Wei Han

Wei Han, called The Sworn Reaper, was a hill-fort spear-bearer on the Yellow River who became a vampire slayer in 2962 BCE and bent metal with a gift called Iron Hymn. She destroyed the broker Tangzhao Jia in 2946 BCE and died in bed three years later.

A ferry-song survives from the Yellow River Basin, eleven verses long, sung by the boatmen of the bend below Qinwei until the last of them died and then written down from memory by a granary clerk. It is the only continuous account of Wei Han, The Sworn Reaper of the Slayerverse's first generation, and it is wrong in the ways that songs are wrong, which helps, because the errors show what people wished had happened. The fourth verse runs: "Wei Han went to the crossroads with a copper knife and a bowl; she went to beg for barley, and she came back with a toll." The barley is true. The toll is the song's way of saying that she came home owing something to the Vigil of Yellow River Basin. Where the song and the shrine tallies at Qinwei disagree, this account follows the tallies, and says so. Wei Han was born at Fengqin in 2988 BCE, in a hill fort above the loess in what is now China, and she grew up inside walls of rammed earth that her grandmother had helped to pound. She became a soldier the ordinary way, at the headman's call, carrying a spear on the grain escort for the fort's three barges and sleeping with her boots on. The song makes her a general's daughter. She was the daughter of a net-mender. She wanted a field of her own on the river terrace, two rows wide, and she saved toward it for years in strings of shells. She also had a habit that puzzled her unit: she wore no metal anywhere, fastening her tunic with thorns and mending it with bone needles. The reason came later. In the autumn of 2962 BCE, aged twenty-six, she was sent to a crossroads shrine two days north to bargain for seed grain against a failed harvest. The shrine keeper was away. That night something came up the road and took the keeper's dog from its post, and Wei lay under the offering table with her heart going and watched the copper bowls on the shelf above her lift an inch off the wood and ring against each other, a high clean note she felt in her back teeth. Nobody taught her what that meant, and she never had a teacher. The song gives her an old woman who hands over an oath. The tallies give her a bruised jaw and a morning of being sick in the road. She stood at the shrine until sunrise anyway, with her dagger out, and that vow is where the name came from. The sworn part was her oath to hold. The reaper part was how the metal she threw came in low and wide, like a swung sickle. The gift she called nothing, and the Vigil called Iron Hymn, was a quirk of the body that no one could explain. Metal near her sounded: copper and the rare lumps of sky-iron as a hum, tin as a thin whine, a bronze blade as a chord. She could bend, pull and fling it by leaning into the note. A copper dagger could be kept at her wrist without a strap. A scale's worth of weights could rise in a spray. It cost her. Her hands cramped shut for hours afterward, and she bled from the nose, and anything she wore that was metal moved when she did not intend it to, which is why she had begun sleeping with thorns for pins. Her skill with a spear was ordinary, her strength was ordinary, and her feet were slow. She was a vampire slayer of The First Night because of one note and a lot of patience. In 2956 BCE, at the grain wharf of Jiaming, she met the vampire the songs call The Bloodless Hunger. Tangzhao Jia was arranging a purchase of the wharf's whole stock with the wharf-master, and Wei was there as an escort, three barges behind her, when the master turned to the barge crews and told them to put down their spears. He said it in a voice she half-recognized as her old sergeant's. Then she saw it was not coming from his mouth. It sat inside her own head, calm and reasonable, and it knew the sergeant's cough. She shut her eyes, which was her first useful instinct of the war: she had noticed that the voice stopped when the woman at the table went out of sight. With her eyes closed she called every copper weight off the wharf-master's great scale, forty of them, and sent them across the room in a spray. One split the vampire's brow. Tangzhao left by the river door, and the whole room woke up. It was the first time Wei understood she could be used for something. Tangzhao Jia was a broker, not a fighter, and she waged the war as a lender does. She bought debts, then grain, then silence. She took the heirlooms of the river towns as security against loans and kept fourteen strongrooms of them under three names, and when a town defaulted she sent in raiders she had paid for, so that the town needed to borrow again. Wei's work was to close the strongrooms and to stand in the gate. In the autumn of 2953 BCE she held the town of Yuhe through a night siege, walking its wall until dawn showed the besiegers gone, and in 2950 BCE she did the same at Dongchang, where the wall was only a ditch and three hurdles. The song says she held eleven such vigils. The tallies record three, counting Qinwei, and the fort at Fengqin sent no aid to any of them. The fight at Qinwei came in 2946 BCE, ten years after the wharf. The town had agreed to surrender its harvest to a purchaser, who turned out to be Tangzhao, and the exchange was set for the night so that the grain house could be loaded in the dark. Wei came in through the south gate at midnight with her dagger and a plan she called poor. The vampire's agents bolted the grain house doors from the outside, intending to keep intruders in, and so also kept their own mistress in once Wei took the gate. The two of them stood across the barley bins for hours, with the voice crawling at the edge of her skull, and Wei stood with her eyes shut and her back against a post. At first light she took hold of the note in the copper strapping on the shutters and pulled them off the wall, all four, with the hinge pins singing out of the wood. The sun came through in four bars. Tangzhao was not fast enough, and the light did the rest. Wei sat on the step of the grain house until the town came to look. She lived three more years. She went home to Fengqin with the strongrooms' contents on a cart, and the headman, who disliked being outdone, gave her the two rows by the river at last. She planted barley in them in the spring. In the winter of 2943 BCE a lung sickness came through the fort, as it did, and she was among the first to be carried to the fever house; she died at forty-five with her dagger on the shelf beside the bed, where the bronze of a neighbor's pot was humming softly at it. The last verse of the song has her dying at Qinwei on the gate step, with the sun on her face. The tallies disagree. On a late winter evening at Fengqin, a clerk recorded, the metal in the room went quiet, one piece after another, and the neighbors did not know why until the morning.