Yutang Tang

Yutang Tang, The Restless Hammer, was a canal builder from Xiuxiu in China's Yellow River Basin who became a vampire slayer at nineteen in 2363 BCE. He fought with levers, counterweights and an oxhide shield, destroyed the thief Qin Qin in 2359 BCE, and died of a lung fever four years later.

The harbor watchman Gu always told it the same way. It was dusk at Xiuxiu in 2363 BCE, raining, and the thin man at the fish-store door turned to look at a boy who was hauling a timber up the wall on a rope. Gu had been watching the thin man for an hour, because the thin man had not blinked, and Gu saw the look very clearly across the harbor. It was the look of someone checking a puddle for depth. The boy on the rope did not see it. He was swearing at the knot. That was Yutang Tang, then nineteen, and the thief was Qin Qin of the Weeping Line, who decided in that moment that the boy was nobody and went in to rob the store. Gu said afterward it was the single worst piece of judgement he had ever witnessed, and he had once seen a man try to ford the river in flood with an ox on his back. Yutang was born in 2382 BCE, in The First Night, in Xiuxiu, a harbor settlement on a lagoon edge of the Yellow River Basin in what is now China. His father dug canals for a river lord, and the boy grew up in that kind of country, ankle-deep in cut reeds, where a month of work could be undone by a night of rain. He became a canal builder himself and a good one. He was the kind of engineer who hung a plumb line from every doorframe he walked through, out of habit, and tapped each wooden peg three times with the heel of his hand before trusting it. His want was simple and, he knew, unreasonable: to finish a canal that nobody would ever have to repair. He had an uneven scar on his chin from a counterweight that had not been tied right, and he treated it as a colleague. The call came in 2363 BCE, in a fever. For three nights he dreamed of a pale road running uphill and woke each morning with his feet muddy. On the fourth day he followed it, walking inland to a cliff above the harbor and an unmarked shrine of three stacked stones that no one in Xiuxiu had ever mentioned, where an old woman of the Vigil of Yellow River Basin was waiting with a bowl of water and a stake. She told him he was a vampire slayer. He asked who would teach him. She said nobody was left who knew how, and gave him the stake. Yutang taught himself, by building. That is how the Slayerverse remembers The Restless Hammer: a slayer with no gift whatever, whose entire power lived in the ground plan of a building. He called it Mechanical Ward, though it was a trade, not a name. A doorway was fitted with a drop bar on a counterweight, hung so that anything heavier than a child in the passage would trip it. A granary roof was cut into hinged panels, held shut by a pin on a trip cord and a stone on a long lever. A heavy door would slam on a timed fall of sand. Clay bells on cords warned of anything walking in the dark. He added a few small refinements for particular guests: a channel to run water over a threshold, a wedge of salt pressed into the lintel. The shield was oxhide, soaked and layered in three thicknesses and rimmed with reed. The stake was jujube wood, hard as a bone, and in the tip of it he set a nail of silver hammered from a trader's bracelet, because he had been told, by the old woman, that silver and the Vigil's mark were the two things the dark ones could not be careless around. His first clash was with the man who had not noticed him. Qin Qin, in 2363 BCE, had spent two nights emptying the harbor stores at Xiuxiu with a gang of helpers, and when Yutang's drop bar took one of them across the neck, he came back to see what had done it. He found the boy and the mechanism both. Qin was a thief, a clumsy one for a vampire, and his gift was the Nightfold, a thickening of the dark in a room that put lamps out. Yutang's lantern went to a red bead. He fought by touch and by the sound of the bells, and lost a tooth, and took a bag that Qin had dropped. In the bag was a black clay lamp with a chipped lip. He hung it on a nail in the store when it was over, because it was a good lamp. The next four years were a campaign through grain stores, and he was wise enough to know it. He rebuilt granaries that had lost their roofs, from Xiuxiu up the coast to the ferry stations, and set wards at the doors. He taught none of the hunters who came to him, though several tried. He was a bad teacher and a worse conversationalist, and said that if a ward needed explaining it was not a good ward. Qin kept coming for the lamp. Twice he tried the quay at Qinshuming, where he ran the night market, and twice Yutang was a day ahead. He was always a day ahead, as if he were laying out the ground in a plan and the vampire were only a stone dropped into it. In 2359 BCE he used the lamp. He knew by then that Qin kept it as another man might keep a child's tooth. He took it to a ferry granary at Weiwei, built a roof of eight hinged panels over a trip cord he had run from the lamp's hook to a stone on a lever, and lit the lamp in the center of the floor before dusk. Then he sat in the corner with the oxhide shield on his knees and waited through the night. Qin came an hour before dawn. He folded the dark in around the room, as he always did, and the lamp shrank to a seed of flame. He took it off the hook. The cord ran taut and the lever tipped, and all eight panels fell open together and let in the first light. Qin turned. Yutang was already there, and the stake went in under the ribs. The Weeping Line's thief was destroyed in the grey sun, in his own thickened dark. It took eleven seconds. He had four more years, though not many in good health. The work did not stop, and the winters in the lagoon were wet, and in the autumn of 2355 BCE he spent a night waist-deep in a breached dike, hauling stones with the village. The cough that followed him home never left. Yutang Tang died in 2355 BCE at the age of 27, after eight years as a slayer. He had been trying, that spring, to design a dike that would not need to be rebuilt every year. They buried him at the shrine on the cliff. The lamp stayed where he had hung it on the nail in the harbor store at Xiuxiu, and whoever had the night watch trimmed it and lit it, as they did without being told. Gu did it for twenty years. He said the flame leaned a little toward the door, and that this was a draught.