Scarp Stonebreaker, Hammer of the South

By Andrew Lyon

Laboring high atop the new Temple of Law in the sacred city of Rabavan, young Scarp Stonebreaker pauses to admire the charms of Senraxa, the seductive witch-priestess. This heedless act embroils him in the eternal battle between law and lust, male and female, gods and humans. Not that he cares. All Scarp wants is a way out of town, as the Judge of Murder is chasing him with white-hot knives...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Lyon
• Release date: Nov 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452475417

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Scarp Stonebreaker, Hammer of the South

Andrew Lyon

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Andrew Lyon

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Cover art by Joel Pickard.

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In memory of Frank Frazetta, who started all this, and for Marie, who lovingly supported it.

Scarp Stonebreaker, Hammer of the South

Transcriber’s Note

Unto Her Imperial Serenity Vionde, By Right of Her own Sword Holy Empress of Pashan, Queen of All the Heavens and Ruler of the World Known and the Lands and Seas Unknown, this insignificant girl-slave sends humble felicitations and salutations. Please accept from this worthless one the manuscript Your Imperial Majesty ordered into being. It is beyond this lowly one’s mind to understand your desire for this work, but in all devotion and duty this worm must warn Your Supremacy that the spewer of this tale is one of the most infuriating males this your servant has ever encountered. As Your Infinity will learn, the real Scarp Stonebreaker is not the hero the bards and storytellers have invented. His career is revealed by his own words to be a lurching journey from one catastrophe to another, driven by his unquenchable thirst for wealth, ease, and pleasure. Like many men of insufficient stature, he is vastly impressed with his own prowess, especially concerning women. In duty to Your Omnipotence this useless one submits to his juvenile attentions, for like all men his mind focuses only after baser urges are satisfied. However, his boasting in this area is valid, if only by benefit of lifelong experience. He is artless and selfish, though possessed even in his declining years of surprising endurance.

Some redeeming historical value may lurk in Stonebreaker’s salacious meanderings after Your Eternal Wisdom’s historians winnow the utter falsehoods and braggadocio from this revolting creature’s twisted tales. Only the hope of Your Imperial favor enables this gutter-denizen to persevere with the work, for the narrator of these pages is an offense to the gods, to decency, and even to so humble an insect as I, your grateful servant.

Ever your loyal property and obedient slave,

Gussa.

Prologue

Lovely young Gussa, I regret that I must desist from your sweet ministrations and earn my wine by honest toil on the plantation of history. But first I must strenuously protest your intolerable attention to duty—you are even now scribbling away as I mumble and mutter. Indeed, I'd hoped that our mid-morning interlude had relieved you of your irksome sense of industry, if only temporarily.

Our wicked Empress, the Glorious Vionde, chooses her agents well, I do admit. She gives me a honey-hipped scribe with the appetites of an Ormaigan mink and the diligence of a Finaxi slave-goader. Don't fix me with that sly eye, pert cat. I'd battled and bedded my way across three continents and several seas before your grandmother ever dreamed of parting thigh. I will enlighten Her Most Deadly Majesty in my own good time, and exhaust you into the bargain.

I will say that this is the last place I would have dreamed to pass my final days. It is a fine garden, with falling terraces of sweet-smelling trees, and eunuchs all about tending each plant like a royal heir. Fountains and brooks and bowers abound for the amorous. Gates with armed amazon guards lacking weakness for any man, even Scarp Stonebreaker, once Great Bull of the Southern Herd, former Admiral of the Junja privateer fleet, Knight of Goorkalli...

Ah, but my titles bore the spry young Gussa, who like all the spawn of her mother’s generation possesses not the wisdom to listen to her elders. Let us give the Great Lady of Torture a portion of her tale then, in the hopes that reading my adventures will keep her from another evening of roaming the streets of Lower Pashan, searching out fresh victims for her infernal machines.

Yes, child, I have always had an intemperate tongue. But the event that launched me into history grew more from my even more intemperate eye. I was young then, a laborer, a whipcord, working high on the ever-rising temples of the Holy City of Rabavan....

Chapter One

I stood on a swaying plank, a basket full of mortar balanced on my aching shoulder. My skin dripped with grimy sweat as I made my way up the bamboo scaffold toward the apex of the nearly completed Temple of Law. Far below, in a gleaming graveled courtyard being swept and patterned by temple slaves, four sweating runners carried a silk-curtained litter. They stopped to lower their burden well out from the new temple, kneeling and placing their foreheads on the ground. The shadow of the new building almost touched the litter, outstripping that of the Temple of Tamur, whose tiled roof I could see a hundred feet below.

Get that mud up here, dung hauler! bawled Sogen, a skinny journeyman whose family connections placed him high in the Mason's Guild. His uncle had years since eclipsed my father within the Guild, and he took every opportunity to belittle me. But this fine afternoon I ignored his beer-cracked voice, my eyes riveted on the occupant who decamped from the litter two hundred feet below.

She wore a shimmering skirt and a gleaming coin corset, and from my height the expansive terrace of her bosom was all but displayed. I have in the many years since outgrown my childish obsession with tits—but I have made the impudent Gussa laugh. You made no complaint, vixen.

As I say, in my youth all I needed to drop my jaw and raise my staff was the sight of uptilted, sun-bronzed paps, and so I stayed rooted in just such a state while Sogen berated me. I ignored him and squinted at the morsel on the square. She had luxuriant black hair, worn loose, though I cursed it whenever the gusty wind whipped it like a heavy veil over the objects of my juvenile attentions.

Move, damn you! demanded Sogen, now standing on the plank above me, his feet at a level with my shoulder. He reached down, grabbed the root of my braid—which I still wear to this day in memory of my mother, though it is thinner now than in those days—and yanked me toward a ladder that stood on the edge of the scaffold. I tore my attentions from the woman below and followed the pain as Sogen wrenched my hair. The gang of masons and laborers on the planks above us looked down, some laughing, some frowning to see the son of a one-time Master so shabbily handled. You've no need to eye the Bitch Priestess, snarled my tormentor. She'd not even spit on a scum carrier like you!

I mounted the ladder to the next level, both arms straining with the full basket of mortar and Sogen wrenching me upwards. I moved too slowly for his liking, however, for after three rungs he gave my braid a mighty pull. I lurched, mud spilled from the hod in a shower, and my foot slipped on the slop that now covered the ladder. I fell sideways, and the gritty sludge poured from the basket in a deluge that splattered the plasterers working several levels below. Seeing no way to save both myself and the mortar, I released it as a bad bet, and barely managed to grab the ladder with two fingers of my left hand. The loaded basket bounced down the scaffold, spewing the remainder of its moist gray cargo into empty air.

If left alone this situation would have sufficed; I would have taken a blistering harangue and a swipe or two as punishment from Sogen, climbed back down and fetched a new batch of mortar, and lived the rest of my life in the city of Rabavan, hauling mortar up scaffolds.

But Sogen would not have it so. You bepoxed cur! he cursed, his eyes following my hod on its bouncing downward course. He still had a fistful of my braid clutched in his strong bony hand, and he hauled at it with a sudden agonizing pull. My scrambling bare feet searched for solid purchase on the ladder, and finding nothing but slippery mortar flung wildly about. My free hand flailed upwards, and in that place where the mind stores its most horrifying memories I can still see my fingers clutching for the trowel stuck in Sogen's belt. The tool was thrust handle out, and my desperate fingers wrapped around the worn wooden grip, hauling at it for my life.

I felt Sogen's body tense to resist my weight, and he released my hair, his hands scrabbling on the brick wall for a holding place. Let go! he screamed, tipping forward. Seeing that he could not hold me, I released the trowel, but momentum worked against him. He launched out from the scaffold, his hands making useless circles in the air.

Now, if left alone this situation would have sufficed; Sogen would have gone to his gods upon meeting the gravel of the courtyard, I would have been drummed from the Mason's Guild to a short life as a beggar in the worst gutters of Rabavan, and as a bonus I would never have met the witch Senraxa.

And yet even in dying Sogen would not have it so, for as he fell his flailing foot caught the upright of the ladder to which I clung, one-handed and desperate. With torturous slowness the ladder-top angled out from the next level, and with the dullness of mind that always visits me in the throes of panic, I clung to its uprights like a drunken monkey.

Time passed at a crawl, and I remember watching Sogen's body hit the ground and bounce, thinking, Doesn't look so bad. My feet belatedly found rungs, and wood creaked as the ladder and I spun out into the void.

As I've mentioned, I’m a bandy little beast, and shortness of leg had forced me to compensate upon the walls and domes of the new temples. This I did by developing a talent for jumping, and many a mason and hod hauler have lost a copper to me, betting against my prowess for leaping from column to arch to buttress. But in the development of this profitable skill I had many close scrapes, which necessitated the learning of another art, that of acrobatics, and it was this that saved me from joining Sogen on the square.

I tucked my legs and spun, flinging my torso and the ladder outward as forcefully as I could. Then I prayed to all the gods—with even a word to Tamur, whom men are never supposed to address—and cart-wheeled downward, ladder outstretched, waiting for death.

There came a shuddering jar through my arms and shoulders, and my hands almost slipped from the sodden ladder. When I was certain I had ceased falling, I opened my eyes and took in my new situation. First, I looked upward. The top rung of the ladder snared on the spines of a vicious dragon gargoyle, mounted on a curving eave of Tamur's temple. The bottom of the ladder stuck out into nothingness. My slightest twitch promised certain disaster.

Tamur's temple was dwarfed by its newer cousin, the Temple of Law, but it was by no means small. Far below me was the tiled roof of the Well of Life, where purifying water was drawn for the rites of Tamur. I hung from the underside of the ladder, looking down at a small crowd of people gathering about Sogen's body and pointing upwards at me. I could see the gang of plasterers turned away from their work, gawking at me and laughing. There would be no help from that quarter.

Who knows how long that huge stone dragon had guarded the roof of the temple? Who knows how many more decades it may have gone on doing so, had not Sogen and I conspired to add the weight of my body and the leverage of a ladder to its years of silent service? And who could fathom why the gods picked that moment for the ancient stone reptile to tear loose from its perch with a terrifying shriek, to spin out over my head. The bottom of the ladder jammed against the aging plaster of the temple wall, launching the dragon on a course across the lane between the two temples. It crashed through the scaffold and hurtled crazily downward, finally demolishing the corner buttress of the yet unfinished Temple of Law.

During all of these perversions of fate I fell, clinging devoutly to my rung, somehow for an instant with the ladder beneath my body. My entire body shuddered as the ladder jammed between the gutter of a small nave of Tamur's temple and the tiled roof of the Well of Life. A startled acolyte priestess in a bright yellow robe looked up at me from the well, spilling sacred water from a clay jar. Across the lane, alongside the new temple, events great enough to draw my eyes from the gauze-clad girl directly below transpired with a mighty rush of sound.

The stone dragon, smashed to bits among the splintered scaffold and vanquished buttress, brought doom to the plasterers and bricklayers. The ropes holding the scaffold to rings in the wall popped like string and planking rained down, carrying massive loads of brick and stone to accentuate the destruction. I watched the bricklayers at the top struggle for holds on the wall, and saw some fall as the newly mortared bricks came away in their hands.

The remaining scaffold dropped away from the wall, falling directly over my head. I dropped from the ladder to the ground and rolled under the roof of the well as brick and stone, beams and wood fell in a storm around me, smashing the ladder that had carried me to earth alive. The acolyte screamed and fell to the ground covering her head with her arms. That seemed a sensible idea, so I cowered with her. Loads of brick smashed through the roof, missing us by handbreadths. The thunderous falling lasted for an eternity, but when it ended the silence was total.

I found myself with my arms flung around the girl, one hand cupping a firm roundness. The silence must have brought her to her senses, because she slammed her elbow deep into my ribs. I gasped and stood shakily as she ran away in a yellow flash of backside. I stepped from the shattered shelter of the well and looked upward. The scaffold lay in ruins in the lane, and at the top of the new temple a group of outraged masons who had clambered from the scaffold screamed imprecations and pointed at me.

I stood mute, too stunned to comprehend their words, but within another instant I heard the rhythm of running feet behind me. I spun and saw a troop of city guards rounding the temple, spears lowered and swords free.

But it was not the guards that sent me running. It was a mighty groan from the Temple of Law that set wings to my hardened bare feet. I remembered in a flash the mumblings from the older masons when construction had begun, whispers that the ground beneath the foundation stones at the south-east corner of the building was soft. Indeed, the buttress for that corner had been made two courses thicker as a hedge against disaster. Not enough, as it turned out, to defend it from Scarp Stonebreaker.

The falling granite dragon had destroyed the support of that very corner.

I ran, the troops behind me, and over my pounding heart and roaring breath I heard a scraping scream. I glanced up and back, and what I saw sent my feet into a whirl.

The unfinished Temple of Law leaned slowly toward the open square—and me. I cursed my stubby legs and put my soul into the race, as the groaning stone monster slid down towards me. I pelted across the courtyard for the main gate, as the shadow of the temple grew ever larger. The groan ceased and the building fell in silence.

It met the courtyard with an unimaginable roar, and the ground lifted against my feet, throwing me to my face. Rubble bounced around me as I pushed up, my heart busting with terror. I heard the screams of guardsmen, and a quick look back showed that several of them had pulled themselves from the wreckage and resumed the chase. The litter with its kneeling slaves squatted like a spider before the courtyard's main gate, which stood open to the city beyond. I jumped one terrified kneeling bearer and smashed into another, barely keeping my feet as he went down.

The woman who had caused the entire catastrophe stood a cubit away from me, smiling. I pivoted to one side and she followed. I tried the other side and again she mirrored my steps. I heard the clink of scale armor behind me, and with a scream of desperation I rushed the brazen woman.

She stood stock still, so I ducked and clamped her squirming body firmly over my shoulder. I ran for the gate, my lungs burning, and the cursed female did nothing to make my job easier. She pummeled my back, and as her feet were at the perfect angle, kicked me painfully about the tenders.

Now this was the second time in a few moments that a woman had offered me violence, and it angered me. I determined to keep this one and return the favor later in a style more to my liking. This great delusion alone must be enough to ensure my illustrious reader as to my mental ineptitude. I knew I carried off the High Priestess of Tamur. I knew that her favors were rumored to cost a man dearly—one heard whispers of incredible pleasures, then…well, the rumors were the mumblings of drunken tavern lords. Naive and heedless of dark murmerings, I determined to have her. Ah, youth and its folly. But would there be an epic worth the name without it?

The guard at the main gate had other ideas, and took a swipe at my legs with his halberd. I spun from him in a panic, and the curved blade of the pole-arm sliced into the flesh of my thigh. How fortunate that the city levy of Rabavan was so shoddily trained, as this fellow over-swung and was in no position for a back cut as I swept by him. Were he better schooled he would have surely removed my legs. As it was, I quickly lost my pursuers deep in the twisting alleys of Rabavan, propelled by fear and the desperate need to stop and lower the punishing creature who had tried to block my escape.

I had just limped around the busy Yinun bazaar and ducked into a deserted tanner's booth when my burden spoke instead of screamed.

Put me down. Now.

The command in her voice and the fiery cut in my thigh forced me to obey. I set her on her feet before me, and she put a hand on my heaving chest. She looked down into my face and smiled, the same smile I had seen when I had charged her in the courtyard. The coins of her corset tinkled and swayed from the ledge of her glorious breasts.

You have destroyed the Judge of Murder's new Temple, she said. You are in serious trouble.

I tried to look fierce, and I tried to look her in the eyes, failing both. So are you, I said.

She laughed. From a little bantam like you?

That made me meet her eyes. She read mine. Why not? she said. You have laid low a mighty opponent of Tamur, or his temple at least. A performance such as yours deserves a reward.

I took her arms and began to pull her down. She spun out of my grasp, You'll not lay me down in this filthy tanner's hovel. It smells of death in here. She led me out into a shadowed, lonely courtyard between two crumbling tenements—which didn't smell any better than the booth, I thought—grasped the ledge of a shuttered window and presented this lowly laborer with a perfection of form he had never before dreamed of. She had to flex at the knee for the exercise to proceed, but soon we were well at the breathy, squirming business—my face buried in that dense black hair and the cut in my leg completely forgotten—and the sweetest words I had ever heard were those she whispered as we climbed to our mutual goal.

You're not, she gasped, so short, she sighed, after all.

And that is how I met the mighty witch Senraxa.

Chapter Two

For many years after that first encounter with Senraxa I would admit some amazement at the alacrity with which she bestowed her favors on a low though sturdy workman. But as time has driven wisdom into my heart I have grown to understand that the Witch of Gen—for the mountain fastness of Gen was the land she first ruled—was a woman who believed that her power derived from the magical energies of coupling, and if ever there breathed a woman more concerned with power, I have yet to lay eyes on her.

The root of that lesson lingers as I remember our disengagement, she standing relaxed and calm, me puffing and weak-kneed, leaning against the rotten window frame and arranging my loincloth and kilt. She looked down into my face and smiled like a well-fed lioness.

You have run a long race, she said. I tried for bluster. The prize was worth it.

She laughed. Gutter chivalry. You are a refreshing child.

The word brought me up straight, my eyes dead level with her chin. And then she patted me on top of my head.

Most of the truly evil things I have done have been the result of some fool's ill-timed reference to my height. And all of the truly stupid things I have done have been the bastard offspring of that raw nerve. My next motion joined in the long line of cases belonging to the second category. I raised my hand to slap Senraxa's cheek.

She laughed in my face and the blow stopped a kernel's width from her bronze skin. Enraged, I summoned all the force in my body, willing my palm to avenge her insult. She laughed again and the strength of my legs died. I slumped to the offal-strewn paving stones. Senraxa knelt and stroked my face. Her smile was the mocking laugh of a jackal, but her hand on my brow was like that of my mother when I had almost died of fever.

I have seen magicians and fakirs, wizards and sorcerers from the Ruby Isle to the Sultanate of Lidana, and if by chance I brushed up against one or was forced to clasp them by the hand all I could feel was a desire to wash the infected part. Add to this the fact that almost each and every one proved to be an utter charlatan and you will no doubt perceive that my opinion of practitioners of the magic arts is a low one.

I consider myself fortunate that Senraxa infected none of my parts, but in my dotage I have come to realize that the reason may be that she was a true adept, and that there may be something to this coupling-magic business. Perhaps your own active social life supplies Your Supreme Majesty with the same species of power…

Again the infernal beauty Gussa cracks her whip, and this old plowhorse must return to the furrow or face an empty bed in the evening, for my scribe commands me remaining days like a West Sea pirate captain.

It was a touch at my kilt, near my near-empty coin pouch, that woke me from the spell of Senraxa, and a heavily painted face near mine that propelled me up and punching.

Don't hit! Please don't hit me! screamed the apparition. She wore a filmy skirt and rouge around her nipples, and white powder did little to hide the sores about her face. I saw her chancred mouth pout in its rush past, and she disappeared into the alleyway.

I stalked through the dim back alleys to my father's stone house, built centuries earlier by my paternal ancestors—masons every one—under the lee of the city's outer wall. The massive stone curtain blocked the light of the rising sun, leaving my home in blessed shadow, and I crept in through a broken-shuttered window like a rat to its hole.

I flew up the creaking ladder to my loft in the rafters of the narrow building. Dawn light filtered through the garret's tiny gable windows. A bulky shadow raised its head from a pallet of straw. I have waited all night. The Judge of Murder has been here for you, Little Bear, said the shape, using the pet name I had grown to hate. In the low light I made out the bristling beard and huge shoulders of my father, Guntar Stonebreaker, once Master Mason of Rabavan.

I ran to him and wrapped my arms around his massive body, sobbing like a toddler. They think I killed Sogen! He fell, Father, he fell! And the Temple, it collapsed at that weak corner! I didn't know the dragon would smash the buttress! You have to believe me and talk to Guild Master Ro. You and he were friends—

Guntar untangled my arms from around him. I can do nothing for you now, he said. He pulled his head away and for the thousandth time I looked into his empty eye sockets. You have killed Old Gravel-head's future son-in-law. You knew that the marriage would ensure his power in the Guild. This was true. Sogen's family had feuded with Ro for generations, fighting over patrons and killing one another on the building sites. Not difficult to do hundreds of feet above ground.

And Sogen the Younger had no brothers. Now Gravel-head would see you scalded to death in the execution pit. It is said that that Judge Aenab already has the tallow heating for you. He is furious about his temple.

I flung back onto the pallet, hot tears dripping as I envisaged Aenab, the Judge of Murder and builder of the Temple of Law, laying a whip to the flanks of slaves as they stoked a fire under the Convict's Cauldron. I could even smell the bubbling tallow—

Father pushed shakily to his feet and laid a hand on my shoulder. Guide me down now, and out to the coops, he said, his voice steady even if his feet were not.

We need eggs? Now?

Obey me, boy.

I wiped the fearful tears from my face and stood, my head coming up only to the top of his ribs. I led him down the ladder. We passed a lower loft and Guntar yelled blindly in that direction. Shill! Scarp is leaving! Off your lazy duff and fix a good breakfast, with hardcake and oldbeef for his journey. Now, woman! A scruffy figure emerged from a pile of furs on the rough wood planks. She ran a hand through frizzy thin hair and yawned, displaying more gum than tooth.

The boy leaving? I'll cook for that, sure I will, said my stepmother. I'd fix a king's feast for that, aye.

Father ignored her and I was too stunned to pay the crone any mind. We continued down as she rolled from the pile of bedding.

Leaving? I asked. Where would I—

The old man shushed me as he had done from babyhood. First to the coop, to find something, he said. And then you must leave, my son. This city means to kill you now.

The certainty in his voice chilled my heart, and to a point strangely quelled my fear. Now I knew where I stood, though not where I was bound, for Father had said it was so, and Master Guntar Stonebreaker's word was as solid as his walls.

We stepped into the back plot, a tiny yard crammed with Shill's small garden and rusting tools of the mason's trade. At the rear of the yard, among vines and small tenacious trees, stood a rough coop where I had gathered eggs from the first day I could walk. A rooster