Yacotl Macuic

Yacotl Macuic, the Cold Sovereign, was a palace assassin of Ixkatl who became a vampire in 2234 BCE and rose in The Thorned Throne. He met his match in an engineer with red hands, and was destroyed at Pachiic in 2177 BCE.

The dogs stopped barking first. That was the night in 2188 BCE that Yacotl Macuic would remember longest, a moonless one at the harbor of Yayaixtl, with the swell breaking low against a new stone wall and the smell of fish guts and wet cotton drifting over the causeway. He had come down from the hills to remove one man. He did not particularly want to. He had been told the man was an engineer and had spoiled the hall at Pachiic, and as an assassin of long standing he had heard that kind of excuse before. He thinned himself out along the stones, low and cold, and slid toward the lamp at the end of the breakwater, and the man standing there turned round with a sling already loaded and fired through him as though through steam. He had been born in 2254 BCE at Ixkatl, a temple town in the hills of Mesoamerica, in what is now Mexico, to a family of porters who carried offerings up the temple stair for the priests. He learned early that the people who mattered in a place were the ones who were not looked at. At sixteen he was in the palace of the neighbouring lord, carrying cups, and by eighteen he was the man the lord's steward asked to see when someone needed to be quietly gone. He was a good assassin because he was patient and because he had no taste for the work, which kept him from showing off. He used a knife of black glass, a pinch of bitter root in a cup, and once, at the steward's order, a sack of dead fish in a well. He did not care to think about the wells. Later, in the Throne's service, he was asked to do it again, to hide a coven's feeding in two towns, and he did it as he had done everything, without remarks. Yacotl Macuic was twenty in 2234 BCE, in The First Night, when he was made a vampire. The maker is not recorded, and Yacotl himself never spoke of it. Asked, he would say only that he had woken in a cold room, that the arrangement had been explained to him, and that he had understood it faster than anyone expected. Vampires in his time were few, long-lived and mostly kept apart, and the coven that took him in was The Thorned Throne, a house of the Vampireverse that ran the hill country through stewards, bribes and well-timed disappearances. He rose in it quickly. A palace assassin who could not be hurt in daylight was exactly what it had wanted. In the lowlands they began to call him the Cold Sovereign, for his hands, which were icy, and because he had a habit of resting his left palm on every lintel before he entered a room, as a king might touch a throne. His gift was called Threshold Ghost, and it was physical, a freakish trait of his body, the way a few people are born double-jointed. He could thin his flesh to a cold, low vapour, slide under a door or through a crack in a shutter, and take his shape again on the other side. A kind of darkness went with it. Lamps within ten paces of him dimmed and sank, and the effect of it, in a room, was that people stopped being able to see each other. It cost him dearly. Coming back into a body took ten breaths, and for those ten breaths he was slow and dizzy and cold to the marrow, and a man with a good knife could have finished him. He kept the trick for doorways and a few clean exits, and he told nobody about the ten breaths. When Yacotl came back to Pachiic in 2189 BCE from three weeks of work in the lowlands, the hall above the spring was in disorder. Two of the coven lay on the floor with silvered pits in their skulls. A captive girl had been carried out of the cellar, and what was left of the doorway was soot and pellet-dents. He asked who had done it and was told it had been a harbor engineer, a man with a sling. Yacotl did not believe it. He sat on the cellar step for an hour, working it out. Then, in 2188 BCE, he went down to Yayaixtl, and found the man on the causeway, the Storm Torch, whom the coast would later call Chicul Xokucul. The pellet went through him without catching. He re-formed, took the slayer by the throat, and felt the man's palm slap flat against his forearm. It was red to the wrist. The arm did not thin. It stayed meat and bone, with blood running from it, and for the first time in forty-six years he understood what it was to be unable to leave a place. He let the man run because he was afraid of the next ten breaths. It was the first thing about the encounter that he told no one. The war with Chicul Xokucul lasted eleven years and Yacotl came to dislike it. This vampire slayer did not shout, he did not pray, and he did not appear to hate. He treated Yacotl like a leak, something to be found, measured and stopped, and for eleven years the Throne's halls were hit one after another by a man who always seemed to know where the water was. Yacotl respected that. He did not enjoy it. The slayer's mark, a hand of red ochre, was turning up on lintels throughout the hills, and he found himself stepping over thresholds with his left hand held away from the frame. He met the end of it at Pachiic in 2177 BCE. He went in at midnight, with an obsidian blade and the courtyard fogging round his feet, and saw the red hands on every lintel and the long ash pole leaning against the wall. He thought, with something like admiration, that the man had done his surveying. Then the slayer crossed the paving in a blur he had no time to follow, a palm struck him in the chest, and the body that wanted to be air stayed as it was. He was seventy-seven. He had been a vampire for fifty-seven years. The ash went in, and he had time to think it was neatly done. The Thorned Throne moved its stewards to another valley within a season, and the hall above the spring was left to goats, which scratched their backs on the red hands until the ochre wore off the lintels.