Yaa Shayaipa

Yaa Shayaipa, the Thorned Sentinel, was a ditch-digger's daughter who became an engineer and then a vampire slayer in the First Night of Anatolia. She moved faster than a heartbeat, taught the Gilded Blade, flooded the Cold Choir out of his own doorway in 2871 BCE, and outlived him.

The donkey-driver Kupi told the story of the courtyard at Pitara for the rest of his life, and every year the well in it moved farther from the gate. In 2888 BCE he was holding a rope with a laden animal at the end of it when a woman with a stone-tipped spear was at the gate, and then, with no stretch of time in between that he could find, at the well on the far side, and the rope was still running through his fingers. He said she looked embarrassed. She had a cut on her forearm and she was breathing like someone who had run up a hill, and she spent a moment looking at the roof where something had gone over the tiles. Kupi's version had the thing on the roof as tall as a door. The truth, as best it can be pieced together, was a thin man in a dark cloak who had been in the house of a grain factor since the evening before. The woman was Yaa Shayaipa, and she did not yet know his name. Yaa Shayaipa had been born in 2914 BCE at Rupipia, a caravan stop in Anatolia, in the country that is now Turkey, to a family who dug for their living. Her father cleared silt from the channels that fed the stop's cisterns, and her mother kept the tally of what every caravan owed for water. Yaa grew up with a knotted cord on her wrist, one knot for every pace of a trench, and she hummed the digger's counting song under her breath for the whole of her life, always a half-tone flat. Her want was plain and a little ridiculous for a woman the Vigil would later call the Thorned Sentinel. She wanted to bring the spring on the hill down to Rupipia in a lined channel, so that the stop would never again have to buy water from the people upstream. She started measuring that channel at nine and did not finish it until she was past fifty. The war interrupted her at sixteen. In 2898 BCE a band came down on Rupipia in the dry season of the First Night, and the siege that followed was strange from the start: the besiegers moved only at dusk, took the sentries one at a time, and left the bodies pale and folded. Yaa was on a roof with a sling when she saw the leader cross a field faster than she could follow with her eyes, and she found, without deciding to, that she could follow him. Nobody trained her. There was no mentor to name and no Vigil elder who came to the door; the Vigil of Anatolia learned of her only after the siege had ended and a vampire slayer in the hills was already a rumor. She was called that night, and the gift that came with it was The Blur Road. It let her cross a courtyard, or a ford, or a bad stretch of scree, before a heartbeat could finish, and it cost her in ways she never made light of. Her joints ached for days after, her nose bled, and she was ravenous in a way that frightened her mother: half a loaf of barley bread and a whole comb of honey, eaten with shaking hands, before she could speak. Being an engineer made her a different sort of slayer. The Vigil in those years fought with torches and numbers, and she fought with plans. She learned from the dead, and from three burned nests in cellars, tombs and cisterns, what the long-lived feeders could not stand: direct sunlight, and running water at a threshold. The second was the more useful. Sun came once a day and you could not always arrange for it. Water you could dig. She redirected a stream under the door of a tomb at Hurma and stood on the far bank to watch the three inside discover that they could not cross it. She hated that work and she was good at it. Her careful, dry notes on how to cut a channel through a threshold without bringing down the wall were passed along the Slayerverse for centuries. The thin man on the roof at Pitara had a name by the following winter. He was Tiwaus Arsharuus, the Cold Choir, an assassin who had come out of the walled city of Arzizia and now worked for the Velvet Throne, and he had a gift that made him a puzzle rather than merely a danger. He tracked by blood. Any wound she took, he could follow across a district like a hound on a hide, and for a year after Pitara he did exactly that. Yaa learned to wash a cut in the nearest stream before she walked away from it, to bind it tight with wool soaked in resin, and finally to lay false trails with sheep's blood across roads she had no intention of taking. It was tiresome, and it worked about half the time. Twice she woke to find that he had stood outside her door and left, and she never understood why until she had met enough of his kind to see that he had been counting her habits. In 2884 BCE a very different person came into her life. Latiipa Tikuili was a mountain man called to the slayers at thirty-four, enormous and unaffiliated, who answered to no Vigil and had a habit of putting his spear through things before asking what they were. Someone at the Vigil of Anatolia sent him to Yaa, perhaps as a joke. She took him on from 2883 BCE and kept him until 2879 BCE, four years of arguments about whether to charge or to measure. Her complaint was that he treated every doorway as a door to be broken. His was that she wanted to dig a ditch before every fight. Both turned out to be partly right, and each left the other a little altered; she began to carry a long spear for the occasions when speed would not do, and he learned, grudgingly, to look at where the water ran. The reckoning with Tiwaus came in 2871 BCE, and it came at Pitara again, because a hunter who has been followed for seventeen years will eventually choose the ground. She had spent the spring in the grain factor's cellar with six diggers and a bribed foreman. When the vampire came back to the house, as she had judged he would, the old drain under the front step had been opened and widened and turned toward the stream, and the water ran black and loud through the threshold of a house whose tenant could not cross it. He stood inside, he saw what she had built, and for the first time in all those years she watched his face change. She had taken the tiles off the roof the evening before, and the dawn came in over the beam. It was not a fight. It was, in the end, a work of drainage, and she was sorry about it in an odd way that she never put into words. She lived thirteen years after that. The Slayerverse keeps her record as forty years in the role, and the last of them were mostly spent with a spade. The channel from the hill spring reached Rupipia in the last decade of her life, lined with clay and flat stones, and it passed under the threshold of her own house, where small children waded in it. When she died in 2858 BCE of the ordinary causes of fifty-six years of hard work, her family found the old counting cord in her hand. Its last knot had been left loose, as though she meant to come back and tie it.