Weifeng Bo

Weifeng Bo, the Cold Lance, was an Exo-Human spy and vampire slayer of the Yellow River Basin who could see a vampire's wrongness across a market. Called in 1402 BCE, he worked in three places that mattered, and the last one killed him in 1388 BCE.

Weifeng Bo worked in three places in his life that anyone bothered to write down, and he used to say each one had taught him a different way of not being noticed. The first was a ferry landing, the second a lord's kitchen, the third a salt road. He was good at all three, and in the end he became a vampire slayer who was better at listening than at the sickle. In the Slayerverse's records for the Bronze Vigil he is listed as a spy, and the Vigil of Yellow River Basin gave him the name of the Cold Lance because he sat so still for so long and then went in so straight, and he was never quite sure whether it was a compliment. He was deaf in his left ear from a childhood blow with a ferry pole, and so he turned his right ear to everybody, which made them believe he was listening with unusual care. He was. The landing was at Fengweitang, the river village where he was born in 1428 BCE in what is now China, a place of two hundred roofs and a toll post on the west bank where every barge from upriver paid in millet, cowries or bronze fishhooks. His father poled the ferry and Weifeng, as a boy, kept the tally on knotted cords, which taught him that people will tell a clerk anything provided he looks bored. By his teens he could tell from the sound of a hull on the mud how heavy a cargo was and from the sound of a voice how much its owner was lying. What he wanted was nothing remarkable: to buy back the strip of field his mother had lost to a debt, and to be left alone with a dry roof. He ate standing and never sat with his back to a door. The second place was the lord's hall at Zhuxi, a walled town two days downriver, where he went at nineteen to work as a kitchen hand and quickly became the person a certain sort of official came to for what the servants knew. He was a court informant in all but title, paid in grain and in being left unhanged. It was in the hard winter of 1402 BCE, at the age of twenty-six, that the gift arrived. The wells in the lower quarter froze with a streak of red through the ice. The town said it was iron in the water. Weifeng stood over the well and felt, for the first time, a gap in the world, as though the whole scene had been painted slightly out of true: the people on the lane had edges that lagged a hair behind their bodies, like a reflection in a bowl of water that does not match the face above it. It was the thing the Vigil called Wrongness Sight, and it showed him, within a week, three people in the lane who were not what they appeared. He understood what the red was before anyone else did. There was no mentor and no teacher, and he did not look for one. He took a sickle-sword of bronze down from the hall's armoury, a hooked, ugly thing meant for cutting reed, and learned it on the riverbank at night. The sight cost him. It arrived as a metallic taste on the tongue and a pressure behind the eyes that deepened with each thing he looked at, and in a crowded market he could do nothing but stand with his hand over his face. He learned to look in glances and to keep his back to the sun. In 1396 BCE it showed him a woman in the hall's scullery who was wrong in a way he had not seen before, the lag at the edges so wide the whole figure seemed to be a drawing of a person drawn from memory. She carried a kitchen knife and a basket of leeks. She was there for the steward, a heavy man named Ran Qi, who had refused something to the Velvet Circle, and she was in the middle of a thin smile when Weifeng stepped between them with the sickle-sword low. He hit her twice, in the ribs and across the forearm. She hit him back once, hard enough to put him through the pot-rack, and then she was gone through the window, and he lay among the broken crockery watching the wounds he had given her close as he stared. That was how he met Weitang Shu, the Weeping Tide, and the first time he had ever seen a cut seal itself. The third place was the salt road to Qinyu. Her trail ran up a mountain track to a shrine on a ledge, the one she had been born at, and in 1392 BCE he went up it in the character of a salt-carrier with a pack frame and a bad cough, which in the cold air was not hard to manage. He found a lodge behind the shrine where something lived. It was empty that morning. He spent two nights in the neighbouring huts listening, and on the third day, with the lodge door open and the sill bare, he drove twelve iron nails into the threshold, as the Vigil's old tally-keepers recorded they could be used against her kind, one every hand's width, and he laid a slayer's ash mark across the lintel with his thumb. It cost him a month's grain to buy that much iron from a northern trader. It was the best thing he ever did and he knew it would not be forgiven. It was not. She came for him at the first place, which had been the one place he would not defend. In 1388 BCE, at forty, he went back to the Fengweitang landing because his father was dying and the toll cords needed a hand, and he took the clerk's stool for the last time. On the second evening a fog came off the river, thick and cold. His sight showed him nothing on the bank, and nothing on the road. He watched the water. The wrongness did not come from the bank at all. The planks under him shuddered, a hand came up between them, and she took him by the ankle and pulled him off the stool and into the shallows. He cut her three times before the river closed over his face. He did not cut her enough. Weitang Shu killed him there at the landing, with his father's ferry pole lying across the mud. They buried Weifeng Bo on the east bank, near the post where he had kept the tally, and the Vigil of Yellow River Basin sent a woman to say the words and take the sickle-sword. The village kept the knotted cords on a peg for some years after, and a boy who was good with numbers was told he had a clerk's hands. Weitang Shu outlived him by four hundred and thirty-two years and was destroyed in 956 BCE, in a flood at the mountain shrine; nobody at Fengweitang noticed the date. Whoever sat at the landing next found a notch in the toll-post, at about the height of a man's right ear, where he had leaned his head to listen.