Wei Xiu

Wei Xiu, the Ivory Architect, was a temple courier turned spy and vampire of the Obsidian Throne, who built night markets and houses in the Yellow River country so that every corner had a dark one nearby. He lived 71 years and was undone by water, fire and one patient woman.

On a peg beside the door of every house Wei Xiu ever lived in hung a plumb line: a flax thread weighted with a bead of ivory the size of a barley grain. He checked it each dusk, before he did anything else, and if it hung off true he had the floor taken up. Servants found this tiresome and said so among themselves. The habit was older than his troubles with the Vigil, older than his making, and had begun in the lean years of his youth when he carried messages between mountain shrines and learned that the one thing in a building that could not be argued with was gravity. Almost everyone who met him afterward in the dark remembered the peg first and the man second. He was born in 2872 BCE at Jiabobo, a mountain shrine in the Yellow River Basin of China, in the quiet middle of The First Night, when the shrines were the nearest thing the valley had to archives. His mother cleaned the lamps. He was clever with his hands and with his tongue, and by his twenties he was a temple courier, running sealed bundles of tally-cords between shrines down in the plain, which meant that he knew every road and every priest's weakness, and that someone in a higher place noticed what he knew. The priests of the lower shrines paid him to tell them whom the upper ones favored, and the upper ones paid him to say who was selling the favors. He was a spy long before he understood that there was a war on, and the main thing he wanted was a house built exactly right. The war found him in 2839 BCE, at thirty-three, after a harvest feast. He had drunk a great deal of millet beer for a man who disliked being out of control, and he was put to bed in a back room of the shrine. He woke some hours later with a stranger seated at the foot of the pallet. The stranger was reading the tally-cords he had been carrying and correcting, without comment, the errors in his knots. This was Bo Bo, called the Hollow Judge, a vampire of long standing in that country. He had marked the courier because of the knots. Wei Xiu was made that night, and the account of it that he gave in later years was brief: that his sire had been tidy, had not apologized, and had afterward asked for the cords. Bo Bo took him into the Obsidian Throne and set him to the same work as before, only at night and with a greater range. Wei took naturally to it, and the Vampireverse's rolls list him plainly as a spy. A spy for the Throne carried messages no human could, and he learned quickly what the new body offered. Its gift for him was a rare physical trait, not of the muscles but of the eye and skin: in the dark his body took in light the way a dry cloth takes water, and the dark around him deepened until it was thick enough to step into. The Vigil, which never found a better word, called it Umbral Step. He could cross from one unlit corner to another in the time it took a lamp to gutter, if the corners were in sight of each other. He could not do it in a lit room. Afterward his hands went cold and shook for a count of thirty. He had to feed soon after, or the steadiness did not come back at all. The gift made him an architect, and the people of the valley, who admired his work and feared its purpose, called him the Ivory Architect for the bead on his string. A man who could use only unlit corners could, if he built the building, supply as many as he liked. In 2833 BCE he laid out the night market of Yufengqin: forty alleys, four hundred lamps, each lamp set low and each junction deliberately dim. Merchants who wanted discretion paid for stalls. Throne agents paid more. For nearly thirty years he ran it, and in all that time it never once failed to smell of pitch and roast millet cake. He liked it. He knew it was not a house, but he thought of it as a rehearsal. He met Yujia Ren in the market in 2806 BCE, on a night he had gone down to look at a leaking drain. A merchant's daughter had seen something she should not have, in a back storeroom, and he had not yet decided what to do about her. A drunk mercenary staggered into the middle of the alleys, dropped a bundle of reeds, asked the way to the wine, and then set the awning beside him on fire. He stepped into the nearest dark to deal with it and found her already there. He remembered afterward not the fire but his own annoyance: that anyone could be so stupid and so exact. His sleeve burned. The market burned until morning, with two hundred lamps out of the four hundred scorched, and the girl went home with the woman. He was told later that the mercenary was a vampire slayer of the Vigil, and called herself the Last Hound. He did not find that funny. Fire and water were what he had to fear, and she knew both; the Vigil of Yellow River Basin had passed her the lore, and she had tested it in the field. He withdrew to Hanzhao in 2805 BCE, a ferry town where the river ran wide and slow, and built the best house of his life over a millrace, with a hall that bent twice and a threshold laid exactly level. For the first time in his life he thought the proportions were correct. He was working on the third floor when he realized that the water under the sill was not the millrace's usual volume. It was the autumn evening of 2801 BCE. She had opened the sluice forty paces upriver so that the whole river ran under his doorway, and she waited at the sill with a skin of lamp oil and a reed arrow wrapped in pitch. He had known her by her scent from the road. At the door the running water stopped him, because it was the one threshold he could not step across, and he stood there with the plumb line in his hand long enough to see that it hung true. The arrow took him. He was destroyed at the age of 71, after thirty-eight years as a vampire, and the Obsidian Throne did not mourn him loudly. His sire Bo Bo outlived him by two hundred and twenty-eight years, until Fengbo Xiu, the Lantern Torch, destroyed him in 2573 BCE. The ferry people took the burned beams of the house for the miller's sluice, and the peg beside the door, which had survived, was hung with fishing line.