Tituili Armuili

Tituili Armuili, the Sleepless Marrow, was a river-village knife turned into an assassin of The Pale Table, who killed for Anatolia's great houses for nearly two centuries. His life survives in a toll-keeper's tablet and a boatmen's ballad, and both end at the same salt-white doorway.

The best surviving record of Tituili Armuili is not a chronicle. It is a clay tablet from the ford at Tarwaas, pressed by a toll-keeper who counted whatever crossed his river and had no reason to flatter anyone. Most of its lines are dull: oil jars, goats, bundles of reed, a woman and a calf. Partway down, in the same square hand, the keeper adds a column he did not need for his accounts. "One man crossed, paid nothing, owed by all." Further down it says again: "The same man, no splash." Whoever the keeper meant, he was careful not to name him, and that care is the closest thing to a portrait that survives from the villages. Everything else must be pieced together from the ballad the ferrymen sang, from what the vampire slayers of Anatolia wrote down afterward, and from the account of one cold night in 2639 BCE. The ferrymen's ballad runs to eleven verses, most of them about weather. In the Vampireverse, which is what his own side's few survivors called the vampire half of the war, he was spoken of as a tool that could be trusted to arrive, and nothing more. In the Slayerverse he was filed as a name on a roll, with a question mark where a face should have been. Tituili was born at Tarwaas in 2872 BCE, a river village in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, where the reed-houses stood on stilts and every shrine had its own price for a death. He grew into a hired knife for the river cults, which settled quarrels about water rights and debts by sending someone patient. His own want was plain and a little shameful: to be paid enough to stop. He never said what stopping meant. He carried a ferryman's pole-ring on a cord at his neck and hummed the boat song the ferrymen used for keeping stroke, flat and under his breath, whenever he was waiting for someone to finish dying. In 2837 BCE, when he was thirty-five, a fever took the lower village and the dead were laid in a pit outside Tarwaas. A vampire named Shaa Arrutias, whom the Anatolian houses called the Velvet Architect, came down to the pit looking for a knife rather than a courtier, and found one still breathing. Shaa made him. The details of it were never spoken in Tituili's hearing, and he never repeated them. What he did learn was what it cost. He lost sleep first. The Sleepless Marrow, the name the river cults gave him, was less a boast than a complaint, and for two hundred years he lay awake through the days in whatever cellar the Pale Table found for him, listening to the water. Shaa Arrutias, so far as anyone knows, is alive today. Tituili never made a childe of his own, and when asked, in the one account that records him being asked, he said one was a debt too many. In The First Night, when the great houses of Anatolia still bought and sold water, the Pale Table was a company of vampires who kept their quarrels at a table and settled them elsewhere, and Tituili became its assassin, which is to say its patience. His gift was Fogstep. He could loosen himself in a doorway into a low grey mist, a hand's depth of it, hold the shape of a man in the cold line it left on the floor, and cross a room or a courtyard at the speed of a slow walk before gathering into himself at his target's back. It was a poor gift in wind. It cost him the feeling in both hands for an hour afterward, and he preferred rooms with water in them. He worked cleanly, left no marks that a local could point to, and refused any job that involved a child in the house. In 2791 BCE, a grain-judge at the northern ford had a silver-handled seal that the Pale Table wanted gone. The judge was found at his own table with the lamp still lit, and the ballad has a verse about it that the singers always rushed. Tituili Armuili was never a talker, and the Table preferred him that way. By his own count and by the record, he worked for one hundred and ninety-eight years, and in that time he was never wounded badly enough to remember it. That changed in 2646 BCE at Latumuili, a caravan stop on the road north of Tarwaas. He had come for its keeper, a man who sold information, and found instead a thin informant with a stone-tipped spear who came through the door at exactly the wrong moment. Tituili went to mist as he always did. The spear went through the place he had been, and a hair of ash-shaft touched him as it passed, enough to leave a line across his ribs that ached for the rest of his life. That man was Muipa Watiipa, whom he came to call, in the quiet of the Pale Table's cellars, the donkey boy, the first of several wrong guesses about him. The seven years that followed were an education he had not asked for. Doors that had opened to him for centuries stayed shut. Salt turned up in lintels, in lamp-pans, along the sills of storerooms in villages where nobody should have thought of it. Messages that should have reached him did not. Muipa Watiipa, the Ember Sentinel, was hunting him with the roads themselves. Tituili came to respect it the way one respects a wet season, as a tiring fact. He began, for the first time in two centuries, to lie down by day and try to sleep, and failed, and kept trying. The end came in 2639 BCE at Yayashaas, a salt-pan settlement on the edge of a dry lake. He knew it was a trap, and he knew where the trap was, and he went anyway, because a hired knife who stops being willing to be hired has nothing else to do. The white crust held his mist like a bowl. At a back doorway he found a man with an ash-wood spear, and he had time to think that the man looked tired. He was two hundred and thirty-three years old. The tablet from the ford has one more entry in the keeper's hand, dated the following spring. "Ferry shut a day. The man who hums did not come back." Then the keeper counts a goat.