Tirasha Tirsidyahim

Tirasha Tirsidyahim, the Hollow Hand, was a harbor-born Stormer of the Levant who called up the ground against vampires for twenty years. He was bad at nearly everything a slayer is supposed to be good at, and he lasted until a river-country broker found the one place his gift would not work.

Tirasha Tirsidyahim could not wait, which was a poor fault for a slayer of The First Night. It was the first thing anyone at Bahaa said about him, and the last thing they said when they were being kind. Born in 2314 BCE in that harbor settlement on the coast of the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, he spent his boyhood on the quay and was a poor fit for the work of it. He could not sit through a netting day. He could not hold a count of jars in his head, and the harbor clerk, who tied knots in cord to keep his tallies, gave up trying to teach him. He was sick in any boat that left the breakwater. This is an awkward thing to be in a port town, and it made him sullen, strong and quick to take offense, the kind of young man who is given the heaviest end of every load because he will not put it down to complain. He was also bad at lying, at tracking, and at names. He forgot where he had put things. He sang one song, a coastal work chant about a fish that refused to be caught, and sang it badly, and refused to stop. He had a habit that frightened and then amused the older dockhands: when he was thinking hard he pressed the flat of his hand against any wall or post nearby, as if he expected it to tell him something. It would not, until it did. It did in 2292 BCE, when he was twenty-two. A trading ship came in at Bahaa with a dead crew and a cargo of untouched cedar. The harbor men would not go aboard. Tirasha went, because nobody could think of a reason to stop him, and in the hold he found a pale figure feeding on the last living sailor. He had no weapon but a boat hook. He put his hand against the planking out of habit, and the quay beneath the ship gave a long groan and rose under the hull like a wave of packed earth. It lifted the ship half off the water and split it down the keel. He had called up a mound, the thing the Vigil of Levant would later name the Barrow Rising, and it cost him two torn nails, a mouth full of grit, and the use of his legs for a day. He had no teacher. Nobody in that town knew what he had done, and the Vigil came to find him only when the rumor reached them up the coast. They gave him an olive-wood stake, a title, and the alias that stuck: the Hollow Hand, because his palm, they said, was empty right up to the moment it was not. What he was good at was breaking things, and the war gave him a use for it. The Slayerverse has always filed him as a stormer, one who goes through a door instead of knocking, and as a vampire slayer he was never subtle. The Barrow Rising raised the earth in a rough, hard heap, tall as a man's chest at its best, in less than the time it takes to draw breath. It could pin a vampire against a wall, shatter a door, turn an ambush into a trench, or crush a doorway shut. It worked best on rock, packed gravel and dry hillside. He was patient with nobody and he learned nothing from cord tallies, but he learned the ground the way other men learn faces, and over twenty years in the role he cleared the coastal towns of the Levant of a number of the brokers and factors of the vampire houses. The coast loved him for it and gave him no peace. People brought him their dead and their disputes. He was good at one other thing, and that was staying in the room. When the others of the Vigil retreated he did not. The olive-wood stake was not a clever tool, and he used it like a man hammering a tent peg, close in and with his whole weight. He took more wounds than any slayer of his generation, and the healers of Bahaa said his body had learned to close against a blow the way a door learns a frame. His long quarrel with Ninmeshun Kienir began in 2287 BCE, on the timber wharf at Bahaa. Ninmeshun was the Pale Hunger of the Salt Cabal, a river-trade broker from Mesopotamia, and he had come up the long caravan road from the Euphrates to buy cedar for the temples of his own country. The Levant and the river lands were a long journey apart, a season or more of donkeys, and Ninmeshun made the journey the way a man crosses a market. He was courteous and he did not feed in the town while he bargained. But a stevedore fell dead on the wharf, and on that evening Tirasha, who could not be told to wait, met him over the cedar stacks. The vampire's shape ran like wax, and for a few breaths there was fur and jaw where a merchant had been. Tirasha heaved the wharf up around him. They broke the timber and the stone. Ninmeshun left on the next ship with a loss and a bad opinion of the coast, and he remembered the man whose hand had been empty. For fifteen years the Hollow Hand heard of a factor on the river road who left a dry carter at each caravan stop. He could not leave Bahaa, he told the Vigil, and then in 2272 BCE he did, and went east with a caravan and a sack of olive stakes. He was forty-two. He reached Ursarir, the caravan stop where Ninmeshun had been born, after most of a season on the road, and found himself on a flat of river silt and mud brick. There was no rock. His mounds slumped like wet bread. He had never trained for that. He put his hand to the clay and got a low, useless swell, and the broker, who had been waiting for him on his own ground, did not need a reason to be gentle. The stake split on a rib. Olive is a soft wood, and ash would have held. Ninmeshun Kienir killed Tirasha Tirsidyahim that night, in 2272 BCE. The Vigil sent no one to fetch him. A carter from Ursarir took the olive stake and sold it for firewood, according to one story, and according to another, the Bahaa dockhands raised a mound of their own over an empty bed and nailed a fish to the nearest post.