Zinashai Elsidyaha

Zinashai Elsidyaha, the Burning Vow, was a human stormer and vampire slayer of the Levant, called in 1160 BCE after a fever emptied her household. With a sling and silvered shot she destroyed the relic broker Ela Haenhaai at Sidsidashath, then lived on to be remembered mainly by a ballad.

There are four versions of the ballad, and the sling-makers of Sidkaa, who kept it alive, have been arguing about them since before anyone wrote them down. They sang it at the wells, on the harbor wall and at the weighing of shot, and they agree on the refrain: "Nine nails in the cedar door, / a roof laid bare and nothing more." They disagree about her height (one verse makes her nine cubits), about the number of vampires she destroyed (anywhere between three and a hundred), and about whether the Black Widow was a woman. He was not. The name came from the black mourning shawl he wore. A harbor-master's tally of the period, the one dry document that bears on her, gives a plainer account, and the plainer account, which the Slayerverse also keeps on its rolls under the years of The Bronze Vigil, is the one that follows. Zinashai Elsidyaha was born in 1183 BCE in Sidkaa, a walled city-state on the Levant coast, in what is now Lebanon. Her father carried shot for the wall-slingers, and she learned the sling at six by throwing river stones at a mark on a dye-vat. At eighteen she joined the wall-guard as a Stormer, the kind of fighter sent over a breach or through a gate first, and she was good at it for a reason she could not explain to anyone. Something in her turned over when the shouting began. The Vigil of Levant later called this Berserk Rush, and to the Vigil it was a craft, not a gift: a deliberate letting go, the breath dropped to a bellows, the field of sight shrunk to a doorway. She had no power in her. What she had was nerve, and a body that could be driven past its sense. After each rush she remembered nothing of the last quarter hour and shook until she was sick, and for a day her ribs hurt where she had been hit and had not noticed. The calling came in 1160 BCE, when she was twenty-three, in a fever year. The sickness took most of the lane where she lived, and her household with it. She went down with it too, and the healers wrote her off, and sent word to the burners. She woke on the third night in the sick-house with her mother's body at her feet and, at the door, a man in a black shawl carrying a boy out over his shoulder like a sack of grain. Then the man broke. There is no better word. He came apart into a hundred palm-sized dark bodies with wings and a shriek like a shelf of bronze bells kicked down a stair, and they poured out of the doorway into the dark. She lit the sick-house pyre herself the next morning, with her own household inside it. The ballad has her swear "on the ash and the ember" that she would burn out whatever came for the sick. A vow is a heavy word for what a woman says at a pyre, but it is the one the lane gave her, and it became the Burning Vow. As a vampire slayer Zinashai Elsidyaha had no teacher. The old Vigil of Levant was thin that decade, and when it learned of her it sent a rumor about silver. She beat her mother's bracelet into a skin around clay-and-lead shot, which she carried in a sling bag at her belt and never let anyone else touch. The silver, as it turned out, mattered less than the weight. A silvered stone broke a bone or a lamp or a roof pin at forty paces, and that was usually enough. She found the man in the black shawl within the month, at the grain store by the harbor gate, because grain was what he knew. Ela Haenhaai, the Black Widow, was a broker: a vampire who had once been a merchant of Kayahai and who now bought and sold things nobody else could, temple plate, seals, the names of the dead, and favors that took years to come due. He belonged to the Weeping Assembly, which held its meetings in houses of mourning because nobody asks a mourner why he is there. She met him in the dark among the sacks in 1160 BCE. Three stones hit him in the chest, and when he came apart, she went into the cloud with a knife and Rush driving her, and came out of it with a gash that ran the length of her cheek and in her fist a thumbnail, the left. It was not a victory. It was the first time anyone had hurt him in that shape. For three years she hunted him by following his purchases. A broker leaves ledgers; ledgers need clerks; clerks drink. The name she kept hearing was Sidsidashath, a harbor tower south of the city where a Weeping Assembly broker kept the eighth of his vaults. To get iron she pulled nails from the hinges of the Sidkaa gate, which she could not afford to buy, and which the gatekeepers ignored because it was her gate. In 1157 BCE she went to Sidsidashath on a night with no moon. She drove nine iron nails into the sill of the vault door, wrapping the hammer, working through the dark, and then climbed the tower and cleared the roof hatch with her sling. Before dawn the first light came through the hatch. He woke at the sound of it. Ela tried to scatter, and could not pass the nails, and the swarm rose in the vault and found the one gap she had left open, the east window, and went at it. What came back down onto the floor was grey, like the dust of a ground millstone. She sat on the stairs. She had a rush on her and she did not remember the last part, and for once she was glad. She lived on for twenty-four years, and by the harbor-master's tally hunted nine more vampire lords out of the Levant's cities, and trained nobody to follow her. In 1133 BCE, aged fifty, she was moving goats up the mule track above Sidkaa in the winter rains when the hillside went. All four versions of the ballad agree on one detail of her death and no other: the mule walked home alone, still carrying the grain.