Weiqin Yu

Weiqin Yu, the Ashen Torch, was a palace assassin of the Yellow River Basin who became a vampire slayer at sixteen and burned out nests with a sling and one trained cut. She and the vampire Yu Yu killed each other at a ferry-house in 1620 BCE.

Vein Strike took the feeling out of the last two fingers of Weiqin Yu's left hand, and the assassin in her never complained, and she never pretended otherwise. The cut itself was simple to describe and close to impossible to do: a short bronze awl driven up under the hinge of the jaw into the great vein of the neck, then turned and withdrawn in the same breath. To land it she had to lay those two fingers flat on the throat first, to find the slow pulse that told her where to aim, and a vampire's throat is cold in a way that goes into the bone and stays there. By her last year she could not feel a needle in them. She also lost her taste for bled meat and ate her millet plain. Those were the prices. The Slayerverse, which keeps such accounts, lists no gift beside her name, only this craft and what it cost to practice it. Weiqin Yu was born in 1640 BCE in Yujia, a temple town in the Yellow River Basin of China, in the age the Vigil later called the Bronze Vigil. Her father cast arrowheads and belt hooks for the district lord's armory and owed that household more than he would ever earn. Her mother sold millet beer outside the temple gate. A steward of the lord's palace compound noticed that the girl could cross a courtyard without any guard remembering it, and he hired her at eleven for small errands that grew. By fourteen she had done three jobs she did not discuss. Her ambition was narrow and domestic: to clear her father's debt and buy him a roof that did not leak. She was good at the work, which she did not enjoy, and she hummed the threshers' song while she did it, always the same four lines. In 1624 BCE, when she was sixteen, she found a man lying in the reeds of the canal below the temple, his chest laid open from collar to belt. She had carried bodies before and knew how. She dragged him to the river shrine at the lower gate and sat with him for the three hours he took to die. He was a vampire slayer of the Vigil of Yellow River Basin, though he did not say so; she worked it out from what he gave her. A sling. A pouch of clay pellets sheathed in beaten silver. The location of a dry cistern. One piece of advice, that nothing should be allowed to speak to her through a door. He never gave his name, and she spent the rest of her life regretting that she had not asked, because she wanted to cut it into a stone. No one trained her afterward. She taught herself on a pig carcass hung from a rafter, and then on the real thing. The real thing arrived that same night. Something grey slid under the shrine door like smoke finding a draft, and the lamp guttered, and she put three silvered shots into it before she had decided to. One struck something hard. The cloud drew back and pulled itself into a man, thin and well fed, holding his shoulder. That was the first clash with Yu Yu, the Crowned Hunger, and it ended with both of them surprised. He left by the same crack. She did not learn his name until the autumn, from a ferryman, and she did not learn what he was in the sense of what the Circle was until much later. The next three years were work. Over the four years she carried the mantle she burned out five nests hidden in cellars, tombs and cisterns, and she learned the weaknesses of the thing she hunted the slow way, by testing them on doorsills. Running water at a threshold stopped Yu Yu's drift cold. Salt lines and doorway wards held it back for as long as they held. She salted sills in three villages, paid a fisherman to moor her sleeping boat in the current, and kept the sling wet so that the silver foil would not crack. Her best work was at a flooded tomb near Qinhe in 1622 BCE, where eleven sleepers died in the water without a sound. She came out with ash in her hair and a cut across one cheek, and the people of Qinhe, who never learned what she had done, called her the Ashen Torch because of how she looked going home. Yu Yu came at her three times in those years, always by a door. At Qinhe in 1622 BCE he spoke through the gap of one and told her that she smelled of smoke, little torch, and that the Velvet Circle would give her a house if she stopped. She understood from the offer that the Circle already knew about her father's debt. She answered by driving a bronze nail into the doorpost at his eye level. Nothing came through the gap after that. She slept badly for a month and hummed the threshers' song louder. The end came in 1620 BCE at Mingfengzhao, a ferry-house at a ford where a canal ran in a stone channel beneath the doorsill. She chose it. She laid a line of salt across the threshold, sat inside with the door open to the night and the water running under her feet, and waited for him with the awl in her right hand and her left hand flat against her knee. He came as a drift on the road and gathered on the sill. He could not cross whole. He crossed anyway, in pieces, taking the pain of it, and as he formed in front of her she put the two numb fingers against his throat and drove the awl up. His hands closed on her ribs and broke them. They went down in the doorway together, and the canal kept running beneath them. She was twenty years old. A ferryman called Old Lan found them at dawn and could not read, so he left no record, only a story he told in the Vigil's hearing for years. He said the vampire's face was calm and hers was irritated, as if the job had come out slightly wrong. He said her left hand was still flat against the man's neck with the two fingers together, as though taking a pulse, and that he had left it exactly so until the Vigil came for the body.