In Shadow at the Reek, the Walker is married to a vampire. She has found him in every life he has ever woken into, and the novel never says how it began. This is where it began, a thousand years ago, in a Venice barely risen from the water.

The fever had come to the lagoon, and the boats were full of the dead. The city was younger then, barely risen from the water, and it had no islands yet for them. Only the water. The boats took them out past the last houses, and the lagoon closed over them without a sound, the way it closed over everything. The islands would come later.

I would return to this place again and again, just as I always returned to places that could not stop dying. In time a sickness, still unnamed, would pass through and take half the city before a single year was out, when the boats could not move fast enough to carry the dead away. But those deaths still lay ahead of me then. That night, there was only the water, and what it held, and me.

I took the pipes to the last step before the wet. They were of this place, cane and goatskin and olive-wood warmed by a sun I had not been born under, and they woke gladly, the drones settling into the salt air like something coming home to its own bed. It was I who did not belong. I began low, the breath before a tune, and the dead came up to meet it, not as shapes but as a pressure on the air, a leaning-in. I gave them the only thing I had ever had to give. Not absolution. I was never a priest. Only the sound, and the saying: you were here, you were here, you were here.

***

I did not hear her come, and that was how I knew. Nothing living moves that quietly.

She had drawn close while I played, close enough to take me, and she was in no hurry about it. That was the first thing I understood. She was a creature that had never once had to rush. The cold came off her the way heat comes off a fire, except backward, the air giving up its warmth to her and getting nothing in return. She moved around me the way a cat moves around a thing it has already decided to kill and is only choosing how to enjoy, and the whole time she watched my face.

Waiting.

I had seen the look before, in other cities, on other faces the night keeps and does not age. She was waiting for the fear. The catch in the breath, the small animal moment when the body understands what has found it. That moment. The drink before the throat.

I let the music finish. Then I lifted the chanter from my lips, looked at the most beautiful and terrible thing on that quay, and gave her none of it. I smiled instead.

"You're early," I said. "Or late. I never can tell with your sort. Either way you've come to the wrong table. I play for the dead. There's nothing here to take that the water hasn't taken already."

She went still. Not the stillness of a thing about to strike. The stillness of a thing that has heard a sound it cannot place.

"You should be afraid." Her voice was beautiful and without any warmth at all, the voice of someone reading a sentence she had read a thousand times and never once doubted.

"They are always afraid. By now."

"I know. I'm spoiling it." I nodded at the water. "It's nothing personal. I've met your sort before. They stop being frightening after the first century or two."

She did not smile. The night-things have been begged at and bargained with by better men than me, and it moves them as little as a child shouting at the tide. But she did not strike, either. She stood there with my death in her hands and did not close them, and I watched something cross her face that surprised her more than it surprised me. She had reached for a frightened man and found a thing that looked back.

"What are you," she said. Not a question now. Closer to an accusation.

"Tired, mostly." I settled the bag against my arm again. "But if you want the longer answer, you'll have to let me finish. Watching is the only way I know how to explain myself."

And because I did not know what else to do with a creature that had decided not to kill me yet, I played.

***

The dead rose. Not in fear of her, though they knew her, knew her far better than I did. They came up the way I had called them, the nameless of the lagoon, and turned their grey faces to the sound and did not flee her. They stood in the shallows and listened, as though she were no more to be feared than the water or the dark.

I watched her watch them. The hunger was still in her face. She was not gentle, not then, not for a long age after. But under the hunger something moved that had not been there before. She had come to the water to take a life, and had not known the water would have something to say to her.

When the last note died, the lagoon was grey and innocent again, as if it had never held anything at all.

"They go so quietly," she said.

“I've watched them die for nine hundred years. Not one of them ever went quiet. But you did that.”

"I didn't quiet them. I made them heard.” I said.

She looked at me a long while. Whatever she had come to do, she had stopped wanting to.

She came to feed.

She stayed to listen.

And she has been finding me ever since.