Zinai Ashsidtiron

Zinai Ashsidtiron, the Cold Bell, was a marsh tracker from a Levantine river village who became a vampire slayer by nose alone. He hunted for forty years with an oxhide shield, taught one student, and finally caught the vampire he never quite managed to catch.

Smell the door before you open it. That was the rule, and Zinai Ashsidtiron had it from nobody; he worked it out the first winter, on his own, from a handful of mistakes that he was lucky to have survived. A closed door in the marshes smells of what lies behind it. Smoke and onion meant a family. Wet fur meant a goat. A particular cold, flinty note, like a knife just taken from a well, meant something else, and he learned that to open such a door without first standing there for the length of ten slow breaths was to invite what was behind it to open you. He kept the rule for forty years. It was tested hardest in 2487 BCE, on a rainy night in the river village of Alashai, when the door in front of him smelled of myrrh and hyssop and a sick child, and he opened it anyway because the child had begun to cry. He was born in 2524 BCE in Alashai, a river village of reed huts on the edge of the marshes in the Levant, in what is now Lebanon, and he grew up in the age the Slayerverse calls The First Night. His father cut reeds. Zinai tracked, from the age of nine, because there was nothing else a boy with a long nose and very little patience for school could do for a family of seven, and by twenty he was the man the village sent for when an animal killed lambs or a child went missing in the reeds. He could follow a trail by smell the way other men follow a road. Wet clay, fox, the sour trace of a man who had eaten fish the day before: he had a vocabulary of odors that he could not have named out loud, and he would not have been able to teach it if you had paid him. His one want was a quiet one. He wished, for a single day, to smell nothing at all. He carried a pouch of crushed bitter herbs for the purpose of resetting his nose, and when he was tired he held it to his face for a long time with his eyes closed. The Vigil of Levant wanted a vampire slayer, and in 2498 BCE it took Zinai Ashsidtiron, a plain hunter, at twenty-six, after he followed a trail through the marshes to a drowned reed-cutter's hut and found there what had been killing the village herders. He did not kill it. He drove it off with a fire-hardened stake and a shield made of an oxhide pulled taut over a wicker frame, which was the only protection he had, and he walked home with the shield in shreds. A Vigil steward who had heard the story offered him a place on the strength of the shield alone. No teacher came with it. The Vigil of Levant was thin in those years, and for the first time in his life Zinai found himself needing to learn a craft from nobody. He did it badly and then well. He rebuilt the oxhide shield, and the stake he cut himself. The nose, Scent-Reading as the Vigil began to call it, he trusted entirely. He had no gift beyond it. He was an ordinary man, with an unusual nose and a patience for rain, and the Cold Bell was a name the villagers gave him for the sound his shield made when something heavy hit it. For eleven years he cleared the dull jobs. Six feeding grounds along the trade roads, a houseful of corpses at a caravan well, the odd stray that lived on the edge of the marsh. The harder trail was a quiet one. Poor families up and down the river were dying of fevers that did not spread, and the sick were attended by a gentle physician in a hooded cloak, who left a smell of myrrh and hyssop behind her. He did not suspect her. The smell was too innocent, and a vampire, he told himself, would not smell of herbs. Then he opened the door in Alashai in 2487 BCE and the physician was already crossing the room. He never saw her move. The blow struck the oxhide shield before he had finished lifting it and spun him against the wall hard enough to crack two ribs, and the woman was past him and out into the rain, leaving only a smell of cold flint and a child who lay asleep, a cool poultice on its forehead and not a mark on its neck, which he never understood. That was his first sight of Tirhaa Zinzinzinim, the Weeping Mask of the Silent Court. He was thirty-seven. After that he learned what she was, a quick and clever creature who moved faster than a man could blink and who treated the hunt as an experiment. He learned that she could be tracked by the herbs, and that she knew he knew. For the next eleven years she hid the smell under other smells, resin, smoked fish, dung, once the sweet rot of a drowned animal, and each time he took longer to find the trail, and each time it was the smell under the smell that told him. She learned too. She stopped using the same door twice. In 2480 BCE a young man called Ishzuum Ishdamum, the Stone Sentinel, walked into Alashai from Mesopotamia in Iraq, a thirty-day journey by river barge and desert track, sent by a Vigil that had heard of the nose and wanted its method written down. Zinai could not write it. He took the boy on anyway, mostly because the boy was quiet, and spent the next year teaching him to stand still. Ishzuum learned to sit at a closed door and say what was behind it. He never became as good as his teacher, and he did not seem to mind. He went home with the rule and an oxhide shield of his own. By 2471 BCE he was dead, and Zinai heard of it from a trader, and sat for an afternoon with the herb pouch held to his face. He destroyed the Weeping Mask in 2476 BCE at Baalon, a walled courtyard of mud-brick storehouses on the coast road, at dawn. It took two weeks to place her there. The oxhide shield did what it had been built to do, which was to turn and herd. He held it up against the first light, and she, forced out of the shade by its edge, found there was no shade left. The stake did the rest. She had been ninety-one years old. He stood afterward in the courtyard until the sun had cleared the roof, with the shield hanging off his arm, and smelled nothing but warm clay and, faintly, myrrh. He lived eighteen years longer, to 2458 BCE, and died in Alashai at sixty-six, of old age, in the hut he had been born in. The herb pouch was in his hand. His family found it still damp.