Tirhaa Zinzinzinim

Tirhaa Zinzinzinim, the Weeping Mask, was a temple-town physician made into a vampire who treated speed as a problem to be measured. A surviving day-book in her own hand lets her tell most of her story, and her enemy, a marsh hunter, tells the rest.

The day-book survives in nineteen fired tablets, wrapped in reed matting and sunk in the cistern of a storehouse at Baalon, where somebody put it, probably in a hurry, in the final hours of 2476 BCE. It is in the hand of a trained physician. The script is small and level, with a habit of ending each entry on a dry line of accounting. The first tablet begins with a list of remedies. The last ends in the middle of a sentence. What follows is Tirhaa Zinzinzinim, the Weeping Mask, as the tablets give her, with the gaps filled from the records of the Silent Court and from the memory of the one person who knew her smell. She was born in 2567 BCE in Tiryaha, a temple town in the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, and her first entries are written in the age the Slayerverse calls The First Night, by a young woman who trusted her own instruments. "Hyssop in warm wine for the cough of the weavers' quarter. Three recover, one does not. Note the one." She noted everyone who did not. The temple employed her to tend the poor in the lanes below the walls, because the priests did not like to, and she kept the tablets because she believed that sickness behaved by rules and that rules could be written down. A scientist, in the sense the word could bear in her day. She counted pulses, timed fevers by the burning down of a measured oil lamp, and wrote down what failed with more care than what worked. In her thirty-second year she wrote, plainly, "I will understand why they die." The entries stop for a gap of twelve days in 2532 BCE. The day-book resumes in the same hand, a little smaller. "Ambushed on the road from the salt pans, struck down, left. A man found me. Did not leave." The man was Tira Ashkamelai, the Gaunt Mask, of the Silent Court, who made her at thirty-five and then, to her visible irritation, hovered around her for a season as if he expected thanks. She did not give any. The Court, which preferred its members to be useful, found that Tirhaa Zinzinzinim could be. It set her to cure its dying and its dead alike, and she did not refuse. She would have said she was more interested than anything else. The sire went on to a long life in the Levant. A slayer destroyed him in 2381 BCE, after the day-book was long buried. The entries now turn to what the body could do. Her great discovery was in her legs. Within a year she could cross a courtyard faster than a man could take a breath, and she measured it, the way she had measured fevers. "Crossed the temple court in less than one beat of the heart, my own. Stopped. Vomited. Hungry for two days." The Vampireverse's chroniclers call it the Blur Road, and she called it a rate. Super speed was the principal gift and sharp senses a lesser one, so that she could pick one sick child out of a crowded lane by smell and by the sound of the breathing. She was too busy collecting to explain either gift to anyone. By her own tally she kept thirteen informants inside the town wardens of the coast, a baker, two gatekeepers, a ferryman, and others, and rarely met them twice. The tablets treat all of this in the same dry hand. There is no remorse in them and very little cruelty. On a rainy night in 2487 BCE the notes change. "Called to a child in the reed village, Alashai. Fever, not mine. Myrrh and hyssop, a cool cloth. Door opened. A man with an ox-shield and a stake, smelling of marsh and bitter leaves. Struck him once, from the side. Ribs. Left. Child sleeping." It was the first time she had met Zinai Ashsidtiron, the Cold Bell, and she did not record his name, only his nose. He had been following her scent for weeks. She had known it for most of them. "He stands at a door a long breath before he opens it. This is new." She wrote nothing about what she felt, but the following entry is a list of nine new masking resins. The hunt ran for eleven years. What she calls "the marsh problem" occupies more of the day-book than any other subject. It cost her. She had to abandon the town network twice, and the Court, which was prepared to lose a physician but not a road, grew impatient. In 2480 BCE a second nose appeared, a young man from the east, silent and shield-bearing, who followed the first. "Two noses now. Neither will be fooled twice. I can outrun one but not both." She tried masking herself with smoke and then with dung, and the marsh problem went on turning up at her doors. She began, in the margins, to record sunrise times. The last full entry is short, and I have not been able to read it without hearing something in that level hand. "Baalon. The storehouses face east. This is a mistake of the builders, not mine. I will stay in the north room until the light is gone and cross the yard before it comes. If I cannot cross it fast enough this is, I note, a data point." The day-book ends there, mid-line, on the nineteenth tablet. The rest belongs to the Cold Bell. He found her in the courtyard at dawn in 2476 BCE, after two weeks of tracking by smell, with his oxhide shield angled to take the light, and he herded her out of the last shade into it. She was ninety-one. A vampire slayer needs only the dawn, and the sun, which she had spent decades measuring as a limit, did the work, and the stake followed. The tablets were found when the cistern was cleaned out in a later age, and they are now kept in a temple archive on the coast. The final line, the one that breaks off, reads in full: "Note for tomorrow: the hyssop is nearly gone, and the child at Alashai should be seen."