Taseni Tahorra

Taseni Tahorra, the Wretched Herald, was a hill-fort singer turned vampire who worked the Nile Valley's trade roads for a century with a soft voice and a hungry smile. The Vampireverse records her as a patient charmer, stopped at last by a levy soldier with a sack of salt.

The soldier did not look like much. That was Taseni Tahorra's first impression, standing on the threshold of a salt-stacker's house at Renrameni on a night in 2547 BCE with one foot lifted and nothing under it. Medium height, a hide shield held low, a face going slack with exhaustion at the end of a long march and a long leave. The soldier had kicked a sack of rock salt open across the doorway before she could finish asking for water, and had not looked at her face while doing it. They looked at her feet. In a hundred years of knocking at doors she had met frightened householders, brave ones, drunk ones and one very devout one, and not one of them had watched her feet. She smiled, as she always did, and began to talk. It was the first time in her long working life that the voice did not do what it was for, and the oddest part was that she was not angry. She was interested. She took a mental note of the name that a dying relation shouted afterward from the back room, Mennefi, and she went on talking for as long as the salt would let her. She had been born in 2678 BCE in Rasenu, a hill fort in the Nile Valley, in what is now Egypt, and she had grown up with a voice. It was the best thing in the fort. As a girl she sang at the temple on feast days, and by her twenties she was famous enough to be sent for by the lord of the next valley, to sing at a wedding he was in no hurry to pay for. She was thirty-two when she was ambushed on the road home, robbed, beaten and left in a ditch for the crows. Someone came for her before the crows did. Khera Menamunu, a vampire of the Velvet Throne, who worked these roads and who had a taste for talent, made her in 2646 BCE, and Taseni woke in a grain store with a stranger watching her and a thirst that she had no word for. She was never certain whether she had been rescued. She decided it was not a question worth the effort. The body that came out of it was the same body with a few differences, none of them beyond what a body can do. A vampire of the Throne ate blood and lived long, and Taseni found that she did a certain trick with it. She called it the Eclipse Mantle, though she wrote nothing of it down, and the name was her sire's. When she wished, the air around her went cool and dim in a ragged circle about the size of a threshing floor, as though something had drunk the light out of it. Torches guttered and shadow pooled thick as river mud, and anyone she chose to cover with it, a fellow vampire or a courtesan or a bribed guard, could cross a lit room without a single eye following. It tired her. After a long use of the Mantle she was left shaking and bitterly hungry, and there were nights she could not stand at all. But it fitted a voice well. A voice brought people to the door, and the dark did the rest. She rose in the Velvet Throne by being polite. The Throne's business along the Nile was the soft kind, with no walls to climb and no names to hide, and Taseni became its best door-knocker. She learned to arrive at dusk, ask a small favor, and be asked in. She worked as a charmer, in the old sense, and her voice was worth more to the Throne than most swords. She made no fledglings. Her own maker had been destroyed in 2590 BCE by the very fledglings they had raised, and she had watched that evening from a rooftop, and drew the obvious lesson. Instead she kept a tidy ledger of household names, favors owed and doors that opened easily. People called her the Wretched Herald in the villages, and she thought the name rather sweet. The Vigil had hunted her kind for through all of The First Night, which the Vampireverse remembers as its long dusk, and every vampire slayer it sent had come like a hero, alone and loud, and she had always outlasted them. That was why Mennefi Senankhet unsettled her. After that night at Renrameni the soldier did not come after her. The soldier went to the villages. She heard of it first as a rumor of salt on thresholds, then as something she saw herself, a line of a dozen men and women with hide shields set shoulder to shoulder at a ford, drilled by a figure in a dusty veil, waiting for her at the water's edge like a row of patient cattle. She tried to talk her way around them. She tried the dark. Both times the line took the blow, lost a rank and re-formed, and both times she noticed the soldier's voice, hoarse and without any flourish, calling the count. She grew to dislike the count more than the shields. It was a plain, steady voice, and it had answers to everything she tried. When she sent two of the Throne's younger hands up the river to burn a signal fire on a village roof, the veiled soldier had a second fire lit within the hour and a rank waiting under it. She resented this and, in the way that long-lived enemies do, she began to respect it. The Throne wanted the matter closed, and its own scribes, who kept the tally of her failures, reminded her that she was a hundred years into a trade that could stand losing a house but not a road. So they met a last time in 2546 BCE at Tarenu, where the grain barges tied up. She came at night with the Mantle already spread around her and her voice quiet, and for a time it worked. The torches went out, and the first rank lost three people to the dark. She heard the soldier's count falter, then take hold, and she walked straight into the gap that opened because she had always been able to walk into gaps. What she had not allowed for was that the soldier would step out of the line, alone, for the only time in the whole war. The ash-wood shaft was in her heart before she had finished the sentence she was saying. She was a hundred and thirty-two years old. The Throne's scribes struck Taseni Tahorra's name from the ledger that season, and her seat at the table was filled within the year. A ferry boy at Tarenu found a thin silver anklet in the mud by the landing, and sold it for a loaf of bread.