Weitang Shu darned her own sleeves. She kept a bone needle and a hank of hemp thread in a wrapped pouch at her belt, and when a blade had gone through a seam she sat down wherever she was, even in the middle of a night's work, and sewed it shut. The habit baffled the people she worked with. To her it was bookkeeping. Every tear in her clothes matched a cut in her body that had closed, and she wanted the two accounts to agree. It was the one domestic skill she had ever bothered to master, and she was better at it than at anything else but her trade, which was that of an assassin.
She was born in 1453 BCE at Qinyu, a mountain shrine on a rock ledge above the Yellow River Basin in what is now China, where the river cults kept a god of floods in a bronze jar and paid their keepers in flour. Her mother swept the steps. Her father was a pilgrim nobody could name. At twelve the cults noticed that the girl who swept the steps was not afraid of men, and by twenty she was a hired knife of the river cults, the kind a temple elder rents for a sum he does not write down. She was neat. She wanted, in an unambiguous way, not to be owed anything, and not to grow old on the steps. The older she got, the less the second wish was in her gift.
In 1418 BCE, at thirty-five, she went looking for the bite. It was not a fever or a roadside accident, as with some of the long-lived; she asked for it. A hired knife with a blunt knee and a gray streak hears things, and what she had heard was that a man called Tangqin Zhao, the Midnight Widow, would make a person who proved useful. She proved useful. He made her, never explained the arrangement, and kept in touch for a few seasons by messenger, as a landlord keeps in touch with a tenant. He is alive still. She did not see him again after the second year, and she never told anyone whether she had expected to.
What she woke into, she managed like a ledger. Her body healed. Wounds that would have killed a man closed in the space of a held breath, with a hot ache and a hunger so heavy it had to be fed within the day. The healing left a record. A day after each wound, a thin white scar rose on the skin, in the exact place, and she could read them by touch in the dark: one for each fight she had lost a little. She called it the Wound Ledger, and she was sentimental about it. Her eyes ran when she healed, a wet stream down both cheeks with no feeling behind it, and that gave her the second half of her name, since the river cults had always spoken of the Weeping Tide. Two things hurt her past mending. A line of iron nails driven into a threshold was a wall she could not cross, and a slayer's ash mark laid on her skin raised a blister that did not close.
The Velvet Circle, which the Vampireverse remembers as a house of quiet money in the Bronze Vigil, liked her because she was quiet and because she finished the job. Along the river she killed treasurers, a ferry-owner, two magistrates' sons, and a priest who would not take payment. She rarely hurried. She worked from the water when she could, because a swimmer's approach carried no sound and no smell, and because the sight of her wrong-shaped outline was, she had been told, blunted by a wet bank. In 1396 BCE she was sent to the lord's hall at Zhuxi for a steward named Ran Qi, who had refused the Circle a favour.
She was halfway into the scullery with a basket of leeks when a kitchen hand stepped between her and the steward with a bronze sickle-sword held low. He had been watching her since she came in at the gate, she realised; he was looking at a place a little to the left of her face. He cut her twice and she hit him once. She thought, not for the last time, that a vampire slayer who stood between her and a victim had a quality she could not price. Then she went out through the window, her ribs already knitting. She stopped in the garden and watched her own arm close. The man who followed her to the window did not look away. His name, she learned, was Weifeng Bo, the Cold Lance, and he had turned his right ear toward her the whole time as though listening to a message. She had a new line on her forearm, and she did not mend the sleeve for a week.
He came to Qinyu in 1392 BCE. She had not expected that, nor the iron. When she returned to the lodge behind the shrine, her old refuge, the threshold bristled with twelve nails and the lintel bore a thumb of grey ash. She stood outside it for a long time with her hand on the frame and could go no further. A woman who had been a shrine-sweeper was homeless on her own mountain, and the Circle took note, as the Circle takes note of everything that costs it money. She made no vow. She asked a ferryman where the man's father lived.
On the second evening of the fog, in 1388 BCE, she swam up the Fengweitang landing from the west bank and went under the planks. She did not need to see him. She had heard the stool creak. She took him by the ankle, pulled him into the shallows, and the water, which had been her friend all her life, did most of the rest of it. He cut her three times before he stopped. She held him under with both hands and wept from both eyes, as she always did when she healed, and later could not say whether it had been the wounds. Weitang Shu laid him across the mud herself with his father's ferry pole beside him, a courtesy that she later declined to discuss.
She lasted another four and a half centuries. The Velvet Circle moved her around the valley as it needed, and her fights grew fewer, and the scars on her arms thickened into a pattern that nobody else could read. In 956 BCE, when the river changed its bed in a wet year and came up the mountain, a party of the Vigil of Yellow River Basin, led by someone who knew where the old lodge was, nailed the shrine doors shut from the outside with iron and marked the lintel, and the flood did the rest, eleven days of it to the beam. She was four hundred and ninety-seven. When the water went down they pried the door open. Inside, on a dry shelf above the water line, they found a bone needle, a hank of hemp, and one sleeve folded and half mended.
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