Weiming Han

Weiming Han, the Hollow Arrow, was a harbor-town singer and talker who became a vampire slayer of the Yellow River Basin in 2866 BCE. With no teacher and no gift but her voice, she outwitted the Gaunt Sovereign in five years and outlived him by thirty.

The net-mender at Yufeng landing, an old woman called Auntie Lo, was the only person who saw it from the beginning, and she gave the same account to everyone who asked until she died. It was dusk in the autumn of 2866 BCE. A girl came down the bank from the shrine road with a grown man across her back, his arms hanging in front of her like a yoke, and she was singing. It was a harvest song, a stupid one, with a chorus about a goat, and she was singing it to keep him awake. At the top of the landing she put him down against a post and said something to him that Auntie Lo could not hear. He died a moment later. The girl closed his eyes and picked up the sickle-sword that lay beside him, and then she looked up the river, where a very tall, thin man stood on the far bank in the last of the light, perfectly still, and she raised her hand to him like a neighbor. That was Weiming Han, a charmer by trade and not yet by name, and it was her first night as a vampire slayer, in the age the Vigil would later name the First Night. She had been born in 2884 BCE at Yufeng, a harbor settlement on the Yellow River Basin in what is now China, to a ferryman and a woman who sold dried fish at the landing. The ferryman's gift to her was the sort of patter that gets a nervous farmer into a boat in a flood. By ten she could haggle a stranger out of an extra string of shells and make him think it was his idea. By fourteen she was singing at the feasts of the local lord, a minor chieftain with a hall of timber and a very large temper, and she learned there the useful art of watching an angry man's hands and speaking to the rest of him. She was good at it. What she wanted, all her life, was to sing at the great autumn feast in the river city of Yuzhaoqin, in front of an audience that was not afraid of her host, and the world kept offering her more urgent work. The stranger on the post was a slayer of the Vigil of Yellow River Basin, who had been wounded on the shrine road by a thing he could not outrun. He had been trying to reach the landing's ferry, and had not made it. He gave her his sickle-sword, a handsome curved blade of bronze with a notched back, and said a sentence that she repeated only once, drunkenly, thirty years later: that the thing across the river was patient, and that she should not be. She was called at eighteen, a few moments before he stopped breathing. She had no mentor and was never given one. The Vigil's elders were far away, the man on the post was dead, and nobody else in Yufeng wanted to hear anything about it. Weiming had no gift of the body. Weiming Han's Silver Tongue, as the Vigil later called it, was a craft built from nerve, listening and years of practice at being underestimated. She found out what the creature across the river wanted and then she offered it, in a voice so even and warm that for a while he did not think to wonder. The thing on the far bank was Fengwei Qin, the Gaunt Sovereign, a vampire of the Sable Covenant who held the river roads at night and charmed toll-keepers into leaving the gates unbarred. She had her father's old boat pole her across to him at midnight. They talked until the stars turned, about boats, about his mother's temple, about whether a ferryman's daughter could be trusted with a goat. When he finally reached out his hand to her, as a courtesy, she took it, and in the clasp she pressed her thumb to the inside of his wrist, where she had daubed a smear of red ochre and ash mixed with the dead slayer's blood. It blistered. He pulled back with a hiss, looked at his wrist for a long moment, and said to her, quite politely, that he would not underestimate her again. It was 2866 BCE, and it was the only occasion on which she ever touched him. The mark was her whole method for five years: a painstaking, ugly thing, a salve that took her days to mix and which no vampire in the Slayerverse's records had ever learned to guard against, because it looked so much like a greeting. The rest was the voice. She sat down with the killers of her region and bargained over lives. Sometimes she let them keep one. Her notorious technique was to refuse to run: with a sickle-sword at her belt and a bag of whistling arrows on her back, she would walk straight toward the roadside camps of the Covenant singing, and by the time the creatures understood what the smell on her hands was, she had been standing among them for the better part of the evening. It is one of the reasons the people of the basin called her the Hollow Arrow, a name from the whistling arrows she shot over rivers to say that she was coming, with a hollow shaft that made a long cold note in the dark. She also had habits. She paid every ferryman twice, always, and never explained it. She would not sit with her back to a door in any building, and her few friends learned to give her the wall seat without comment. In the villages she was known to be generous and a little tiresome, a woman who could not be hurried and who would tell you the whole of a story before she told you whether the road was safe. Her business with Fengwei Qin was finished in 2861 BCE at Yuzhaoqin, in the autumn she had always wanted to sing there. The city was loud: drummers on every wall, a hundred torch-bearers on the quay, a barge of performers and incense on the river. She had spent the summer arranging it, and arranging the vampire's visit, with a go-between's flattery and a gift of dried plums. His sense, as she had learned from a street-boy who had worked for him, was a cruel instrument in a crowd; every raised hand was a threat, every torch a danger, and the Held Breath went off in him like a rattle. He stood on the barge's deck with his hands pressed to his ears, and she walked over the planks toward him humming the goat song, and nobody in the crowd looked. The barge was already soaked in lamp oil, and the torch came down on it from the quay. Fengwei Qin, who could feel a blade fall before it moved, felt the fire come and could not tell which way to run from it. She lived thirty more years. She sang at the feast of Yuzhaoqin only once, badly, with a cold, and everyone said it was the best performance they had heard. She died in 2831 BCE, aged fifty-three, of a long illness and without a wound, thirty-five years after she picked up the sickle-sword. They buried her at Yufeng with the bronze blade beside her. In the grave was also a string of old shells, a ferryman's fare, laid there by someone who knew the habit, with one shell more than the usual count.