Tzian Ahzoli

Tzian Ahzoli, the Midnight Judge, was a hired knife of the river cults who was made a vampire on one bad night in 1851 BCE. He served the Winter Brood in Mesoamerica for thirty-two years and met his end at the hands of a thief with a sling.

On the night of his making Tzian Ahzoli was thirty-six years old, lying at the bottom of the lower stair of Xokukuic with a cult paymaster's spear in his back and the noise of the river in his ears. The year was 1851 BCE. A woman came down the stair with no torch and knelt over him and asked, in the voice of someone checking a price, whether he would like to keep going. He said he would. He had a good deal of unfinished business with the paymaster, who had decided that it was cheaper to have his best knife killed than to pay him. Tzian Ahzoli remembered the next hour badly and the following week well. Everything he afterward became was built on the fact that he said yes before he knew the terms. He had been born in 1887 BCE, in the age of The Bronze Vigil, in Xokukuic, a hill fort over a river ford in what is now Mexico, in the region later called Mesoamerica. It was a place for collecting tolls and for being looked down on by those who collected them. His father carried loads for the ford traders and his mother sold dried fish at the ford, and Tzian grew up large for his age and wanted nothing so much as a post on the wall, with a bench, a view and a ration of maize. The cults of the river valley gave him instead a job, and he was an assassin before he knew the word was needed. He carried their sentences out. A debtor would be named in the evening and found in the morning, and the cults called the knife that did it the Judge, a habit that stuck to him afterward in a way he came to enjoy: the Midnight Judge, they said, once the sun was down. At thirty-six he was the best they had and had begun to say so too loudly. The woman on the stair was Tzitl Yakal, and she made him her childe and her responsibility. She did not tell him so. Tzitl Yakal was not warm and he never expected her to be. She taught him in short, dry lessons what the body would now do and what it would not, and then she disappeared for years. He joined the Winter Brood, which took him because she had made him, and he stayed in it because there was nowhere better to be. The gift was Breaker's Blow: a strength in the arm and the shoulder that let him open a shield, a stone lintel or a skull with the heel of his palm. It cost him, too. Every time, something in the wrist cracked and knitted again within the hour, and he learned to hate the sound of it. A second gift, rarer, was that when he wanted to he could turn the cold of his breath outward, so that his shape thinned into a mist at the edges and a man looking straight at him might lose him for a heartbeat. His weaknesses he learned the hard way and kept to himself. Running water laid across a threshold stopped him as a wall would, and he could not step over it or stand in it. A slayer's mark laid on the skin never closed and ached whenever that slayer was near. In his first decade he made a point of walking around every doorway in the valley before he went through it. He tapped the post three times, looked down, and listened for a stream. It made him a slow guest and it never failed him until the week it did. In 1831 BCE he came to the water-gate of Cukal, a walled city-state, to collect on a cult debt, and stopped at the sill. There was a stone channel under it carrying a stream, and no way across but the way he did not want to go. He stood there long enough to be annoyed with himself, and then he turned to go around. There was a man waiting on the other side of the wall. He was not a large man, lean and quiet, a thief by the look of him, and in his right hand there was a spear whose point glowed from a brazier. The point went against Tzian's forearm before the arm was fully up. He broke the man's spear in two with the other hand and left. The burn stayed. He went on aching in it for twelve years, whenever the man was in the same town, and it was by that ache, more than any sight, that he learned the thief's name, Kukali Kukuan, whom Cukal's lower town was already calling the Burning Spear. It was an odd contest. Tzian could break a door in a breath and the thief would not be behind it. The thief seemed to prefer walls with water in them. Tzian once took a granary lintel apart with his bare hands, found nothing but a sling and a bowl of dried peas, and spent a long evening wondering what he had been meant to learn from that. He came to admire the man in the way one admires a bad knee in the weather: it was always right. What he wanted was to be rid of the thing and to go back home to Xokukuic, where the toll-keepers had changed three times and nobody remembered him. He saw his sire only three times in thirty-two years, and each time she asked him fewer questions. He was not sure whether he disappointed her. By 1819 BCE he was sixty-eight years old, which in the Vampireverse made him middle-aged, and he was tired. Any vampire slayer in the valley would have called him a veteran. He felt like a toll-keeper. The thief took a month to arrange it. Tzian went to Yamapali because a messenger told him a cult account lay there, and at the cistern house he stopped in front of a doorway with a stream crossing the sill, and for a moment he thought, quite clearly, that he had been expected. The silvered shot took his knee. The old burn on his forearm felt as though it had been laid there that morning. He swung once, and the doorpost went with the blow, and he was aware, in the last of it, of the thief's feet making no sound at all on the floor. The last thing he saw was the stream, still running across the stone, not troubling to change its course.