The man by the wine jars went the colour of tallow, and Zia Kukuili noticed it before she had landed her point. She was in the middle of a bout, in the courtyard of the old market at Zitius, with a padded staff in her hands and a young man's guard coming apart in front of her. Across the yard a stranger with chalk on his sleeves had looked up at her and flinched, as if someone had shown him a face with the middle taken out. He was a surveyor of some kind. He had come to see the temple terrace and he was seeing her, plainly and for the first time, and what he saw made him sick. She finished the bout, because she always finished the bout. Then she took off the copper crown to wipe her forehead, and the man put down his cup and reached for a sickle-sword on the wall. It was the spring of 2583 BCE.
She had been born at Zishaa in 2643 BCE, a hill fort in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, to a family whose pride was bigger than its barley. The fort's temple had a spring festival at which girls performed the old footwork, a stamping, turning sequence timed to a drum, and Zia was better at it than anyone who had ever done it, which went to her head. She wanted to be the thing the festival talked about. She was not, in the way of such wishes, interested in the festival itself. By thirty she had learned the staff from a retired guard, and by forty she had learned to read a man's weight on his feet before he had decided to move, and her father's debts had come due. The creditor's cousin was a patient and unsentimental man.
She ran in 2603 BCE, at forty, with a salt caravan going south to the Levant coast. In a harbor town she had never heard of she found a cellar with an unlocked door and went down it to sleep. The cellar belonged to Tira Ashkamelai, the Gaunt Mask, who had been in the coast trade for three hundred years and had never made a vampire who talked back. He made her. She did not later claim it was a choice. The hunger was bearable, and in return he gave her what she had never had at Zishaa, which was time and a patron. When she asked why, he said he wanted someone clever in the north who did not owe him affection. He sent her home. He outlived her by centuries, and was destroyed in the end, though none of that concerns her.
She came back to Anatolia as a charmer of the Silent Court, a house of vampires that did its business in nods and sealed tablets and never raised its voice. She wore the copper crown she had won three springs in a row at the Zitius games, braided wire as heavy as a small loaf, and never took it off in company. The stall-keepers called her the Crowned Duelist, and she answered to it. In the Vampireverse she was the Silent Court's best face, a woman who could sell a house its own rooftop. Her gift was Heartbeat Step. She could listen to the pulse in an opponent's chest, the smallest tick under the ribs, and move in the space between two beats, so that to the watcher she did not cross a room so much as occupy it. The air cracked where she had been. Afterimages hung in lamplight. It left her shaking and ravenous afterward, with legs that did not feel like hers, and she limited herself to one or two uses a night. The rest of it was talking. She charmed the house heads of Zitius one at a time, told each that the others were stealing from him, and sat in the middle like a stone in a river.
The man with the sickle-sword was Tarus Yamuus, a vampire slayer of nothing yet but his own nerve, the Lantern Warden, and at that first meeting in 2583 BCE he was twenty-five and had no business being in the courtyard. She cut his forearm before he had the blade clear. He got the point of it across her wrist anyway, which no one had managed in years, and she laughed, partly from surprise. A silver-tipped weapon would have been worse. The bronze only stung. She put down the staff and went out through the crowd, and nobody saw her leave, because she did not want to be seen. Later she heard he had gone east with the caravans, to find someone who could teach him. She thought it was the most sensible thing a man had ever done on her account, and she was irritated by it.
For ten years she worked unopposed. She set twelve houses against each other and profited from every fall, and in The First Night, with the great houses still dealing in water and grazing rights, it was more profitable than killing. The Silent Court asked for little. When Tarus returned, about 2573 BCE, he had a broader chest, a lantern, a new way of standing, and a palm marked with soot and pine resin. He found her on the stone bridge below the market in 2572 BCE and closed that palm on her wrist. It burned as if he had held a coal there. She wore a copper cuff afterward, and she did not take it off to sleep.
She was a vampire for thirty-three years, and the last of them were spent in the knowledge that she was making an enemy of an entire town. The houses had begun, at last, to compare notes. In 2570 BCE three of the heads asked her to a private meeting in the old cistern beneath the market, to settle a matter of accounts. She went, because she liked to win more than she feared to lose. Behind Zia Kukuili, as she walked in, masons drew a line of salt across the threshold and set a slab. The joints were driven with spikes tipped in silver, bought through a dozen hands. She was seventy-three. She had time, in the dark, to see how it had been done, and to admire it.
For years afterward the children of Zitius dared each other to put an ear to the drain beneath the market. The ones who did swore they heard a slow, steady tapping, as if someone were counting.
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