Page 56 of Conflicted Fate
“I should be back in Helisson,” the alpha said. “Keeping the peace. People are becoming unsettled. They’re starting to question things in a way we haven’t seen since the earliest days. This is a big threat. Bigger, I think, than you realize, Lycaonus. Our position is more unstable than it has been in centuries. It must change.”
“And it will,” Lycaonus said, gesturing for the other Alpha to follow him as he headed down the walkway toward the forge and the figure in black. “Let me show you how.”
In the darkness, Lycaonus’ Nehringi kept pace with them, moving with that ethereal hunting grace that scared even my wolf.
It was a shame the assassin hadn’t died when Kiel tossed him off the side of a cliff. That would have been convenient.
“I don’t like this,” Kiel murmured into my ear.
“Me, neither. But we knew this was his plan.”
Kiel shook his head. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
The Alphas paused near the Grand Forge. The figure all in black still hadn’t moved, waiting immobile, like some kind of statue.
“Okay,” Helix said, looking around. “What is it? What is this grand plan of yours that you couldn’t tell me thirty feet over there?”
Lycaonus nodded. “When I was in the mountain, buried under it, as you said, I saw the way forward. And it wasn’t with the stones.”
“Without the stones?” Helix asked, the statement finally breaking the man’s composure. “You want to make us all mortal again? That seems … counterproductive.”
“Not when you see what I’ve seen,” Lycaonus said. “The stones are not the answer. What I saw, for the briefest moment, is something so obvious we should have seen it from the start. For mere moments, Fate was bound to something else. A weapon.”
Helix cocked his head, a streak of eagerness twisting his face. “A sword? That’s what you’ve ordered forged down here? A sword to bind Fate within, isn’t it? Yes, I can understand. If we wield those swords, then we would be able to do much, much more.”
“You always were the swiftest on the uptake,” Lycaonus said, patting the other Alpha on the shoulder.
“How do we do it?” Helix asked, looking at the forge as it heated, the flames within seemingly coiled, eager to strike at anything fed to them.
“That sword,” Lycaonus said dreamily, “had one shard in it. One piece of Fate. The weapon I’m creating will haveallof them.”
At that moment, the sword of Lycaonus’ pet Nehringi burst through Helix’s chest from behind, impaling the Alpha, raising him clear off the floor, the weight of his body slowly widening the cut as gravity pulled on him.
Lycaonus then snatched the stone from Helix’s hands and tossed it into the forge. The fires greedily swallowed it, catching the metal and glowing green, melting away the cage that held Fate.
The Master Blacksmith finally moved, swinging into motion as he began to fold and hammer away at the metal, adding it to something already at work in the depths of the Grand Forge.
There was a cry and then a clatter from farther back down the walkway. My head whipped around to see Helix’s guards dead on the ground as the other trio of armored Wulfhere wiped their swords clean.
“Clean this up,” Lycaonus said, gesturing at Helix. The Alpha was gasping his last breaths as he slid free of the Nehringi’s sword, his immortality stripped away by the destruction of the Fate Stone. “Then bring me Pallantia. The sooner I get this wrapped up, the better.”
He walked past the prone guards and out of the room, leaving his Nehringi and soldiers to do the dirty work of disposing of the corpses. Which they did by dumping them into the furnaces as additional fuel.
I exchanged a look with Kiel. It was worse than we’d ever expected. Lycaonus wasn’t creating swords for all the Alphas.
He was forging a single one for himself. And if he succeeded … nothing in the world could stop him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“We can’t let him get away with this,” Kiel said, clutching the commandeered hammer tightly as we crouched in the darkness.
“How do we stop him? He’s already begun the process of merging the remaining shards into one stone.”
“I don’t know, but we have to make sure he doesn’t get them all. Which means breaking the forge, so it’s unusable.”
I looked at the giant room filled with industrial equipment. Bellows and blast furnaces, pipes, pumps, brick ovens, and pooling areas. In the distance, hammers, bigger than a man and made of solid steel, lifted and fell, worked by unknown machinery in the depths.
“That’s a lot of stuff to wreck,” I said dubiously. “We’ll be spotted and attacked long before then. The Nehringi and guards won’t be far.”
