Tarus Yamuus

Tarus Yamuus, the Lantern Warden, was a temple builder from an Anatolian river village who woke one spring night with a gift for seeing what was wrong in a room. As a vampire slayer he walked across the world to learn his craft, and left one rival sealed under a town, unfinished.

The ballad is called "The Warden of the Stair" and the muleteers of Zitius still sing it at harvest. It has forty-one verses, a refrain, and a narrator who is sure of everything. "Tap the wall and hear it breathe," goes the refrain, "tap it twice and it will leave." Tarus Yamuus never said anything of the kind, and he fought the woman in the song for one night, not seven, but the ballad is the best portrait we have of how he was seen, and where it is wrong it is wrong in a revealing direction. The singers wanted a man who always knew what was behind the wall. Tarus wanted, more than anything, to finish a building. He was born at Tutara in 2608 BCE, a river village in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, to a family that laid reed matting for a living. He had a good eye for a level and a bad one for faces, and he went into the temple trade as an engineer, laying foundations and drains and testing the footing of stairs. The habit that stayed with him all his life was one the ballad got right. He tapped walls. Not out of any gift, but because he had spent fifteen years finding the hollows that careless builders left, and he would not sit with his back to a wall he had not knocked on. His great want was a temple, a real one, with a roof, in the town of Zitius, whose upper terrace he was surveying in the spring of 2583 BCE. That was the night it happened. He was twenty-five. The headman's household had given a betrothal feast in the courtyard of the old market, and the entertainment was a series of padded-staff bouts, in which a guest champion in a braided copper crown had been disposing of the young men of the town one by one. Tarus was standing by the wine jars, bored, with a cup in his hand, and he looked up at her and felt something go wrong behind his eyes. It was not a voice. It was a flatness, a vacancy in the spot where a person ought to have been, as if someone had painted a woman over a hole. The flies did not settle on her. The lamp-flames leaned toward the other guests and not toward her. That was Wrongness Sight, which the Vigil of Anatolia would later describe to him as a gift of the body, like a rare eye, and it cost him the first of what became a lifetime of headaches. The woman was Zia Kukuili, the Crowned Duelist. The ballad has a verse about what followed that is entirely wrong. He took a sickle-sword from a wall bracket meant for show, and she cut him across the forearm before he had finished lifting it. He saw her move. He saw, as he put it afterward, the edge of the moment where she had been, and then the air cracking beside his ear. He got the sickle to her wrist, once, and drew blood that did not run quite as it should. She laughed. She put down her staff and went out through the crowd, and not one of them noticed her go. By morning, a Vigil woman had found him, bandaged and puking, and told him what he was. He was a vampire slayer of the Slayerverse by dawn, in The First Night, with a bronze sickle-sword he had never asked for and an enemy who had chosen him by being first. She was not the kind of enemy that a man defeats in a season. He knew it, and decided to find someone who could teach him to hold the kind of ground she took. The Vigil had a rumor, carried by caravan, of a woman in the far east who had built walls and then learned to lift them. In 2583 BCE he set out with the caravans on the northern steppe roads, and reached the hill fort of Yuren in 2581 BCE, two years later. His mentor was Fengbo Xiu, the Lantern Torch. From 2581 BCE to 2575 BCE she taught him, and not in the way he expected. She made him build a wall before she would let him fight beside one. She taught him to lay the Vigil's mark, soot and pine resin, on a palm, so that a hand closing on a vampire's wrist could leave a blister. And she taught him smoke: a clay lantern with pierced sides, burning pitch and wormwood, to fog a nose that read pulses. He took the lantern home with him, and the Vigil, which names its people for what they carry, called him the Lantern Warden. He left in 2575 BCE and spent two years getting home, slowed by a winter in the mountains and a bout of fever at a caravan well. He came back to a town that had been run, quietly, by the Silent Court for ten years. While he was gone Zia Kukuili had been busy pitting the great houses of Zitius against one another, a quarrel at a time, and the houses had never noticed that the quarrels had the same author. Tarus Yamuus found her at last on the stone bridge below the old market in 2572 BCE and put his marked palm on her wrist. She flinched for the first time in her long career. He had not meant to hold on. She wore a copper cuff on that wrist ever afterward, and some say the ballad's refrain is about the blister. In 2570 BCE the houses, who had finally compared notes, agreed on one thing. With the help of masons, salt from the town's wells and silver-tipped spikes that no one admitted buying, they walled her into a cistern chamber under Zitius. They did not consult him. He was at Tutara when a mason's boy came running with the news, and by the time he reached Zitius the mortar was dry. He stood in front of the slab for an hour. His own part in it had been to give the town a method. What they did with it was theirs. In 2565 BCE he took on a protege, Elashim Sidrahaon, the Crimson Thorn, who had come up from the Levant coast on a trading boat and walked inland asking for him by name. He taught Elashim what Fengbo had taught him, and left the arguing to the walls. He was fifty-seven in 2551 BCE, at Titiwaas, when two valley towns went to war over a spring and Titiwaas, which he had advised on its cisterns, was besieged. A sling stone caught him on the ramparts. It had nothing to do with vampires. A mason finishing the Zitius temple a generation later noted in the margin of his tally that the north wall was a hand's breadth out of true, and decided to leave it alone.