Harker Lives (Unfated, Book Five)

By Edward Cowan

The serial epic continues! Harker Aldreth may have made the ultimate sacrifice, but as Sudden, Sumei, and Trantz soon learn, the power of his memory only grows in his absence. New players enter the scene, eager to lay claim to Harker’s legacy in furtherance of their own causes. Meanwhile, Sumei finds herself in the clutches of a flamboyant pirate, Trantz attempts to escape into the Drift of his childhood, and Sudden seeks answers to a pair of questions that torment her in the wake of Harker’s fall: What use is the power of the gods if it couldn’t even save her brother? And why was she cursed with it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward Cowan
• Release date: Jul 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781945152047

Book preview

UNFATED

Book Five:

Harker

Lives

•

Edward Cowan

Contents

Welcome Back to a Serial Epic

MAP: The Blessed Realms

MAP: The Fateless Lands

MAP: The Frontier

MAP: Hnath and the Fathomless Sea

The Archivist’s Wonder

1. The Drift

2. The Maths

3. A Man Named Vengeance

4. That Which Rises

5. The Scorpion Dance

6. The Ache

7. Black Thoughts

8. The Alderman

9. The Cause

10. The Cringe

11. Certainty

12. The Poisons

The Story Continues . . .

Glossary and Pronunciation Guide

About Edward Cowan

Acknowledgements

Copyright

Welcome Back to a Serial Epic

If you’re reading this, you already know what you’ve got here: a serial novel by the name of Unfated. (Unless you accidentally picked up this book before reading the first one. In which case I say: Back! Back with you! You should be feasting your eyes on Fate Decrees, Man Defies.)

Firstly, thanks for reading!

Secondly, just a friendly reminder that Unfated is a quarterly concern, meaning you’ll be seeing four new installments every year until this beast is finished. For news about the release dates of future episodes and everything else Unfated, visit www.edwardcowan.com.

Now let’s turn this back over to our dear friend, the Archivist.

The Archivist’s Wonder

This seems as good a time as any to pause in the telling of this story, mid-transmission, and reflect upon a fallen star.

It’s what comes naturally to you humans, after all. You’ll break off in the midst of a days-long battle to collect and honor your scattered dead. You insist on venerating the slain even as you prepare to add to their ranks on the morrow. And none of this seems slightly odd to you.

Above all, you love making martyrs.

So: let us now pay homage to Harker Aldreth. In his name, heads will be bowed, words of praise uttered, oaths of remembrance sworn.

—And just like that, you snatch the dead from the blessed void and force their recollected facsimiles to dance like puppets through your lives. No human cheats death on an individual level, but as a species, you have conquered mortality. Congratulations and deepest sympathies!

Yes: you worship your ancestors, name your children for them. You trudge forward under a staggering burden of obligation to the assumed desires of the departed. And you do so gratefully.

It’s a wonder to one so simple—your humble Archivist, left to chronicle your lives whilst never imagining one of my own. Even in the worst of times, in the raw face of apocalypse, you spit out babies, ensuring the saga—or tragedy—or farce—of your existence never ends. Inevitably, new players crowd into the scene, rubbing shoulders with their predecessors, who never exit so much as grudgingly cede action and dialogue. The story continues. It must—there are butchers’ bills to pay.

Hence, we turn our eyes back to one Trantz Nurayanan, who has long lusted for death himself. He and all the others in this tale will soon learn, however, that death is by no means a departure from this narrative.

No one escapes the human saga. No one is so lucky as to drift off into sweet, sublime oblivion. Everyone is imprisoned in this life by another’s memories, just as the prisoner incarcerates others within his.

You wouldn’t have it any other way.

1. The Drift

Change never troubled Lythe. Change was a rumor, a superstition, something discussed only in fearful whispers or nervous jokes. Change, all understood, was a punishment inflicted on those unfortunate souls who toiled in the vague lands across the sea. Never Lytheans.

—Or else change assaulted Lytheans ceaselessly, and they simply never noticed. It was said that dreams heralded change; therefore an islander, immersed as he was in the living dream of his home, might in fact float about unknowingly on ceaseless tides of change. What did it matter? If he washed up on the shores of a catastrophic turn, so be it; the ebbing tide would eventually, inevitably, pull him back out to sea. The Drift remained the only constant.

Once, before the Cull snatched Trantz away from his home, his mother took him to the beach and pointed out a sea eagle: high-crested, its eyes imperious and accusatory, its mouth scything down in a sneer of vexed impatience with the folly of the world below. Trantz squinted at the eagle, barely more than a pinpoint blotch on a faultless blue sky, then jumped as it plunged seaward. Its talons skimmed the surface, leaving an incensed wake of white spray. Its wings heaved, lifting bird and prey—a silvertop larger than any he or his father had caught in weeks—from the waves. Trantz watched as the eagle receded back into distant threat, then disappeared, soaring into the sheer green mountains piled against the shore.

That, said his mother, was how change came to the Blessed who lived across the sea, beyond the Drift. Change is borne on eagle’s wings. Change snatches them up like eagle’s talons. Change carries them from everything they ever knew to worlds unknown.

There on the beach, his mother pressed him to his knees, the surf lapping at his thighs. Thank Fate that you were Blessed to be born on Lythe, she told him. Thank Fate for the Drift.

•

All his life, Trantz had clung to his mother’s faith in the Drift, even after the Cull delivered him to Tarxien’s academy. The Widow Tarxien abetted him by ceaselessly imposing a uniform brutality upon her boys. So, too, did Fate itself when it indoctrinated him into the mysteries of the Yun Tao; there was no greater Drift than that of floating in the wake of Fate’s decrees.

Then he met Sudden Aldreth.

She snatched him up. She carried him from everything he ever knew to worlds unknown. Just as his mother prophesied.

•

Tonight his mother’s words took literal form: he dangled in the grip of one of Sudden Aldreth’s tulus—a big one, male in that emasculatingly obvious way. Trantz had measured the strength of these creatures while fighting the one that attacked the girl in the Green Mourns; still, it surprised him how long a tulu could fly carrying him as cargo. Even the strongest had to hand him off, though, after half a day or so. That these monsters performed the handoff while airborne was one of the few things Trantz disliked about flying.

—For he found that he didn’t so much mind being snatched up, after all, or being carried from everything he knew to worlds unknown. Beyond the physical discomfort of aching shoulders and thin air, he discovered a certain peace in watching life unfurl beneath him, its miseries too miniscule to register from these heights. He wouldn’t quite say he felt as the Iikulti must have before they descended to earth in flaming ruin (for one thing, he doubted any god ever had to contend with insects buzzing to their spattering deaths in the divine mouth), but he at least enjoyed gazing over creation as they once did.

From this vantage, indifference didn’t feel so much like cowardice. It felt like perspective.

The ashen moon threw its light at the kind of swollen cloudbanks from which his dead gods were once rumored to hurl thunderbolts. Below, the Fathomless Sea stretched to every horizon, throwing an ebon reflection back at the heavens as if rejecting that light’s desire to penetrate it. It was the womb of the world, said the sailors who plied the Fathomless, its belly heavy with all the lives it had swallowed.

The tulu let off low, anxious hoots. Its mouth-tentacles tickled the air about them, sounding their environs. Trantz could guess why: all around them, things stirred. He’d seen darting shadows along the shore, sinuous shapes cresting the waves, fluttering rumors in the sky. Something had woken the Monolith.

He didn’t have to guess what that something was. Or, to be precise, who. The very same who he’d flown north to escape, even as the whats she spawned crawled and swam and soared around and beneath him.

Upon leaving Sudden Aldreth’s aerie, Trantz had initially teased himself with a vision of going home. No soul who left the Isle of Waking Dreams, however, could ever return. And even if the island permitted him to set foot on its vague shores again, what would he do there? The boy the Cull dragged from Lythe bore no resemblance to the man Fate had made of him. Trantz Nurayanan, Yun Tao, Oufari, was born not on Lythe, but at Tarxien’s fortress, that black pupil of an abattoir glaring under the red peaks of Tahrim’s Brow.

Perhaps he should return to the academy then. But, again, to what purpose? To watch boys struggle and fight and die, with the survivors spat back into the world no more alive than the brothers they’d slain?

In truth, it hardly mattered where Sudden Aldreth’s tulus took him. This one could toss him ashore on the vast, green plains of Xauth for all he cared. He had only chosen to fly north because north wasn’t south. Both directions held bitter memories in their care, but north at least held older ones, wounds scabbed over rather than fresh.

•

The freshest of all wounds had opened on Sudden Aldreth’s aerie, where her tulus deposited him, the girl, and the Qusura Mal after the collapse of those impossible ruins. Trantz stood between the two used-up queens as they wept and felt truth settling in and making a home of him. No illusions of honor or duty succored him; this was failure unbound by consequence, by reproach. He had no master, no Maja, to call him down. He was free. Truly Unfated, from this moment to his end.

And how did an Unfated life end?

Like any man of deeds, Trantz had always embraced death as a release from the grinding obligation of doing, a prize to be won through good works. Trepidation belonged to the men of words: to Teuro Yurk and his coconspirators, whom Trantz had driven back from Her Celestial Majesty before the bridge gave way under them.

In that weightless moment, he did just as any Defier would: he blamed luck. For just as his hand gripped the Qusura Mal’s arm, just as he reclaimed his honor, Harker Aldreth, most defiant of all Defiers, snatched it away, burning and tumbling into eternity.

No sooner had Aldreth plummeted than his sister swept in to take up his defiant mantle, spiting death itself. The tulus, her tulus, pulled them out, the two queens. And him. Even him. Sudden Aldreth could slay Fate—and now, it seemed, twist luck. What oppressive force had she not vanquished? What was death in the face of her will?

. . . Though even her will couldn’t save her brother. Harker Aldreth died, taking the city and the mechanical horror festering from its guts with him. The gods themselves hadn’t survived such a fall. And yet he would now live forever, at least in name. Just as the Iikulti did.

Trantz had witnessed Defier funerals. Once, they had amused and befuddled him: the spectacle of some withered spiritual eminence assuring the bereaved the one they had lost would live on—forever—so long as they remembered the departed’s name. No one Blessed by Fate would cling to such absurdity; the memory of a person hardly figured into the soul’s inevitable rebirth. But to the Defiers, who fed their dead to the devouring flame, only the name would live on. And soon—if they hadn’t already—Defiers would gather to commemorate Aldreth as a martyred champion of their cause, chanting Harker lives, Harker lives.

Trantz doubted anyone would chant his now-Unfated name when he died.

The girl and the woman at his feet wept more violently for Harker Aldreth than he would have thought possible, streams of their tearfall veining the parched stone of the aerie. They sobbed for so long it startled Trantz when one of them finally stopped.

Sudden Aldreth sat up, staring at the pile of bones and birds. She tilted her head at every sharp breeze, as if the wind carried messages meant for her and her alone.

Deep into the night, the girl shared one of those windborne secrets with him. She looked straight at Trantz, though he would swear she spoke not for his edification, but merely to evacuate the words from her skull. To inflict them on another so as not to suffer their burden alone.

Only a fool trips over what’s behind her, she said, her eyes dead, her voice hollow: an automaton given voice through an unseen contrivance. You must remember the danger you invite when you turn back: you can’t see what’s in front of you. But chase the future and you’ll trample it under your feet, because the future is only the present unfolding under you.

With that, she blinked, her head rolling on her neck, and collapsed.

Trantz crept to her, mindful of the tulus festering on every peak in sight. They didn’t so much as hoot at him. He lifted her up and felt her breathing, yes—with the bottomless calm of exhaustion, of well-deserved, long-denied sleep. He envied her that much.

He piled blankets under her head and wrapped her in a cloak, pondering what dreams must now be assaulting her. The wise masters of the mainland called this life Tyona saa: the Dream Somewhat Real. On Lythe, the reality of the dream was more than somewhat. It was a privilege or curse reserved only for islanders: when Trantz slept, darkness overcame him, darkness and nothing more. To a Lythean, the life waking and the life sleeping were one and the same, whereas every mainlander Trantz had ever met spoke of dreams guiding them, of prophecies formulated and promulgated while they slumbered.

As a boy, he’d puzzled over what that must be like. As a man, he’d learned enough to know he would rather not find out.

Though his birth spared him a sleeper’s dreams, a waking vision now tormented him: of boys, legions of them, ranked across battlefields from the dimmest reaches of the past to the furthest horizon of the future. They marched brave and blind from the womb of the world into its mouth.

Boys—and girls.

•

And now Trantz was free of Sudden Aldreth. (If he ignored the fact that his life depended on the sureness of her creatures’ grasp.) The night air was crisp like black fire, the Fathomless Sea a pane of rippled glass. The moon’s glare granted the clouds above that proverbial silver lining of which Defiers always spoke when their untrammeled lives failed to bring them happiness.

Flying revealed to Trantz a beautiful monotony, a comforting sameness, stasis rendered on a scale to make any man feel less than an ant and be glad of it. An ant could be forgotten, and in the process of being lost to time, forget himself. No: Trantz didn’t mind flying at all.

The plummet, now—that he could have done without.

His eyes had grown heavy with the opiate of his insignificance. And so Fate, or luck, or whatever malign force now escorted him