The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1651: Hands in Marble (Part One)

Far to the west of Blackwell Bay, in a city that never truly slept, High Lady Erna had come to the workshops of one of High Fen City’s most renowned sculptors in the hopes of seeing something beautiful that would lift the dour mood the day’s events had put her in.

Unfortunately, today seemed to be filled with disappointments, and Master Vespert had just treated her to another one.

Erna circled the great gleaming column of pale stone in slow, steady movements, the wide diamond pattern of her black-and-gold scales catching the workshop’s lamplight as she moved. The block stood twice the height of a tall man on its rough plinth, and from it, two figures had begun to surface the way a swimmer surfaces from deep water; one breath at a time, head and shoulders first.

The figure on the left had broken free as far as the line of her collarbones. The figure on the right was scarcely more than a shape against the stone with a suggestion of where an arm might one day be. Between them, where their hands would meet, the marble was still a single uncut mass.

Erna stopped at the front of the plinth and let her tongue flicker out, tasting the air.

The aura around the stone was thick with the master sculptor’s concentration. It possessed the particular flat, patient, almost mineral taste that Erna had come to associate with the very best craftsmen in her city, the ones who could hold a single image in their mind for months on end without letting the image waver.

It was a good aura. It was the aura she had paid for. It was the reason this man’s workshop, and not another, had been given the most important commission to come out of the palace district since she defeated the last of her siblings to seize the throne of the High Fen and had statues commissioned to mark the beginning of her reign.

She could taste the care that went into every blow of the hammer and chisel, but if care were enough, the world would be filled with masterpieces. The block of stone before her, however, possessed only the faintest trace of hope that it would ever be called a masterpiece, and the most important work hadn’t even begun...

"Master Vespert," she said, in a tone that sounded bright and cheerful but that people who knew her well had learned to dread. "Tell me again about the hands."

The master sculptor, a broad-shouldered man of the Clan of Painted Masks whose dark facial markings flowed in elaborate, almost calligraphic lines that swirled more around his left eye than his right, bowed where he stood clutching his hammer and chisel.

His ringed tail drooped low as he heard the first words his patron had spoken since she entered his shop and demanded to see his progress. It had only been a month since she awarded him the commission, and in that time, half of it had been spent refining his sketches and carving models and mockups before he committed to the heavy block.

He’d only recently begun to pull the rough figures from the stone, learning the block as he went and becoming acquainted with it the way a man acquaints himself with a woman he fancies. There was still time, in Vespert’s mind, to turn away from the block entirely and begin again with another one if the stone proved to hold hidden flaws that made it unsuitable for Lady Erna’s ambitious project.

"Highest One," Master Vespert said as patiently as he dared when speaking to a woman whose powerful tail could crush his skull faster than his eyes could see it move. "As I said before, the hands are last. You said that they were the most important focal point of the piece, so everything else must build toward them."

"Once I’ve come to know the figures as well as I know my own tail, I’ll know how they should hold each other," Vespert promised. "They’ll be beautiful and perfect, Highest One, I promise it."

"And if the stone of the hands is flawed when you get there?" Erna asked, rising higher on her tail as she loomed above the shorter sculptor. "If you spend the months I’ve given you on all the rest and have to start over again because you find a flaw at the end, what then?"

"Highest One, if the block is flawed, I’ll discover it long before the final stage," he promised, fighting to keep his tail from bristling in agitation. No matter how much he disliked receiving a surprise visit from his patron, or how much he wanted to chastise her for interrupting him to inspect work that had only barely begun, a man who valued his head couldn’t afford to display the slightest trace of irritation to the most powerful and ruthless being in the whole of the High Fen.

"I want the hands finished first," Erna said as her tongue flickered in the air, tasting the sweet scents of determination mixed with fear that permeated the air around the master sculptor.

A lesser man would have broken under her gaze. The fear would have overwhelmed their pride as a craftsman, and they’d bow and scrape, promising her whatever she demanded in order to win the favor of the powerful High Lady. Or, if they couldn’t win her favor, they would at least accede to whatever demands would preserve their pathetic, miserable lives.

A champion on the sands of the arena would never back down and submit, even if they faced the greatest battle of their lives. The air around them would taste of rich, coppery courage and bitter, earthy determination. That was the air she was looking for from Vespert now.

The Mother of Trees had told her that merchantmen could hone themselves into blades as sharp as any carried by a champion in the arena. She’d proven her power in just a few weeks in High Fen City as she and Heila leveraged their power as witches and her understanding of commerce to fill a ’war chest’ with thousands of tails of silver and gold.

In the process, she’d gathered a number of surprising allies who had been willing to pack up and venture across the mountains to the Vale of Mists, overcoming nearly a century of disdain for a place that most people in the Eldritch world believed would never recover from its fall.

Erna knew that her demands were unreasonable... But for a commission this important, she wanted to find out if Auntie Nyrielle’s beloved was right and the craftsman could really prove as sharp as a champion on the sands...

If he couldn’t, she’d reduce the unfinished statue before her to a pile of broken rock and dust, and if Vespert truly disappointed her, then his body would adorn the shattered monument as a lesson to anyone else who failed to meet her standards.