Fate's Keep (Fate's Journey Book 2)

by T. Rae Mitchell

  The king shoved the broken end of the flute against Finn’s jugular. The red spark of vengeance lighting his eyes quickly reminded Finn that Tynan was every bit his mother’s son when it came to holding a grudge. “I could easily bleed you out right now,” he snarled.

  Finn held his breath as the king jabbed the sharp splinters into his skin.

  Tynan abruptly flung the two pieces of the flute against the wall. They clattered onto the grimy floor. “I won’t though. I wouldn’t want to deny the executioner his due. And it’s important for my people to witness the axe coming down upon your neck. Justice will come when I slide your head onto a pike and send your rotting skull on a tour throughout my kingdom so every man, woman and child can see that the Unholy Piper is truly dead.”

  The king punctuated his promise with a slug to Finn’s gut. Gasping from the sudden blow, Finn watched Tynan turn and leave. The pain spreading through his belly became a sick feeling of dread as the guard slammed his cell door shut and locked it.

  Finn hung his head, staring at the broken flute lying near his feet. Somehow, it was no surprise he’d meet his end this way. It didn’t matter that he’d committed his crime when he’d been overtaken by Mugloth’s darkness. He’d done too many unforgivable things. Most of all, he’d enjoyed destroying the empress.

  For that alone, he deserved his punishment.

  22

  We Can’t Act On This Plan

  FATE RUSHED INTO THE sanctuary. She’d fallen asleep without instructing her chamber robot to wake her in time to make the morning meeting. Now she was late and had missed her chance to talk to Farouk about her plan to save the day by bringing Finn back to the Keep to help them. More than likely now, she’d have to fall in line with whatever plans everyone had arrived at without her. Unless she could get him alone, the chat with Farouk would most likely have to wait until after she completed her first mission.

  If she survived.

  She skidded to a stop as everyone in the room turned to look at her. “Uh, sorry I’m late.” She inched into the room, feeling weird and sheepish as frowns formed on the faces of Farouk’s new army. Jessie, Mason and Lincoln were wearing what appeared to be cybernetically enhanced armor over their uniforms. They also had their Dragon Eye headgear on. The usual goofing around was now replaced by a serious, somber mood.

  Steve acknowledged her with an easy smile and Darcy at least nodded to her. Fate was glad they had at least chosen to work in the library. She wished she could say the same about Jessie.

  Brune’s expression held an air of annoyance. Fate walked stiffly by, expecting to be berated for her tardiness. Much to her surprise, Brune refrained, and instead, held out a set of armor. “Put these on. We’ll be heading out right after the meeting.”

  Fate took the heavy pieces, which consisted of a helmet, gloves, contoured breastplate, shoulder pads and arm and leg bracers. Each was outfitted with a mysterious menagerie of brass and copper discs, gears, wiring and what looked like hydraulics.

  Everyone was gathered around the huge mahogany table, which had been cleared of all the lab equipment she’d first seen on their arrival. Eustace smiled and opened a space for her. “We were just about to familiarize ourselves with the different quadrants of the Keep,” her father explained as she stepped in between him and Gerdie, who stood on a stool so she could see better.

  “I’ve got some good news,” Gerdie whispered to her.

  “Really? What is it?” Fate whispered back as she strapped the leg bracers onto her thighs.

  Farouk cleared his throat with a stern glance in Fate’s direction. “As I was saying before the bargeruption, Quadrants 148, 29 and 537 are hot zones.”

  Gerdie gave her a wink. “Tell ya later.”

  Fate nodded as she pulled the breastplate down over her head and buckled the sides. Feeling rushed, she hastily slipped the arm bracers on and locked the shoulder pads onto the breastplate. When she pulled the gloves on, she stopped to study the mechanics attached to them. Curiosity got the best of her and she tested the gloves by squeezing the edge of the table. The wood groaned beneath her fingers and broke off in her hand.

  She looked at the others in surprise. “Sorry.” She placed the jagged piece on top of the table before giving Farouk her full attention.

  Farouk eyed the damage with irritation then tossed a large scroll out onto the table’s polished surface. The scroll unfurled, revealing a detailed map of the Keep’s two hemispheres. He tapped each of the circles with an ornate bronze pointer stick, triggering the appearance of 3D projections of both halves of the Keep, each an exact replica in every way.

  He pointed at one of the halves. The spot lit with a red glow, spotlighting a much smaller and less scary duplicate of the Chimera. “This is Quadrant 29. The Chimera’s taken up occupendence there because it’s closest to the sanctuary, which is positionated here, within the axis point of the revolving hoops.” A tap on a schematic tucked in the corner of the scroll produced a 3D image of the Keep and the rings sweeping around it.

  “Are you saying the other rooms, like the library and residential suites, are built inside the rings?” Eustace asked.

  “Not at all. We would never withstand the velocity generated by the motionment of the rings. We are positionated within the connection point between the rings.”

  Eustace nodded and Fate could see his engineer’s mind working out the logistics. “Makes sense, though I have to wonder why we’re not down there on the surface of the Keep, where there would be more options for structural expansion.”

  “The Keep is strictly for housing all magical objects of dangerous quantportions,” Farouk answered, though impatiently. “Shall we move on?”

  “By all means.” Eustace gave Fate a playful shrug.

  Farouk pointed at another section of the same 3D hemisphere and lit the area with another red glow. Everyone leaned in as the light illuminated a host of deformed humanoids. Some had the heads of animals, others the bodies of sea creatures, while most were grotesque distortions of humans, slithering and scrabbling between the architectural vaults. “These are the Fomorians, currently located in Quadrant 148. From what I can gatherclude, they seem to be searching for a way out of the Keep. They’ve had plenty of chancetunity to escape through any one of the gateways–all of which open during twilight–but so far they’ve bypassed every one of them.”

  Fate screwed up her face at the repulsive creatures. “What are they?”

  Brune leaned forward. “Only an ancient race of chaos-makers. Get near just one of those bad boys, and your brain turns to mush. Confusion and terror take over. Time distorts, and before you know it, you’re sucking your thumb in the psych ward for the rest of your natural life.”

  Fate stared back in horror. “If that’s the case, how do we fight them if we can’t go near them?”

  “We’ll come to that, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Farouk aimed his pointer at the other hemisphere of the Keep. The area lit up and a figure appeared. At first glance it appeared to be a knight in spiked armor, but a closer look revealed a creature comprised of twisted metal, shrouded in blue mist. It loomed over a huge cathedral, while tearing into the cast-iron dome and gorging on mangled scraps.

  “This is the scavenger,” Farouk continued. “As you can see, it’s growing in size as we speak. I calcumate it to be growing at an amplinential rate of two hundred percent a day.”

  “Then let’s dismantle the thing before it gets out of control,” Mason said.

  Farouk looked at him with barely contained patience. “It’s already out of control. Ordinaturally, scavengers never get this big, but this one likes iron, which most of the Keep and many of the vaults are made of. It has plenty to eat. Every vault made of iron in Quadrant 56 has been destroyed and now it’s gone through half of the ones in Quadrant 537. It’s also extremendously strong because it ate Thor’s Hammer.”

  “Really?” Eustace exclaimed. “Thor’s Hammer actually existed?”

  Farouk’s gaze
slid to the librarian section of the table. “Yes, that and many other things you thought were myths.” He huffed with annoyance. “Now then, any battle with the scavenger will draw the Chimera’s attention, and most likely the Fomorians. The chance for survival goes down if you have to face all three at once. Therefore, termicluding the Chimera is our first order of business.”

  Fate watched for any sign of nervousness in Mason and Lincoln, and especially Jessie, but there wasn’t a trace. They either didn’t understand the gravity of what they were about to do, or the Dragon Eye was giving them a false sense of invincibility. Most likely it was the latter.

  “What’s to keep the scavenger from coming after us while we’re facing off with the Chimera?” Jessie asked.

  “Scavs are only interested in one thing,” Brune answered. “Consuming whatever material it is they need to build themselves up with.”

  “Shweet, it’ll be focushed on eating when we come down on it. Lead the way and I’ll blow it to piecesh.” Lincoln aimed his hands like a gun and made an explosion sound.

  Brune laughed. “You better make that shot count. If you miss, it’ll come after you like a mad hornet. Scavs have strong survival instincts, which makes them very hard to kill.”

  That silenced the military section of the room.

  A burst of restlessness came over Fate. “Okay, let’s do this by the numbers. We focus on the Chimera first.” The sooner they got this first scary mission out of the way, the sooner she could talk to Farouk about Finn. “What’s the big master plan?”

  “I’ll leave this to the research team to explainate.” Farouk handed the pointer over to Eustace before making himself comfortable in the cushioned bucket seat of his cage.

  Fate stared at her father in surprise. He’d been part of the strategy meeting the night before, but she hadn’t expected him to be given the lead in planning the attack. Farouk and Brune had certainly embraced having unwelcome guests in their midst.

  “Certainly.” Eustace appeared a bit uncomfortable. “Steve here discovered some key points about the Chimera, which I’ll let him explain.”

  Caught off guard, Steve glanced one way and then the other. “Uh, sure. Um…well, the Chimera is made of about twenty different animals. It has the talons of a raptor for ripping its prey to shreds and the forelegs of a primate, which gives it incredible upper body strength. It’s covered in the nearly impenetrable hide of a dragon. It has the wings of a bat and the horns of a ram and hindquarters of a–”

  “Maybe we should just focus on the two main animals, Steve,” Eustace interjected politely.

  “Right, more to the point that way,” Steve agreed. “Well, the Chimera’s got the head of a lion and the tail of a snake. This means the Chimera is one organism controlled by two brains, each of which is dominated by very different instincts. Generally, this isn’t a problem for the creature, unless it’s disoriented enough to see its two heads as separate from itself. In which case, the lion would see the snake as a threat, or even a competing predator, while the snake might see the lion as prey–”

  “Yeah, yeah, we get it.” Lincoln shifted back and forth. Like everyone else in the room, he was anxious about the mission. “The shnake and lion shtart tearing each other apart.”

  Steve nodded. “Exactly.”

  “How do we make that happen?” Mason added. “Blow magic confusion powder in their noses?”

  “We lead the Chimera to the Fomorians,” Brune answered.

  “What? Are you nuts?” Fate looked from Brune to Eustace. “First we have to offer ourselves as bait and then we fly into the lose-your-mind-zone?”

  Eustace raised his hand in an attempt to calm her concerns. “I know it sounds like a crazy plan, but we’ve come up with protections.” He turned to Darcy. “Show them.”

  Darcy gave everyone a smug smile as she placed seven brass gadgets the size of flash drives on the table. “These are chromatic amplifiers.” She sent them sliding across the table.

  Fate reached for hers, but Darcy swiped it out of reach. “You can have yours as soon as I demonstrate how it works.” She held the amplifier for everyone to see. “All you need to do is press the button on the bottom.”

  The crystal encased behind the tiny round window of glass gleamed with a bright blue light as electrical strobes danced over the copper coil surrounding it. A clear hum filled the room, the notes shifting methodically along a simple musical scale.

  “Really? That needed demonstrating?” Fate held out her hand with an eyebrow raised.

  Darcy shrugged and dropped the amplifier into Fate’s open palm.

  Eustace placed a large ancient tome on the table and opened the yellowed pages to a section filled with handwritten text. “We found this Book Of Conquests when we were researching the Fomorians yesterday. It says here, ‘Truly, to fight against Fomorians was all the same to punch a wall by head, to hold an arm in a snake nest or place a face to flame’.”

  Fate tried her best to smile, so as not to sound too negative. “Oh, that’s encouraging.”

  “I know it sounds gloomy,” Eustace agreed, “but what it’s saying here is the Fomorians cannot be defeated by anything other than their own might.”

  “Except maybe this tiny secret weapon?” Fate waved it at him. “What’s it supposed to do, bore them to death with lousy music?”

  “No, it’s not a weapon.” Eustace’s eyes shone bright with fascination for the subject. “We discovered something very interesting about the Fomorians. They emit sounds, undetectable to the human ear, which distort reality and the very fabric of time. But, thanks to Darcy and her findings in the Builder’s records of sound technology, we’ve come up with a way to disrupt their emanations. Farouk assembled the devices last night, and voila, we have the chromatic amplifiers.”

  Fate had never heard her father use the word, voila, before. He was more excited than she’d previously guessed.

  “The amplifiers will allow you and the others to safely inhabit the same space as the Fomorians,” Eustace continued.

  “I like the sound of that, pardon the pun.” Fate’s smile was pained as she turned off the annoying sound of her amplifier. “But how do we fight them if they’re so indestructible?”

  A loud thump at the other end of the table grabbed everyone’s attention. “With this.” Brune shook the end of a thick chain attached to an ornamental, octagonal-shaped box the size of a grapefruit. It was silver and covered in symbols. “The Eye of Balor.”

  “Brune was kind enough to risk her life last night to retrieve this from one of the vaults inside the Keep,” Eustace explained. “Apparently, Balor was once king of the Fomorians. He was known to have one eye that was always shut, because to look upon his venomous gaze was to die a terrible and instant death.”

  Fate grimaced. “Ew, are you saying his eye’s in that box?”

  “Short of looking inside for myself, it would seem so,” Eustace said. “Suffice to say, we have our weapon against the Fomorians. If the stories are correct, neither gods nor giants could save themselves from the baleful glare of Balor’s eye. Hence, the reason for its extraction, and why it is kept in a box. We can now use their own might against them.”

  Fate nodded as she listened. “No offense, but all this sounds like theory. Words like, ‘it would seem so’, and ‘if the stories are correct’, don’t exactly fill me with loads of confidence.”

  The light went out of her father’s eyes and his brow furrowed with worry. Fate felt terrible for calling him out in front of everyone, but it needed to be said. This was life and death.

  “You’re right, none of this is tested.” Eustace looked at Farouk. “We can’t act on this plan. Uh, hello?”

  Farouk was slumped in his chair, his head falling to one side as he snored softly.

  Gerdie rapped his cage. “Hey, wake up!”

  Farouk jolted awake. “Wha–what?” His ears shot straight up as he looked around.

  The worry in Eustace’s eyes turned to horror when he saw t
hat Farouk had fallen asleep. “I was saying we cannot act on this plan when nothing’s been tested. We don’t know if the amplifiers will actually work. And what if that’s not actually the Eye of Balor? It’s not like we can look inside to confirm.”

  Brune rounded the table and walked toward Eustace. “This is how it’s always been done. We trust in the system the Builders left in place. They were nothing if not precise about recording every item stored inside each vault. The same goes for the Library. We trust that every scrap of information found there is every bit as accurate and true. It has to be, there’s too much at stake.”

  Fate looked down at the projector ring on her finger. Why was Brune referring to the Builders? They weren’t responsible for the collection of vaults and magical objects in the Keep. This was Kaliena’s collection. Was Brune really that in the dark about the history here?

  Eustace pressed his fists against the surface of the table. “Well, I for one will not send anyone out there based on theory alone.”

  Fate put her hand on his arm. He was shaking with sheer tension. “You’re not, Dad. We each need to decide for ourselves if we’re going to do this.” She looked across the table at Jessie, Mason and Lincoln. “How do you guys feel about the plan? Do you think it’ll work?”

  Her friend’s expression remained unperturbed. “It’s better than winging it. I’m in.”

  “No problem here,” Lincoln chimed in.

  Mason hesitated for the briefest moment as his gaze moved to Darcy. Her eyes filled with hope and Fate could tell she was waiting for him to back out.

  “Yeah, I’m ready,” he said at last.

  Darcy glared at her boyfriend with a look of utter disappointment. “Fools.” Her mouth turned down as she fought to hide her fear.

  For once, Fate understood how Darcy was feeling. Fate was terrified for Jessie. Her best friend and the others had no business going out there to face those monsters. Their courage was false. Any bravery they felt was being artificially pumped into their brains by the Dragon Eyes. What would happen if their headgear got knocked off? Would they be able to defend themselves, or would they be paralyzed by fear?