Yayaa Shapihata

Yayaa Shapihata, the Last Spear, was a temple performer from Anatolia who became a vampire slayer in 2065 BCE, when a feeding party killed her household and a lung-locking gift kept her alive. She worked three places in sixteen years and met her match in a singer.

Yayaa Shapihata is easiest to follow by her addresses, because she kept few other records. Over thirty-seven years she lived in three places, a temple town, a caravan stop and a copper works, and each one shaped a different part of what she became. Anyone who tries to follow her by her titles gets lost. The Vigil of Anatolia called her the Last Spear, in the days of The Bronze Vigil, when the Slayerverse was a scatter of road-side watchers with little in common but the fight, and nobody in the Vigil could say quite why. The records give her name as Yayaa Shapihata, nothing more. Her own account, given to a ferryman near the end, was that it was a joke which had been told too often to be fixed. The first place was Shaara, a temple town in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, where she was born in 2086 BCE to a household that served the temple of the storm-god. The household supplied performers for the great processions, and Yayaa walked the hundred-step circuit around the sacred court from the time she was six. It was disciplined, dull work that involved counting, balance and a stern woman with a stick. She learned from it how to move without being noticed in a crowd, how to keep her face still when her feet hurt, and how to read a room by the way the front rows leaned. Her want at that age was simple. She wanted to be the one who led the processional steps, and by nineteen she was. She also, privately, wanted to leave Shaara, which she thought of as a very large room with only one door. The door was closed for her in 2065 BCE. A feeding party came through the temple quarter in the night and emptied her household, nine people, in the time it took the lamps to burn down. Yayaa, twenty-one years old, survived by lying under a grain jar with her mouth against the floor, and in those minutes something in her body changed. Her lungs locked. A dead stillness fell on her chest a heartbeat before every blow that was coming, and the air stopped moving, so that she could not have made a sound if she had wanted to. She called it The Held Breath. It was a gift of the body, like a rare trick of the nerves, and it saved her over and over in the years that followed. It also cost her. Each time it came, she was left without breath for a few seconds and then gasping, and in a long fight those gaps added up. Nobody trained her. She took a copper dagger from the temple kitchens and went to the vampire slayer's work with no teacher, no sire of any kind, and a very long list of questions. The second place was Zizia, a caravan stop on the high road, where she spent the winters of 2064 BCE and after as a lamp-keeper at the largest inn. A charmer by nature, Yayaa made friends with drovers and traders, who told her everything, and she filed it all away. She learned which roads the feeders favored, which inns shut their doors early, and which singers had suddenly become popular. She never lied to anyone, in her own estimation. She only let them tell her what they wanted to tell. A habit she picked up there, and never lost, was eating dried figs from a pouch at her belt when she was thinking, which she did through almost all of 2063 BCE, and which left a trail of stems across half of Anatolia. The singer was the thing she had been looking for. At Zizia the drovers loved a performer called Hattuus Pitarili, the Weeping Marrow, who sat by the fire with a cedar harp and sang them into a heavy sleep. Yayaa noticed the sleep first, then the number of drovers who did not wake. In 2061 BCE, in the stable yard behind the inn, she followed the singer out after the last song. What happened is told differently by the survivors, but the outline holds. The singer's jaw lengthened, the voice dropped into a growl, and the shoulders thickened into something that was not entirely a person any more, what the Court called the Wolf Hour. Yayaa's breath locked a half second before the first strike. She went under it, cut the harp's strings with the copper dagger, and took a claw across the ribs that she carried for the rest of her life. Neither of them finished the other. Hattuus left by the east road with a ruined harp and an interest in her that never went away. There were seven more meetings in the next twelve years. Yayaa learned the shape of Hattuus's habits. The vampire preferred small stops, sang before feeding, and could not abide direct sunlight, so a clear day spoiled an ambush. Hawthorn through the heart was the known remedy, and she never got close enough to try it. She did learn that a held breath could be useful in two ways, and in smoke or at the edge of a fire she could keep her lungs shut long after other hunters had to cough. She was not trying to be brave. She was trying to be annoying enough that the singer would make a mistake. The third place was Alaksu, a copper-working town in the hills, where Hattuus took refuge in the spring of 2049 BCE and where Yayaa, thirty-seven and tired, followed. The furnaces ran day and night, and the casting floor was full of smoke. She went in expecting that to be her advantage, and for most of an hour it was. Then a vent cracked, the air filled with fumes, and she coughed, and the cough broke the gift. Hattuus Pitarili killed her on the casting floor. The Weeping Marrow carried the body out into the first grey light and laid it on the slag heap. The workers of Alaksu buried her under a rank of ingots and left her dagger in the furnace-wall, where it was found a year later with its edge still keen. The Vigil never agreed on the nickname. Some said she was the last of the temple's spear-bearers, though she never carried one. Others said it was what she called herself when someone asked how many were left. The people of Shaara kept her procession steps in their rites for a hundred years, and added a pause in the middle of the circuit that no one could explain.