvests and lending seed at an interest paid in the next crop. She wanted the wharf. Not a stall at it or a share of it, but the whole river frontage at Jiaming, with its warehouses and its landing rights and the old men who sat there deciding whose barge unloaded first. She carried a counting cord in her sleeve, tied a knot in it for every lie she told, and had stopped enjoying the exercise at about the fortieth knot. In 2964 BCE, at twenty-three, she brought a dispute to a night judge. The arbiter in question was a vampire called Bo Bo, whom the river towns knew as The Hollow Judge, and he heard cases after dark in a shuttered room above the wharf. She won. He then offered her the other kind of settlement, in the same level tone, and she accepted it with her eyes open, because it was the best offer she had ever received. He made her a vampire that night. Bo Bo left the Jiaming reach before the month was out and she saw him twice in the years afterward, both times by appointment, and she never said what he cost. She joined the Pale Circle on his word and was counted within a season among those the Vampireverse trusted with its accounts. What she brought to it was Voice Beyond Voice. When she looked at a person, a voice sounded inside their skull, clear as a thing said across a table. It could be anyone's voice, if she had heard it enough; she once held a whole wharf gang with the sound of their gang-leader's dead mother. It lasted only while she could see them, and it cost her a headache like a bar across the eyes, and a nosebleed, and a hoarse real voice for a day. She never used it to make anyone do something monstrous. She used it to make them agree with her. In her opinion that was the more efficient gift, and she was a broker in her bones. She bought debts, then grain, then silence, and when a town defaulted she sent in raiders she had paid for, so that it had to borrow again. She kept fourteen strongrooms of heirlooms taken as security, under three names. In 2956 BCE she was at the Jiaming wharf arranging to buy its stock when a spear-bearer on a barge escort, a vampire slayer named Wei Han, heard the voice and shut her eyes. Tangzhao Jia, who had not met a person who did that, felt the voice go into nothing, like a hand into a sleeve with no arm in it. Then forty copper weights left the wharf-master's scale and filled the room. One caught her above the left eye, and she went out by the river door with blood in her hair and learned, standing on the pier with the bank dark behind her, that the slayer was not afraid of her. She had not been in that situation since she was turned. Nobody at the Pale Circle believed her account until she showed the scar. The war with Wei Han ran ten years, and she found it tiring and oddly restful. The slayer was the one client she could not move. She offered no bribe, because Wei would not take one; she sent no threat, because the threat went into Wei's pack with the rest of the post. In the autumn of 2953 BCE her paid raiders besieged the town of Yuhe, and at first light she watched through a gap in a shed wall as the slayer walked the wall until the raiders lost nerve. She was not angry. She thought it the best-run vigil she had seen. In 2950 BCE the same thing happened at Dongchang, where there was almost no wall at all, and she conceded the arithmetic. She respected the woman. She also wanted her gone, and sat many evenings estimating the cost. By 2946 BCE she was forty-one and rich and behind schedule. The town of Qinwei had agreed to sell its harvest, and the sale was to be closed at midnight, at the grain house, so that loading could be done in the dark. It was her rule to be done by dawn, and she was. All except one account: the clause by which Qinwei's headman would sign for the winter seed, and he was drunk, and she stayed to wait for his mark. Her agents bolted the grain house doors from the outside to keep intruders out. Wei Han came through the south gate in the small hours, shut her eyes, and stood against a post for hours. Tangzhao stood in front of her and tried the voice on her again and again, in the sergeant's cough, in her mother's, in the sound of a barge-master asking for orders, until her nose bled onto the barley. The slayer never answered. When the light showed grey through the slats, the shutters came off their pegs together, all four, copper strapping and all, and the sun came in across the floor in four bars. She had time to realize that her own men had locked the room against her. The counting cord lay on the step of the grain house afterward, with the knots in it, and Wei Han picked it up. As far as anyone could tell she never untied one.