Tira Ashkamelai

Tira Ashkamelai, the Gaunt Mask, was a tomb-robber turned vampire thief of Lebanon's Levant, made in 2909 BCE and destroyed in 2381 BCE after five centuries of night markets and borrowed doors. The marsh people had a story about his face. The truth was smaller and worse.

The marsh people of Raalalim said that Tira Ashkamelai had been born without a face, that the mask was all he had, and that if you ever saw it slip you would forget your own name. It is a good story and it was told for thousands of years in the reed villages of the Levant, and nearly every part of it is wrong. He was born in 2952 BCE to a net-mender and a woman who sold eels, with a perfectly ordinary face that his mother called plain. The mask came later. It was made of plastered reed, shaped over a clay mould, and he made it himself because the face under it had stopped looking like anyone's. The only part of the rumor that holds is the last: people who saw him without it did tend to be unavailable for questioning afterward. Raalalim was a marsh village in what is now Lebanon, built on mounds of old reed and silt, and the boy who grew up there learned two things early. One was how to walk across ground that would not hold a heavier child. The other was that the desert road beyond the marsh was lined with graves, and graves had things in them. By his teens he was a tomb-robber, a thief with a good ear for hollow floors, and by his thirties he was a competent one who kept his tally on a knotted cord: a knot for every grave, a different knot for every grave that had been worth the trouble. He wanted a long life with a roof over it. He did not want to die in a marsh bed coughing, as his father had, and when the fever came to him in his forties he went looking for another way. The way was Baa Elashbaon, the Bloodless Judge, who held court in a cistern-hall on the coast. Tira walked there in 2909 BCE, aged 43, and asked for the bite the way another man might ask for a loan. The Judge heard him through. Baa was in the habit of sitting very still while people talked, and the stillness was the entire reputation. The cost was not mentioned in advance, and when it came, over three nights of fever that was nothing like the marsh one, Tira found that his hunger had changed shape and that his face, in the black water of a cistern, had gone narrow and bony and grey at the edges. He took the Silent Court's name and its rules, and in time the title The Gaunt Mask, which he pretended to dislike. Sentences were passed there in gesture and never in words, which suited a man who had spent his life listening at tomb floors. He made the mask that winter. His gift was the Pale Drift. It was a trait of the body, nothing more mysterious than that. His flesh could loosen, for a count of perhaps thirty breaths, into a cold pale haze that slid under doors, along ceilings and through the gap between a guard's shield and his shoulder. It cost him dearly. Afterward he was brittle and ravenous and unable to feel his hands for a while, and he could not drift in sunlight at all, which was the first of the two things he truly feared. The second was a slayer's mark laid on the skin, a notched edge or a burned sign that raised a wound which would not close. He knew both well. He thieved the way he had always thieved, with patience, but now there were no locked rooms. In The First Night a thief with a lasting body had few rivals. By the middle of his long life Tira Ashkamelai ran the night market at Zinashath, a spread of lamp-lit stalls behind the grain wharves where a buyer could find stolen grave goods, stolen grain and, for a price, a stranger's name. He made two childer. Zia Kukuili came in 2603 BCE in the hill country of Anatolia, where he had gone to sell a hoard of carved bone, and was a duelist who liked a crown and a crowd, and who was sealed away in 2570 BCE, 33 years after she was made. Tirhaa Zinzinzinim followed in 2532 BCE in the Levant. Tira taught the Weeping Mask his craft of reed and plaster, and lost the pupil to hunters in 2476 BCE. He kept their two knots on his cord beside the graves. Each was cut shorter than the others, he would have said, by the thickness of a thumb. Kaena Babahaon, the Stone Warden and a vampire slayer of the plainest sort, arrived in 2387 BCE. He noticed her before she noticed him. She was a broad woman in her thirties who came into the market with a barge-guard's rolling walk and a plain copper dagger, and who stopped at a factor's door and did something odd, which was to wait. He went through that door as mist, as he had gone through a thousand. She cut the mist. The dagger had three notches filed along the edge, and where they touched the back of his hand when he re-formed, the skin opened and stayed open and went on weeping. He had been cut before. He had not been cut by somebody who looked so unbothered about it afterward. For six years he had a rival, and he found that he missed having one. It was tiresome, because she did not frighten and she did not stop, and it was something else because she was usually right. She guessed the cistern at Raalalim, the tomb on the desert road, the empty storeroom where he left a spare reed mask on a peg as a joke and found it gone on his return. He admitted, in his way, that he respected her. He told no one. He took to counting her mistakes on a separate cord and discovered it was very short. The end came in 2381 BCE at Zinmelath, where the brine pans lay open to the sky. The salt traders owed him a debt and he went to collect it at dawn, thinned and low across the water, because the pans were flat and the screens that shaded them hid the horizon. He heard a noise like a bark, two rising notes and then a command. Forty ropes pulled. The screens tore off together and the sun came flat across the water, and the drift would not hold. He took a body because there was nothing else to take, and the skin on his face lifted in sheets under the mask, and she was already there, breathing hard, with the dagger. The Silent Court's record gives his age as 571 and his time in the Vampireverse as 528 years, and calls it an avoidable mistake. Baa outlived his childe by 23 years and was destroyed by an unnamed hunter in 2358 BCE. At Zinashath the stalls reopened within the month under somebody else. The cord went with a trader to the coast and was sold as a curiosity, forty-three knots, one of them still tied tight around a small clay bead from a grave that had not been worth the trouble.