You can read the early career of the Ivory Tyrant off three buildings, and Yahashon Eltiron would have admitted as much, since he was a thief and thieves think in terms of buildings. The first was a granary. It stood on stilts at the edge of Sidsidai, a marsh village in the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, and it was where he spent the first twenty-odd years of a life that began in 2298 BCE. His family kept ducks and mended nets. He kept a private count of which storehouse planks were rotten, and by the age of fourteen he could go in under the floor, take a measure of barley, and be home with his hands washed before the watchman had finished his beer. The watchman, a gloomy fellow named Obed, was blamed for the losses for ten years. Yahashon felt bad about it in a general way and never did anything.
It was in that granary, in 2274 BCE, that he met the man who changed his work. Tuas Tutarzius, the Bloodless Architect, had come down from Anatolia with a donkey caravan, ostensibly to look at how the marsh villages stored grain on stilts so as to design something like it for his own country. He was, in fact, looking for a young person with quick hands and no family worth the name, and he found one lying flat under the floorboards. Yahashon was twenty-four. The making was done in a reed hut over several nights, and he remembered it chiefly as cold and as a taste like pennies. Tuas did not stay. He went home to Anatolia within the season, and Yahashon never saw him again. He learned in time that Shatias Mushaili, the Ashen Wall, a slayer, had destroyed his maker in 2234 BCE, and he found that he felt nothing in particular, which troubled him less than it should have.
The second building was the cedar wharf at Zibakhai, and it was where, early in The First Night, he learned what he had become. Unbowed turned out to be a matter of the skin. When he braced for a blow, his hide went hard as a drum-skin pulled tight, so that blades slid and arrows skipped; and the price, which he discovered the first time and never forgot, was that for as long as the skin held he could not bend a joint, and for an hour afterwards he moved like a man carved from a post. At Zibakhai he used it as a night-thief. The timber merchants kept their payments in sealed strongrooms, and he opened them without breaking a single seal, because patience was easier than force. He belonged to no one. No coven approached him twice. He was Unbound in the plainest sense: he answered to nobody, ate when it suited him, and took the small valuable things that nobody would miss. He also took a worthless thing from every room, a pebble or a spoon or a child's whistle, and kept them in a basket. He did not know why, and did not try to find out.
In 2232 BCE a hunter came to the wharf. Yahashon smelled him first, as a man smells smoke: sheep fat, old cedar, dried reeds. The man was Ashraai Morzinyaha, the Crimson Hand, a human vampire slayer who had only just finished his apprenticeship, and he fired three arrows at twenty paces before Yahashon had finished turning round. Two bounced. The third stuck a finger deep, and Yahashon, standing very still, pulled it out and laid it down on the planks because he did not know what else to do with it. He walked away stiffly, a post in a coat. It had been the first time anyone had hurt him since the reed hut. He found, to his own surprise, that he wanted to see the man again.
The third building was a ford-house at Tel Barzaha, on the inland river road, and it was where he spent the next eighteen years. He took the place over from a family who had left in a hurry. By night he collected small tolls from caravan drivers who thought the road was merely tended by a very cold man; by day he slept under the loft, behind a door laid with ash planks that did nothing at all. The Ivory Tyrant, they called him in the villages, and he disliked the name, but he liked the fear. Ashraai came for him three times. He set salt across the threshold, he painted wards on the doorframe, and once he drove a stake of olive wood through the mattress when Yahashon was somewhere else. Yahashon stepped around the salt like a man avoiding a puddle. He admitted privately that the third visit had frightened him, because it was the first time anyone had come close to the loft.
In the winter of 2214 BCE, when the hunter was fifty-three and had spent twenty years at it, Yahashon went up to the mountain shrine at Alenasha. He did not announce himself. The salt line at the shrine door had been washed thin by rain on the sill, a gap no wider than a hand, and he came over the gap in the dark. Ashraai had no room to use the bow and fought with the knife he used for skinning ibex. The blade went into the shoulder, and Unbowed took the rest. What followed was not quick and Yahashon did not tell anyone about it afterwards. He left before the sun cleared the ridge. A pupil of the dead man, a big young thief with a sling, would be the one to find the body, and he thought about that boy for some years.
His making of others came late and by no particular plan. He raised his first child, Baon Tiryahashim, the Crowned Envoy, in 2145 BCE, a lean and smooth-tongued man who took the trade roads of the Levant. Sidashon Melalalon followed in 2015 BCE, a builder with an unhappy temperament who ended Sealed in a cellar of his own design. Iti Rakaet, the Weeping Collector, was made in 1375 BCE in the Nile Valley, and she is still alive. Kanikis Phidemes, the Gaunt Marrow, came in 1239 BCE in the Aegean; Ela Haenhaai, the Black Widow, in 1187 BCE; Ruipa Tirurua in 1163 BCE in Anatolia, where her maker's maker had once built things. Ashhaath Sidkaai, the Ashen Duelist, was made in 666 BCE. The last, Andrei Dumitru, the Hollow Warlord, was made in the Carpathians in 1845 CE and was destroyed eleven years afterward. Yahashon kept to himself, as ever, and he did not go to the funerals.
Yahashon Eltiron is alive in 2026 CE and has been a vampire for 4,299 years. He is no more fond of company than he was at Sidsidai. The salt lines, the doorway wards and the sun still limit him, though he works within these limits so easily that people forget they are there. In the course of the centuries the war has passed through the Slayerverse and the Vampireverse many times, and he has contributed to it chiefly by being hard to find. He keeps the basket. It has grown to fill a room, in a house he does not name, and at the bottom, below the pebbles and spoons and whistles, there is a reed-shafted arrow with a fingertip of dried wharf mud still on the point.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
