Yahmora Bahaai

Yahmora Bahaai, called The Steadfast Vow, was a road thief of Tirhaai who rose from a burned granary in 2217 BCE as a vampire slayer of unusual strength. He kept his promises across thresholds, and in 2197 BCE he kept the hardest one.

A promise made at a door is kept at a door, Yahmora Bahaai used to say, so often that his friends in the Vigil of Levant could recite it with their mouths full. He did not mean it as poetry. He meant that you did not swear anything in a doorway that you were not prepared to walk through, and that when the thing was finished you went back to the same frame and said so. The rule was tested for the first time in 2217 BCE, in a burned granary at Tirhaai, on a night when it would have been very convenient to forget it. He was lying in the ashes among three dead men, left for dead himself, and the only one still talking was an old watchman with a beam across his legs who asked him, at the doorway, to tell his daughter that he had not suffered. Yahmora said he would. Then he got up, which he should not have been able to do, and walked out into the first light with his skin unmarked and his hands shaking, and did it. The Steadfast Vow, as the Vigil came to call him, had been born in 2244 BCE in Tirhaai, a walled city-state in the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, in a family that sold lamp oil and bad advice. It was the last stretch of The First Night, the age before the bronze states grew big, and the roads were thick with traders and the tombs along the desert road were thick with unwatched copper, and by sixteen he was working both at once. He was a thief, a good one, with a sling he had carried since boyhood. He hummed a ferryman's song while he worked, always the same four bars and always flat, which was how the road guards learned to find him. At twenty-seven he was a man with a modest fortune, a reputation in three towns, and no idea that he was about to become something else. What the fire gave him was physical, and it came with a bill. Yahmora was an Exo-Human, which in his age had no name and so was called luck. After that night he was strong in a way that surprised him on stairs and doors. He could throw one blow with the whole of his body behind it, a thing the Vigil learned to call the Breaker's Blow, and it would split a cedar beam or take a door off its pins. The price was in the hands. The knuckles went black for days, and he got into the habit of favouring the right until the left had healed. He also took to carrying a sling with silvered shot, a thief's weapon with a slayer's ammunition, because silver was the one thing he knew would hurt the creatures he had begun to see. The Vigil of Levant took him in, mostly because nobody else would. His teacher was a man who despised the Vigil. Ashraai Morzinyaha, the Crimson Hand, a human hunter and a vampire slayer of the Slayerverse, had heard of the thief who rose with the sun and walked six days from Alenasha to see for himself. He found a broad, clever, careless man with no patience, and he took him back to the mountains. From 2216 BCE to 2214 BCE Yahmora learned what Ashraai knew, which was mostly how to wait. The old hunter had a nose that could read a room, and Yahmora had no such gift and never would, but he learned to sit still in the dark and listen until the quiet turned into information. Ashraai complained that his pupil laughed at his own jokes. He did not complain loudly. Ashraai was killed in the winter of 2214 BCE at the shrine, by Yahashon Eltiron, the Ivory Tyrant, a vampire who had been going around the salt lines for twenty years. Yahmora was down in the valley selling cheese. He came up the track the next morning, found the door open and the sill swept, and went in. The vampire was gone before the sun cleared the ridge. Yahmora took the bow, which he never learned to shoot, and hung it in the rafters of whatever room he slept in for the rest of his life. He had sworn something in that doorway, though he never said what. He could not pay it, because Yahashon Eltiron went on being alive, and the rule hung unfinished for the rest of his days like a debt he knew he would never collect. He found something else to do with the anger. In 2207 BCE the Vigil sent him to Yahtirkaon, another walled city-state in the Levant, where the lamp-sellers' quarter had been losing children. The cause was Hazinai Hakaon, the Bloodless Mask, a scientist of the Velvet Circle who had been a vampire for more than six hundred years. At a house in the lane of the oil-sellers a mother stood in her doorway and said, in a voice he remembered, that she wanted the one who had taken her son brought to her door. Yahmora said he would. That night he found the cellar under the water-gate granary, a room with a floor of beaten clay and a hundred rows of tally marks scratched on the walls, and he took the door off with the Breaker's Blow. Hazinai had heard his heart before he touched the latch. A silvered shot caught the vampire in the shoulder, and he went out through the water-gate into the canal and was gone. It took ten years. Hazinai could feel a pulse through a wall; Yahmora worked out that the answer was to make his own too faint to find. He took to lying in the cold water of a cistern with a flat stone on his chest, breathing as slowly as a man could without fainting, until his heart dropped to something the vampire mistook for the beat of a sleeping animal. It was exhausting and it made him ill, but it worked. He also bought, at a price that cleaned out his savings, a handful of iron nails, which were rare and costly in that country and which a vampire could not cross when driven into a threshold. In 2197 BCE he followed Hazinai to Yahelashon, a hill town to the north, and found him in a house with a door that had never been locked. He hammered the nails into the sill. Then he took the door off its pins and, with a stake of ash, ended it. It was not dramatic. Hazinai looked mostly annoyed. In the autumn of 2197 BCE Yahmora walked the mask, a thing of pale plaster with the inside rim worn smooth, back to the lane of the oil-sellers. The mother was old by then. She looked at it for a long time, and then she asked whether he had eaten. He had not, and said he had, and it was the only lie anyone remembers him telling at a door. Yahmora Bahaai died in the next year, 2196 BCE, in Tirhaai, of the marsh fever that came up the river that wet season. He was forty-eight and had held the mantle for twenty-one years. The Vigil buried him under the lintel of his family's house, so that anyone who came to the door would step over him. The bow of Ashraai Morzinyaha hung in the rafters above the bed, unstrung, and the bundled reed shafts beside it were the old man's own.