Fate Damns, Man Dies (Unfated, Book Four)

UNFATED

Book Four:

Fate Damns,

Man Dies

•

Edward Cowan

Contents

Welcome Back to a Serial Epic

MAP: The Blessed Realms

MAP: The Fateless Lands

MAP: The Frontier

The Archivist’s Deathwish

1. The Entombed

2. The Rose

3. Spurs to the Dragon

4. The Plebiscite

5. Echoes

6. Oblivion

7. The Grumplesack

8. The Boulder

9. What Feeds the Soul

10. Live to Thirty

11. Burning Bright and True

12. The Fathomless Sea

13. The Kindness

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 Deathwish

Death!

. . . Is a puzzling concept to your faithful Archivist. For one whose lifespan and purpose are determined by powers not at all nebulous or theoretical—though every bit as capricious as the moodiest god ever conceived by humanity—death is an abstraction, a will-o’-wisp. I am pure function swaddled in forms both endless and inconsequential. When death visits me—if it ever does—I will feel nothing like closure. I’ll simply . . . cease.

For you humans, now? Oh, it’s coming. And you know it. You’re perfectly aware you’re going to die—often from plagues you lack the sophistication to understand and wars you lack the good sense not to wage.

But it isn’t the eventual and certain termination of all human life that so fascinates me. Nor is it your awareness of your inescapable end. It’s what you choose to do with that awareness.

You choose to believe that what you call death—the simple transfer of energy from one state to another—somehow imparts meaning to life. That, as you lay withering (or more likely, for this bloody narrative, upon the pointed end of an enemy’s pike), revelation will rain down upon your departing soul like motes of stardust. That, whatever else you have failed to accomplish or understand during your life, death of all things will lend both closure and clarity to it. Death!

I suppose one could argue it’s only natural, an innate compulsion cooked into the basic workings of a species bound and determined to exterminate itself. Or perhaps it’s simply a sadistic joke to grant beings with such short, cruel lives the intellect to comprehend that shortness and cruelty. Why wouldn’t you to try to wring some kind of meaning, and purpose, from the horrors you seemingly can’t help inflicting on each other?

To say nothing of the horrors you inflict on yourselves.

I only wish I could experience what you do in those moments when death creeps near. Not the actual act of dying; as your Archivist, I’ve witnessed enough of that to know what an unpleasant scene you make of it. But the illusion of choice you enjoy in the face of the crushing inevitable? What I would give to feel that. To feel human, if only in those last moments before death claimed me!

Alas, it is not to be. And thus I return to what gives me purpose: the epic at hand, where we find a certain Blessed queen indulging in a familiar illusion of her own:

1. The Entombed

Sumei:

Perched on a ledge, pondering jumping.

Again.

•

Vaster Fayn, Surjhan of Mensohir and de facto ruler of Isidria (if not all the Fateless Lands), had ensconced Sumei in the quarters once reserved for the royal family. None but a select group of maids had entered these chambers in the seventeen years since the coup that elevated Fayn to power. Even Prince Eron, sole surviving reservoir of the sovereign bloodline, slept elsewhere. The palace servants called this wing the Azakyr Family Tomb.

Fayn called it a shrine to dear, departed King Geron and insisted the Tomb be maintained for that distant day when Eron was finally ready to wear the crown. As if to grant a sheen of truth to their master’s lie, his maids scrubbed and dusted these chambers so assiduously Sumei could admire her reflection in the marble floors. Still, the moment the Defiers left her alone, she threw every window open to let out the cloistered air, the tangible sense of petrified murder infusing every surface she touched.

The Master of Tranquility would sigh and shake his head at her for assigning such histrionics to inanimate objects, to the air itself. We project no further into this world than our own minds, he admonished her at the Shrine of the Silent Rebirth. The world itself keeps its own counsel. True—yet her skin still crawled as the smug mustiness of an unavenged slaughter clung to it. And so she climbed onto this casement to bask in night air only marginally cooler and fresher than that within the palace.

Her stomach turned. She couldn’t blame the precariousness of her position for her nausea; heights no longer terrified her. The orphan girl, now, raised in a Southharbor kitchen? She would have spewed her supper to find her toes wriggling over naked air.

Before her ascension, Sumei had never climbed further than the loft above the kitchen, where she and the other scullery girls slept on bamboo mats. Then Fate collared her with the mantle of Qusura Mal, and she journeyed over the mountains ringing the holy city of Xhama. She bid adieu to the worshipful masses by the shores of Lake Xa, sanctifying the water by dipping a single toe into it. Pilgrims dove in by the thousands, chasing the ripples of her sacred touch.

The Southharbor of Qutan cringed so low to the earth, so hard against the Silk Sea, that the streets flooded after every rain. And there in Xhama, her subjects’ frenzied bodies pushed Lake Xa’s shoreline into the otherwise unfamiliar avenues. Sumei’s escorts cursed as the water soaked their feet and the fringes of their robes, but she sloshed happily about, momentarily comforted by the echo of her former life.

Then her procession began its ascent, and comfort gave way to fear.

The Heavenly Palace clung to the peaks above Lake Xa. She rarely glimpsed the water from her new home; peals of fog sighing up from it perpetually floored the mountain heights, an ethereal border isolating Her Celestial Majesty from the mortals below. For the first two months of her reign, Sumei refused to cross any of the bridges spanning thousand-foot chasms to link the wings of her palace. Finally Sano convinced her to let him carry her over. She slung her arms around his neck, pressing her face between his shoulders, eyes squeezed shut—a frightened, earthbound Celestial flung too near the stars.

Sumei never overcame that terror while she resided in the Heavenly Palace. She simply learned to mask it behind ritual. Such, she told herself, was the true mark of royalty.

The process of learning to accept, if not embrace, the literal nature of her ascension began at the Shrine of the Silent Rebirth, when she plummeted into the mountain pool that cleansed her of the last vestiges of her former life. But it was Damara that freed her from all fear—those weeks beneath the city, toiling for the Broken Men, peering upward in vain for any hint, however fleeting, of open sky, of sun- or moonlight. She longed for the uncertainty of exposure, the vertiginous wind, and would gladly have taken it all whipping past her as she plunged from any height imaginable.

After Damara, she no longer feared the heights. Only the depths. So had the Master of Sciences succeeded in breaking her of one thing, at least.

•

The Azakyr Family Tomb overlooked the palace gardens—as if to tempt her with visions of soft landings among the greenery. Sumei had taken enough falls by now, though, to know better than to trust in any apparently giving surface. If she jumped from this casement, her legs would join her fear in breaking. And only her legs, if she were lucky. The end of a plummet was never so generous as it appeared.

She gazed over the garden wall at the Serpentine River’s gleaming scales. Her stomach positively writhed. She couldn’t blame the river for her queasiness, either, though some of the scents wafting from it proved more than equal to the task.

No: it was the reflected moon, fat and red tonight, that nauseated her.

It did so by reminding her of her blood . . . but again, no. It didn’t remind her of her blood, because she had no blood of which to be reminded. In fact, it should have come and passed during the journey from Taern.

Of course she blamed Harker. Who else?

She would have cursed his name if the mere thought of him didn’t spawn eels that thrashed about in the already-frothing sea of her gut. When she slept, she dreamed of a baby in her arms, one with her jade eyes and his fire-kissed hair. A beautiful child. Its cries never failed to awaken her in a cold sweat. She inevitably found herself clutching a pillow to her chest as she had once clutched Harker, nails raking its fabric as they had his back, in those breathless days after their escape from the Broken Men. When he had attacked her with that ravenous need she would have called love if he hadn’t left her.

Again she heard the Master of Tranquility sigh. Love, like all words, is an illusion, he instructed. It is our feeble effort to affix permanence to fleeting moments of grace.

. . . And she imagined Harker’s smirking reply: He’s a monk living alone on a fucking mountaintop. What would he know about love?

Now, alone herself but for the company of quarrelsome voices—and as far from anyone who loved her as she could be—Sumei fully understood the lure of the breathless heights. No doubt the Master would call that transcendence.

•

Rather than perch in this window and ponder what she would call it—though the dreams and nausea gave her a few churlish ideas—she should have slept. Her mind and stomach, however, insisted on wrenching Sumei from rest she desperately needed if she was to endure the parade of idiocy she seemed doomed to lead here in Mensohir.

Like a proud fool, she had refused to admit to her exhaustion upon arriving in the city—on Harker’s advice, naturally. Don’t show Fayn the first hint of weakness, he insisted. He hadn’t mentioned that the Surjhan would only take that as a challenge.

After her initial presentation to the noble class of Mensohir in the throne room, Fayn and Cestine Malaviya spirited Sumei to the Hall of Concessions. There she was gaped at by the Fifty-five Delegates of Isidria, a group whose duties and powers Harker had struggled to elucidate. The Delegates acknowledged her in a broil she would call dignified only in comparison to an even more bizarre conglomeration, the Magnificent Rabble. Four hundred strong, this mob had no hall to call its own; the Rabble packed a warehouse by the river, its ranks ordered along the lines of a stomped anthill.

Isidrian law celebrates the power of the common man, explained Fayn. Two hundred years ago, during a famine, the people stormed the palace, the guard towers, and the walls. They held Mensohir for a month. The lords of Isidria laid siege, eventually retaking the city. The mob’s leaders were lined up on a gibbet when the king emerged to pardon them. A magnificent rabble, he named them, truly worthy of calling themselves his subjects. And so he made of them a body of advisors, the voice of the common folk. The Surjhan imparted this information in a voice dexterously devoid of contempt.

She wondered how Harker would have reacted to the sight of the Rabble. In other company, probably not at all beyond a condescending smirk. In hers, though? She winced to imagine his inevitable lecture extolling the Rabble as proof that he and his fellow Defiers were truly free.

He once told her the Blessed had replaced dead gods with false gods. Now she had a retort. (A useless one, as he hadn’t bothered to join her here.) And you Defiers have replaced dead gods with kings and Surjhans and Delegates and Rabbles. She would dare him to explain how a citizen of Mensohir was better off than any of her own people, with a dozen fates tugging the Unfated soul in every direction but that of salvation, rather than the one true Fate that led