Tuas Tutarzius could not fight, and he knew it, which is more than can be said for most of the vampires of his time. He was born in 2325 BCE at Tuyaa, a harbor settlement on the Anatolian coast in what is now Turkey, the son of a boatwright, and he grew into a narrow, stooped, nearsighted man who preferred a patient with a fever to a quarrel with a sword. As a vampire he stayed that way. His strength was ordinary, his temper was mild, and in any contest where the other party swung first he lost ground. In The First Night, a man who sets out to be a scientist among killers either learns to hide behind his work or to make the work his weapon. Tuas did both, in that order.
He was also bad at silence. He could not stop counting. This began in the physician's trade, where a good healer takes a pulse against the sun's shadow and a count of breath, and it went on being useful for years: he knew a hundred remedies from the marsh herbs of the coast, and he knew how long each took. Tuyaa trusted him with its children. But the counting went on in his head even when he was not working, in the dark, in the middle of conversation, a slow dry tally at the speed of his own heart. It was nearly his only vice. His acquaintances found it restful. It was to prove the most expensive habit he had.
He was bad, too, at being left alone, and that is how the Velvet Architect found him. In 2286 BCE, when Tuas was thirty-nine, a stranger came to his door late with a wound across the ribs, and the physician cleaned it, and by the time the lamp had burned down the edges had closed. Shaa Arrutias, who was a vampire and by then a very old one, asked whether the herbalist wished to learn how. It was not a bribe or a threat. The Winter Brood wanted a man of exactly his talents, and Tuas, who had spent a life fighting fevers he could not beat, said yes before he had asked what it would cost. He was made a vampire that night. Shaa Arrutias is alive today, and Tuas never saw his sire afterward without feeling slightly the junior, which may be why the Bloodless Architect took an alias that borrowed the older vampire's trade.
After that came what he was good at. He was good at noticing. A physician learns to see what a patient is not saying, and a vampire scientist learns the same of a town. He drew up the movements of watchmen and grain-carts in the back rooms of Tuyaa, timed the hours of the lamps, and kept a quiet record of who slept where, in marks he scratched onto potsherds. He designed houses and hiding places the way he had once designed poultices: for a purpose, with a few cheap materials, with no mercy for waste. His body gave him the Heartbeat Step. It was a burst of speed that fell into a single beat, one long stride in which the world seemed to hold still, and left a smear of air behind him. It cost him dearly. His heart stuttered after it, and the narrow chest ached for a day, and he needed to feed sooner than he liked.
In 2274 BCE he traveled to the Levant coast for balsam and cedar resin, which he wanted for his work, and at a harbor there he met a young trader's son, Yahashon Eltiron, who was dying of a wasting fever. Tuas could not cure it. It was the only failure of his life he could not forgive. He made the young man a vampire instead, as a physician might cut a limb, and the Vampireverse remembers the boy afterward as the Ivory Tyrant. He is alive today, and does not speak of the arrangement. Tuas wrote to him once a year by ship, and the letters were never answered.
His war with Shatias Mushaili, the Ashen Wall of the Vigil of Anatolia, began in 2256 BCE in a stone grain-store at Arzias, a trading town in the hill country. He had gone there to look over a store of grain; a vampire slayer was standing in the doorway with an oxhide shield, and she did not move. He stepped, and the air smeared, and she met it with the shield as though she had known where he would land. She had. He left by the roof, bruised, trying to work out how a creature of no great speed had guessed. It took him several nights, and he was a man who counted, and when he found the answer he was ashamed. She could hear him think. She could hear the count.
For twenty-two years he tried to stop it. He tried counting in a foreign tongue and counting backwards. He tried singing, and a verse of the marsh songs, and reciting the names of herbs. Each worked for an evening, and then the habit returned, because it was how his body knew where it was. He also built houses without a single threshold she could salt, and she learned to lay the line a pace inside the door. They were evenly matched in patience and unevenly in everything else. She was a better fighter than he was and he was a better thinker than she, and the war ground on in the harbor towns of the coast.
It ended for Tuas Tutarzius at Arzias in 2234 BCE, in the same grain-store, rebuilt. He knew the doorway was salted, and he came anyway. It was the one decision of his life he took without a count. She stepped aside in the dark at the number he had been unable to stop, and her ash-wood stake went home. He was ninety-one, and had held the role for fifty-two years. His potsherds, scratched with the movements of a dozen harbor towns, were found in a jar in the grain-store roof, and a woman who sold salt to the Vigil is said to have kept one for a measuring weight.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
