Xertaad Tafaan

Xertaad Tafaan, the Crimson Reaper, was a self-taught hunter of the Persian Plateau who tracked vampires by smell and a reed-shafted bow. He spent five winters chasing the assassin Baius Bakaarad, destroyed her at Horbaush in 1334 BCE, and died of a river fever three years later.

On the last morning of his life Xertaad Tafaan carried a reed-shafted hunting bow with the string slackened, five arrows, a bronze knife with a handle bound in goat gut, a skin of sour barley beer he had not opened, a twist of sheep fat for greasing the bowstring, a child's wooden whistle that was not his, and one iron nail as long as a finger, rusted brown at the head. The woman who washed him that evening at the ford of Harmaush listed the things in the order she found them, because the headman wanted to know what the dead man owed. He owed nothing. The whistle belonged to a goatherd's boy whom Xertaad had hauled out of the spring flood, and the beer had been a gift from the boy's father. The nail nobody could explain. A hunter has no use for one nail, and iron was dear enough on the plateau that a man might be buried with a single good blade and be thought well sent. He had carried it for three years. It was the last of three he had bought, and the other two were still in a doorsill at Horbaush. He died in 1331 BCE, aged thirty-four by the count of the fort that raised him, after eight years as a vampire slayer. The fever that took him two days after the flood was, by every account that survives, an ordinary lung fever from ordinary cold water, and the Slayerverse, which keeps the war's books from the slayers' side, is almost embarrassed by how plain it was. He had been born in 1365 BCE at Ardvaraius, a hill fort on the Persian Plateau, in what is now Iran, to a family that cut barley for the temple on the hill and hunted boar for it when the barley failed. The name that followed him later, the Crimson Reaper, came from the harvest rather than from any killing. The red clay of the Ardvaraius slopes stained a reaper's arms to the elbow by the second week of cutting, and the boys of the fort called him Red Hands before he was ten. His father owed the temple two oxen, a debt older than anyone's memory of how it began, and for his first twenty-odd years Xertaad wanted only to see it paid and then to be left alone with a bow and a boar trail. He hummed while he walked, a harvest tune with four notes, always slightly flat, and he would not eat anything until he had held it to his nose. His mother called that bad manners. The Vigil later called it training. The calling came in 1339 BCE, when he was twenty-six, in a winter hard enough to split water jars. A shepherd's family in the high pass above the fort stopped coming down for salt. Xertaad went up because he was the one the temple sent when animals went wrong, and he found them in their stone fold with no wound a wolf would have made and almost no blood in them or under them. What he remembered afterward was the smell, sweet and sour together, like a fig crushed on a copper dish. He followed it for four days across the ice and understood by the end that something was working the hill forts that fed on men and could walk out of snow without the right prints. No one taught him what to do about it. The Vigil of Persian Plateau, in the years of The Bronze Vigil, was a scatter of old hunters who swapped news with the caravans. The one who answered his message sent him a name for what he had found, a warning about sunrise, and nothing else. His one gift, if it can be called that, was Scent-Reading, and no physician would have found anything in him to account for it. It was craft, a few thousand boar trails deep. He could tell from a trampled thorn bush how long ago a body had passed and what it had last eaten, and tell a shepherd from a runaway by the sweat. Vampires, he learned, carried a smell of their own that no washing removed, fig and copper, strongest after feeding and thinnest in the hour before dawn, and to a man who had stopped being afraid of it the smell was a signature. He had no sword and never wanted one. Most of what he knew he learned by nearly dying of it, and the rest he got from a smith's widow, who told him that a certain kind of visitor would never cross the sill of a house where iron had been driven into the threshold. The vampire he made his business was Baius Bakaarad, whom the plateau called the Ivory Hunger. She had been an assassin for the Ember Brood for forty-six years, which is to say she had a long record of rooms that people entered and did not leave. Her gift was Fogstep. She could go to mist, thin and cold and low along the floor, and travel under doors and through the gap between one guard's shield and his neighbor's. A man with only a bow has a poor time against something that is, for a moment, not there. But each time she used it she came back hungry and slow-handed, and his whole method against her was built on that cost. They met in 1338 BCE at Taurraush, a lowland caravan town where she kept a night market, a row of lamp-lit stalls whose keepers paid her in silence. He had come for lamp oil and found a bronze-seller missing from his own stall. Baius came out of a doorway as a white cold that smelled of figs. He loosed an arrow into the middle of it and the arrow broke on a wall behind. A hand took him by the throat from inside the mist, quite solid. Then he stopped looking and breathed, and put his second arrow into the thickest part of the smell, and caught her in the shoulder. She cried out in a voice he thought was younger than it should have been, and she was gone. He lay in spilled lamp oil until morning. It was the first time anyone had learned that the fog carried her scent. The next four winters were a pursuit conducted like a ledger. He followed her out of Taurraush and into Kaardes, the temple town where she had been born, and found there a woman who remembered a quiet girl with a talent for poisoning barley who left the year she turned nineteen and never wrote. From the smith's widow's hints he bought three iron nails off a trader on the Elam road. They cost an ox he did not have, and the debt at Ardvaraius went from two oxen to three. He trained no one. A boy from the fort asked, once, and Xertaad told him to go home and mend the sheepfold. He found her in 1334 BCE at Horbaush, a winter storehouse at the head of a pass where herders kept grain. He knew by the smell. At night he wrapped his hammer in felt and drove two nails into the sill, one stroke at a time, holding his breath between, and in the thin grey before dawn he climbed the back wall and lifted the roof poles off one by one. She woke on the floor in the first light. Fogstep carried her as far as the sill, and there the mist lay against the iron the way a cat lies against glass, and slid back. "You smell of barley," she said. "Figs," he said, which was the nearest thing to courtesy he had. When he came down the sun was full on the pass and there was a handful of grey on the grain floor. He sat in the doorway for most of the day. Xertaad Tafaan went home, and paid the third ox with a year of boar hides, and kept the last nail without saying why. The Ember Brood sent no one after him; an assassin who fails is not much mourned by her employers. The boy at the ford kept the whistle. The headman's wife, who had washed the body unpaid, asked for the nail, and drove it into the sill of her own door, where it stayed. She said it was the only thing he owned that anyone could use.