Yujia Ren

Yujia Ren, known as The Last Hound, was a caravan sellsword from the Yellow River who became a vampire slayer in 2809 BCE and burned the Ivory Architect out of Hanzhao. She had no gifts, a reed bow and a talent for looking beaten.

The night market at Yufengqin was lit by four hundred small lamps, and Yujia Ren had counted them from the gate, which was the first mistake the market's builder ever saw her make. She counted them because she was paid by the lamp. A salt merchant named Kao had hired her to find his daughter, who had gone in after dark in the year 2806 BCE with a basket of dyed thread and had not come out; the girl was nineteen, Kao said, and had a stubborn jaw, and the price was a jar of millet beer, three copper ingots and the beer jar again if she brought the girl back unbitten. Yujia took the work for two reasons. One was that nobody else would. The other was that she had spent three years learning how a certain kind of thing arranged a market, and this one was arranged very well. It was a market for people who preferred not to be recognized. Between the lamps lay long dark pockets, in every alley, one at every corner, so that a person stepping from the light felt the dark close behind them like a door. Yujia walked in drunk. This was her trade: the Sellsword Feint, an old caravan guard's trick of seeming beaten, tired, overpaid and careless until the moment of use. She staggered. She dropped a bundle of pitch-soaked reeds and laughed at herself. She asked a stallholder the way to the wine, and while he pointed she put a coal from her pocket-pot to the reeds under his awning. By the time the first awning caught she had slipped through the nearest dark pocket herself and found, standing in it, a man with a plumb line weighted with a bead of ivory in one hand and a look of academic annoyance. That was Wei Xiu. His sleeve took fire. He did not stay to argue. She brought the girl out of a storeroom behind the dyers' lane, unbitten and furious, and the market burned until morning. Kao paid in full and did not thank her, which she preferred. She walked home with a burn on her wrist that she kept, for the rest of her life, uncovered. Yujia Ren had been born in China, in Fengfeng, in 2827 BCE, in the days of The First Night: a caravan stop on the river road where the millet carts stopped to let their oxen drink, and she grew up in the dust of other people's journeys. The guards there called themselves hounds, because they followed the cart and bit anything that came near it. At eighteen she was a hound, a mercenary in the plain sense of the word, with a reed-shafted hunting bow and a way of staying alive that everyone else's mother called luck. In 2809 BCE a bite on the road to the ferry should have made her something else, and it did not. A woman from the Vigil of Yellow River Basin came to her bedside and told her that she had been called, and that a vampire slayer in that country was a rare and uncertain sort of animal. That was the whole of the instruction. Yujia had no mentor, and no one thought to send her one. Over the next few years every other hound of her company died in ways she preferred not to describe, and she was the last. People started calling her the Last Hound as a taunt, and she kept it. Her method was nothing grand. A human slayer in the Slayerverse has no gift to lean on. What Yujia had was timing, an ear for a hired liar, and a long familiarity with the sort of person who takes money and runs. She taught herself to read a lamp. She kept a pouch of pitch and coals, and a skin of river water to pour on the sill of any door she did not like, because Wei Xiu and his kind could not abide running water at a threshold, and she had learned it by watching one try. She measured her days in broken bowstrings. After every fight she kept the snapped string in a pouch at her belt, and by her fortieth year the pouch was heavy. Over thirty-six years she cleared three nests hidden in cellars, tombs and cisterns along the great river. The first was a grain cellar at Dongtai in 2804 BCE, a few years after the fire. The second was the dry well of a mountain shrine in 2803 BCE, which she entered by lowering herself down the shaft like a bucket. She thought about Wei Xiu a good deal during those years. He was a spy, and the Obsidian Throne used him to place its eyes in temples and ferry-houses, and he was also an architect, in a way that frightened her more: everywhere he built, the dark came already furnished. In the dark pockets he moved by Umbral Step, from one unlit corner to the next in the time it took a lamp to gutter, and then stood there with his hands shaking from the effort. She learned that too. A lamp, any lamp, was the only wall he respected. He retreated from Yufengqin to Hanzhao in 2805 BCE and rebuilt. Hanzhao was a ferry town on a wide, slow stretch of the river, and he built his new house over a millrace, with a long entrance hall that bent twice and every lamp set low. It took her four years to find the front door. She found it in 2801 BCE, in the autumn, in the evening. The sluice at the house's own mill, forty paces upriver, she opened herself, and the channel under the floor ran with the full river. At the sill she stood with a skin of lamp oil and a reed arrow wrapped in pitch. Wei Xiu came to the door and the water at his feet stopped him as a wall would have stopped a man. She loosed the arrow. The oil took. He burned for most of an hour, and she sat on the ferry steps, unable to leave, until nothing in the doorway was moving. She never boasted of it. The Vigil entered the destruction of Wei Xiu in its roll for 2801 BCE and underlined the year. Twenty-one years later, nobody's idea of retired, she walked the long caravan road west with a jade train in 2780 BCE, because word had come back along the route of a strong young man in the Indus country, called with no teacher and likely to break himself on his first fight. She reached the plain in 2778 BCE after more than a year on the tracks, and trained Jaa Dejaesh, who had been called in 2779 BCE, and stayed two winters. She taught him to keep his hands off the nearest throat, to count the doors in any room, and to eat before a fight. Then she turned around and went home. She died in 2773 BCE, at fifty-four, in Fengfeng, of a winter lung that had nothing to do with the war. She had been a slayer for thirty-six years. The pouch of broken bowstrings was found under her bed, and the stallholders of the river road, who remembered her paying for her millet beer in full, would not let anyone throw it out.