“It has no form for a thing that has taken a room, paid for it, and been a neighbour for nine years, and I have twice written a page that I did not know what to call.”
As the houses of Yellow Ward tell it
In the houses of Yellow Ward they tell it low, on the stair or over the copper. There was a man of property in the ward, resident, respectable and long-lived, who kept a good room, paid for it, and was civil to his neighbours. Nobody saw anything. What the houses saw was the women going, year on year, faster than they went from any other ward in the city, and nobody counting.
Twice in living memory the ward put a name to him. The first was a landlord with a rent dispute running against him. The second left the city in 4611 and was never heard of again, and the ward took his going as the proof. It was not proof, but the ward has never much cared for the difference.
In 4614 a household in the ward sent for the Black Lantern, and the house would not come. Its book gives the ground in two words, no finding, and the ward has read those two words every way it can. The houses will tell a stranger that the brothers have been in Yellow Ward eleven times since 4580 and have never once said why. They call the thing a vampire when they call it anything, and no paper in the city uses the word.
What is known
Very little, and all of it a rate. Over some forty years the Yellow Ward houses have lost women faster than the other wards, by Sabine Rook’s reckoning, which she cannot prove because nobody counts. Surgeon Ellis Mow’s casebook holds a small number of cases from the ward entered under a description rather than a diagnosis. The Black Lantern has attended Yellow Ward eleven times since 4580, oftener than anywhere in the city but the nine closed acres east of the Cinders, and Brother Anselm has given no reason. In 4614 it refused one household, the ground entered as no finding.
The law keeps it so. A suppression on anything with standing is an execution without trial, and no authority can require the occupant of a paid-for room to say what he is. Across the realm the accusation is nearly always false and nearly always about property. Sarrum burns its dead within the day.