Yu Yu washed his millet bowl every morning at the well in Shuqinxiu, long after he had stopped eating from it. He dried it with a cloth, turned it upside down on the shelf over his sleeping mat, and left the mat unrolled on the east wall, as it had been when he was a living man in his mother's house. The neighbors thought him fussy. The Velvet Circle thought it a weakness and said so. Tangqin Zhao, who made him, once picked up the bowl and held it to the lamp and put it back without a word, and he took that as the nearest thing to approval he would ever get. He kept the bowl clean for the rest of his life, which was thirty-three years of a different kind.
Yu Yu was born in 1676 BCE in Shuqinxiu, a temple town in the Yellow River Basin of China. His father had been a trapper for the temple kitchens, and Yu took over the work as a boy: snaring hares and fowl in the millet stubble, then following boar into the oak scrub with a bronze-headed spear. By his early twenties he was the best hunter the temple employed, which meant he was the man the priests sent for when the feast needed a stag and the stag was not cooperating. He wanted something larger than the work and could not have said what. If pressed he would have said a seat at the high table, not at the hearth beside it.
He got the feast instead. In 1653 BCE, in the middle of a harvest banquet at the temple, he left to relieve himself in the yard and was taken from behind by a guest nobody had seen arrive. He was twenty-three. He woke three days later in a granary with a throat that burned and a woman sitting on a grain sack watching him. She was Tangqin Zhao, the Midnight Widow, and she told him nothing useful: that he was hers now, that the sun would hurt, that he should eat only when she said. She is, by every account, alive today. She visited him each autumn in those years, corrected the way he held a cup, and left.
The Vampireverse remembers him mostly as the Crowned Hunger, a tracker for the Velvet Circle in the years of the Bronze Vigil, and he was a very good one. The Circle held the night roads of the Basin, and it needed someone who could follow a courier by the way he walked. Yu's gift, Pale Drift, was the thing that made him useful. His body would loosen, joints first, then the long muscles, and go to a pale cold haze that moved with the air and could pass beneath a door or between the teeth of a bronze axe-blade, then draw itself together again a few paces inside. It left him cold for an hour and starving for longer. It could not cross running water laid at a threshold, nor a doorway marked with salt, and the Circle had learned that the hard way, three drifters at a time. He made no childer. The Circle asked, more than once, and he said he had enough to manage in himself.
In 1624 BCE he cut open a man in the canal reeds below Shuqinxiu's neighbor town of Yujia. The man was a vampire slayer, one of the Vigil's quiet people, and the Circle had wanted him quiet for a year. Yu followed the blood trail to the river shrine to finish what he had left, slid under the door as a drift, and met a girl with a lamp and a sling. She hit him three times before he could form. One shot struck his shoulder with something that felt like a hot needle drawn through cold water, and he had not felt pain in a long while. He retreated by the same crack and sat in a drainage ditch for an hour, working out whether he was angry. He was not. He was interested.
For four years the girl was his work. The Circle gave Weiqin Yu a name, the Ashen Torch, and a price. He learned that she salted sills, that she slept on a boat in the current, that she hummed the same four lines of a threshing song when she was frightened, and that she did not appear to know the song was audible to anyone but herself. At Qinhe in 1622 BCE he told her through a door that she smelled of smoke, and she drove a bronze nail into the post at the height of his eye. He admired that more than he said. She was stubborn, she tired him, and she had learned the Circle's weak points faster than the Circle's elders had learned to forget them. His people began asking why he had not finished her. He had no answer he could say aloud.
On a night in 1620 BCE he found out that she had chosen the ground. Mingfengzhao was a ferry-house at a ford with a canal in a stone channel under the sill, a line of salt laid across it, and the door left open. He could see her sitting inside with her left hand flat on her knee. He knew what the trap was, and went in anyway, since the alternative was to keep being hunted by the same girl. He broke across the threshold in pieces, and the water took half of what he had. As he drew together before her she laid two fingers against his throat, gently, and he understood in the instant before the awl that she was feeling for the vein. His hands closed on her ribs. She was twenty. He was fifty-six.
Nobody in the Circle collected him. The ferry-house stayed on the Vigil's map as a bad place and the Circle's as an embarrassing one. Tangqin Zhao sent no message that anyone remembered. In Shuqinxiu the neighbor who had looked after the house kept the bowl on its shelf for a long while, upside down, and the mat on the east wall stayed unrolled until the thatch fell in.
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