Tiwaus Arsharuus was poorly built for comfort, and he knew it. Crowds unsettled him. Thanks he took for a threat, and being owed money for a debt of another kind. He slept badly, long before he was a vampire, and worse after: the long-lived do not sleep much by day, but they must be indoors for it, and he had a nervous way of choosing a house with only one dark room and then checking the roof twice. He was bad at water, though he did not discover how bad until the end. Anyone who wants to understand him has to begin with this list, because nearly every good thing that can be said of him was made out of one of these failures.
He was born in 2925 BCE in Arzizia, a walled city-state in Anatolia, in the country that is now Turkey, and he spent his youth as a hired knife for the river cults, which in the first cities of the First Night meant settling arguments about who owned a ford. He did it cleanly and without relish. He could not stand loud killings and he did not like looking at faces, so he specialized in knowing where a person had been and when they would be alone. At twenty-five he took a job that sent him a long way from home. A client in the Levant, in the country now called Lebanon, wanted something delivered across the mountains, and Tiwaus went with the caravan: some three months with donkeys, the cedar coast at the end of it, and a stranger waiting in a terrace house above the harbor. The stranger was Baa Elashbaon, the Bloodless Judge, who had been alive, by his own account, since before the first walls of Arzizia were raised. Baa made him in 2900 BCE. Tiwaus never spoke of the bargain, and whether it was a bargain at all is not recorded. Baa stayed in the Levant and lasted until 2358 BCE, when an unnamed hunter finished him; the sire and the childe saw each other perhaps twice more.
What Tiwaus Arsharuus was good at, then, was being followed by nobody and following everybody. His gift was called Red Trail, and the Vampireverse has no finer name for it than that. A person who bled, even a little, left a line in the air that he could read the way a herdsman reads a track in dew. It did not fade with the afternoon. He could pick up one bleeding stranger in a crowded market and walk behind them by the line, up stairs, down alleys, through the door of a house, and wait. It cost him comfort. A fresh wound a street away felt like a hand on his collar, and in a battle he was half-blind with it. He kept to the quiet parts of the cities that the Velvet Throne held and worked, as an assassin, at night and mostly alone.
He was bad at being a teacher. In 2889 BCE he found a man dying on the edge of a field after a skirmish between two rival caravans, a tracker called Shaa Arrutias with a spear wound through the thigh, and he followed the trail of the man's blood for half a morning to get to him. He had not meant to make anyone. The sight of a man who would not stop talking while he bled to death made him do it, and then there was a new childe, forty-three years a mortal, who asked questions at all hours. Tiwaus answered with silence, and Shaa learned the rest from watching. Neither of them was ever sure who was the pupil. It was the worst piece of mentoring in the Velvet Throne and, by accident, it produced the one vampire of that generation who is still alive today.
He first met Yaa Shayaipa, the vampire slayer whom the caravans called the Thorned Sentinel, in 2888 BCE, in a courtyard at Pitara. The grain factor who owned the house had refused the Velvet Throne its tithe, and Tiwaus had spent the night in his loft. In the morning a woman with a stone-tipped spear came through the gate, crossed the courtyard before he could judge the distance, and put a blade along his ribs; he cut her forearm in return, went out through the tiles and was gone before she could turn. It was the first time that anything had ever been faster than the warning in his own body, and it unsettled him more than the cut. He admired her for about a day, the Cold Choir of the cult songs, as the river people called him. After that he tracked her.
For a year he followed her blood across Anatolia, and she became very annoying to follow. She washed wounds in streams. She bound them in resin and wool, and laid false trails of sheep's blood to bring him to nothing but a flock and a shepherd with a stick. Twice he stood outside her door in the dark and went away without knocking, though he could not have said why. She was the first enemy he had who changed her habits in response to his, and he found that he looked forward to the change. He did not call this respect. He called it a long and tiresome engagement with a tidy mind.
He should have been good at stopping, and was not. In 2871 BCE he went back to the same house in Pitara, because the grain factor's cellar was dry, quiet and had one dark room, and because it was the one place in the district where he felt anyone had ever tried to outwit him and failed. He did not see the drain. By the time he saw that water was running under the front step, loud and black and on the wrong side of the door, the tiles had been lifted off the roof above him, the rafters stood bare, and the first gray of morning arrived at the tiles. A man who cannot cross running water at a threshold, and cannot stand direct sunlight, has a short list of ways out of a room. Yaa Shayaipa had read it before he did. He was fifty-four, twenty-nine years in the Vampireverse, and when it was over his last thought, if it can be called one, was that the drain had been very neat work.
Shaa Arrutias kept a flat river stone that Tiwaus had given him, the only gift of Tiwaus's life, picked up in the bed of the Arzizia stream on some forgotten morning. He is said to have carried it for thousands of years, though it has never been shown to anyone.
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