Urbaes Miardbaius

Urbaes Miardbaius, the Crowned Tide, was a temple astronomer of the Persian Plateau made a vampire in 2163 BCE, who ruled the night market of Ramiares and never hurried. She killed the slayer Shaardius Rarabaush in 2125 BCE and vanished in 1806 BCE.

Never run: that was the whole of Urbaes Miardbaius's creed, and she held to it through nearly four centuries. A person who runs shows you what they are afraid of, and a person who walks shows you nothing. She taught the rule to everyone who worked for her, and she was tested on it only once that mattered, in 2132 BCE, in the doorway of her own house, with a marsh-man's boot kicking away the clay that held back the river. The water came across the threshold in a sheet. It took the skin from the soles of her feet. She stood in it for a count of three, because she was too proud to jump, and then she walked out of the market with her chin up and her blue-bead circlet straight, and nobody who watched her go would have guessed she was in agony. She did not run. It cost her a month of lying in a closed room while the flesh grew back. She had been born in 2189 BCE at Faraures, a river village on the Persian Plateau, in what is now Iran, to a family who kept the village sluices and measured the river's rise with knotted cords. It was dull work that required exactness. She was good at it. The temple at the nearest town took her at fourteen to help the astronomers, and she was a scientist in everything but the word: she kept the star-tables, compared them against the flood records, and noticed that the two disagreed in a pattern. At twenty-five she was close to publishing the pattern, so far as anyone published things then, and she was engaged to a man who held the next office up the temple ladder. The man took her tables, put his own name on them, and married someone else. She spent a winter not eating, and not speaking much, and the village thought she would die of it. She was twenty-six in 2163 BCE when a caravan came up from Mesopotamia on the Zagros road, carrying tin and lapis. With it came Ludamum Damsarir, the Hungering Duelist, a long-lived person who fed on blood and who had followed the caravan the whole way up the mountains because he had heard there was a clever woman at Faraures with nothing left to lose. He asked her a plain question. She said yes. He did not stay. Within the season he went back down the road, and she never learned how it ended for him; she had no reason to think him dead. She was left with a new body, a very sharp mind and a faint sweet smell in her sleeves. Urbaes Miardbaius rose, in the Vampireverse, with the speed of someone who had finally been allowed to work at her own pace. The Gilded Line, a house that dealt in tin, favours and information, took her into its ranks, and she took the night market of Ramiares from the previous steward without raising her voice. The market stood on a terrace above the river, lit by torches, selling dyes, beads, tin, bitumen and gossip, and she ran it for something like fourteen decades. Her title was the Crowned Tide. The circlet of blue stone beads was a joke at first, then a signature, and the people of Ramiares noticed that the crowds around her rose and fell on an invisible schedule. Her house had a stone channel across the threshold, fed from the river and dammed with clay, a thing she explained to nobody. Running water at a doorway was the one thing that she could not cross, and she had learned it from an accident with a bucket. Her gift was called Knit-Flesh, and it was a trait of the body, like a rare healing disposition taken to an extreme. A cut closed in a few breaths. A broken finger set itself in the time it took to say a short prayer. It was not painless and it was not free, because every wound she mended left her ravenous afterwards, and a bad one left her shaking for a day. She had a second thing, which she disliked to talk about, a way of laying her will on the blood of another person so that it stopped moving. It left her with a nosebleed and a pounding head. She used it only a handful of times in her life. In 2132 BCE, in the age later called The Bronze Vigil, a slayer came to Ramiares, a big man in a levy cloak with an olive-wood stake, and drove it into her chest in the middle of the market. It was a good thrust. She told him, mildly, that it was the wrong wood, and she drew it out and let the wound close. She had underestimated him by one detail. He was a marsh-man, and he looked at her doorway and saw a dam. When the water came, she walked, and she hated him for a month. When she could stand she did what she always did, which was to think. She had the channel rebuilt with a sluice and paid the keepers upriver to close it in the dry months. After that her threshold was safe, except in the wet. He came back in 2125 BCE, in the driest week of the year, and found her standing in the doorway waiting. He was Shaardius Rarabaush, the Storm Warden, a vampire slayer of the old school who answered to nobody. She respected him in the way one respects a good river. He took her by the wrist with a grip that could have cracked a ledge, and she looked at him and stopped the blood in his arm. She held it, with her own blood running from her nose, while the arm went white and the other followed. He was thirty-nine. He fell across the threshold without a word, and she stepped over him and walked out into the market, and she did not hurry. Her only child in the blood was made on the Indus road, in 1998 BCE, at a trading post in the plain of the great rivers. Bhaa Yuviini, the Sable Vespers, was a clever and difficult woman who was destroyed in 1971 BCE, and Urbaes did not go to see it. She kept running the market. The Gilded Line prospered, and she lived by the habits she had always had: one meal a week, a daily walk through the market, and one hour a night with her star-tables, which she never stopped keeping. She was three hundred and eighty-three years old in 1806 BCE when she vanished. The stalls opened that evening and there was no steward at the head of them. Her house stood empty, the clay dam intact, the channel behind it dry and clean, and a bowl of still water set on the sill with nothing spilled. No one has seen her since.