Urkium Meshluir

Urkium Meshluir, the Stone Arrow, was a marsh thief from Mesopotamia who became a vampire slayer in 1639 BCE after killing a vampire with a table leg. She hunted five vampire lords in the Bronze Vigil, and her life survives mainly in one marsh ballad and a school tablet.

Most of what is known about Urkium Meshluir comes from a ballad that the marsh people of southern Mesopotamia sang for centuries, and which a scribe at Enzuun copied onto a schoolroom tablet, mistakes included, when it was already old. The tablet is cracked across the middle. The copyist wrote her name three different ways in sixty lines, and the ballad itself contradicts the records of the Vigil of Mesopotamia in at least two places, but its bones are sound and the rest of this account follows them. It begins, as these things do, with a marsh girl and a debt. "In Galgalbaa on the reed mound / a girl was born with a quick hand, / she took the eel from the weir at night / and the weir-man's wife slept on." Urkium was born there in 1664 BCE, in a marsh village in what is now Iraq, on a mound of packed reed that sank a hand's breadth every year and had to be rebuilt. Her father owed barley to a grain-house at Enzuun, and the debt grew faster than the mound sank. She learned the bow for waterfowl, with a reed-shafted hunting bow that was her mother's, and she learned to steal from the same instinct that made her a good shot: she watched what other people stopped watching. She chewed lumps of bitumen like gum, which annoyed everyone she lived with, and she said it kept her teeth from chattering when she was working at night. "She went to Enzuun with an empty sack / and a debt to pay by the moon, / and a man said, Lift me a seal of stone / from a broker's strongroom floor." The commission came in 1639 BCE from the very grain-house that held her father's debt. A steward offered to wipe it out if she could take one small cylinder of dark blue stone from the strongroom of a broker who had bound the house to a string of ruinous contracts. The seal, rolled in clay, made those contracts valid. Without it, the steward argued, they were only mud. She was twenty-five, and she took the job because a clean slate was worth a few hours of risk. She did not ask who the broker was. He was Sardama Sarzua. The ballad is least reliable about what happened in the strongroom, and the singer plainly improved it. The tablet says a clerk was at his table in the dark and that the clerk was not what he seemed. She had no time for subtlety. The table had come apart at one corner and a leg was loose, and she took the leg and used it. Whatever the clerk was, a vampire, a creature that fed on blood and kept the broker's books, he did not leave the room. The Vigil's elders, who gave her the name the Stone Arrow after her bow and her aim, heard of it from a priest the next morning and took note, because nobody had killed one of the Obsidian Choir's clerks with a broken piece of furniture before. The ballad says: "She took the leg of the table / and counted him out in three." This was the start of the war between them, in 1639 BCE. Sardama came down the stairs while she was still in the room. He did not speak; he broke into a storm of dark wings that filled the strongroom from wall to wall, and she went out through the roof hatch with the seal in her fist and the swarm after her over the canal roofs of Enzuun. At the edge of the town, where the reed margin begins, she fell into the water. That was when the gift woke. A charge she had stored without knowing it, in the way a dry fleece stores static, went out of her hand in a blue arc through the wet reeds, and the swarm behind her dropped into the water in a smoking line. The ballad calls this the Vow, since she had sworn aloud, as she ran, to answer for every death in the broker's ledger. The Slayerverse's Vigil called it Chain Lightning Vow and noted that it jumped from body to body, so that a swarm was no safer than a single man. Urkium Meshluir spent the next twenty-seven years in the Vigil of Mesopotamia, a vampire slayer of the Bronze Vigil who was still a thief at heart. It was a thin life for a thief, with no pay, but the debt at Enzuun was gone and so was the grain-house, because Sardama's contracts failed with the seal. The gift was an expensive one. Every use left her palms blistered, her hair on end and her teeth ringing, and she could not call it twice in a day. She learned to carry it as a hunter carries a loaded bow, with reluctance. She hunted five vampire lords out of the cities of the river country. She did it without a mentor and without an apprentice, a tomb-thief's habit of preferring her own company, and the ballad has less to say about those years than about the first. "He came with the wings of a thousand moths / to buy his stone back dear, / She said, I'll sell it at the grain-house door, / and he said, I'll come alone." In 1638 BCE, a year after the table leg, she sent word that she would sell the seal at Enzuun, in the abandoned grain-house, at dusk. He came. The Vigil's account is plainer than the ballad: she stood on the threshold with her bow strung, he broke apart, and she let the charge run through the swarm until the bodies had no choice but to rejoin in front of her. She put a hand to his neck with the Vigil's mark pressed into the palm, and she put an arrow tipped with silver into his chest. He was seventy-three. The ballad has him cry out. The Vigil's account says only that he looked, at the end, annoyed. She kept the seal. It hung on a cord around her neck until she died in 1612 BCE, at fifty-two, in Galgalbaa, in a house built on a mound that had been raised three times in her lifetime. The tablet closes with a stanza no one has been able to date: "The stone is blue, the stone is cold, / it sits where the reed-wives keep it." A woman of the village still rolled it across wet clay for children on feast days, so they could see the two small figures cut into it, facing one another with spears.