The Archimage Wars: Wizard of Abal

by Philip Blood

  Hydan was about to say something, but right then the door burst open with such force it tore off the hinges and the whole door flew into a nearby table, knocking three people to the ground.

  Fiona stood and turned to face the disturbance calmly.

  What shouldered itself inside was a very large man, like a linebacker on mega-steroids, but this guy looked, well, dead. His clothes were half rotted and there was dirt caked on him like he had crawled out of a grave recently. His lips were half twisted and frozen in a bazaar position, revealing his teeth and rotting gums. One of his dried eyeballs was hanging down onto his cheek, like a shriveled grape. The other orb was milky white, but it was scanning the room.

  Patrons of the pub were backing away, and a couple of women screamed.

  “What, in the fiery pits of hell, is that!” I exclaimed.

  “Necrosoul… probably controlled by a Dokkalfar,” Hydan noted dispassionately, and then added, “big one, too.”

  That’s when the windows around the pub burst inwards in a shower of glass, and more necrosouls could be seen crowding in to try and clamor over the sill, their dead hands grasping at the frame as they struggled to get past the others and be the first into the pub. I noted they were moving quite fast.

  “Doka-what?” I burst out.

  A woman screamed, “Oh god, are those zombies!”

  Hydan shrugged, “That must be the Earth name for necrosouls.”

  “They don’t move like zombies!” I said as I backed away from the necrosouls leaping through the broken windows. They were fast, if kind of jerky, and looked like they knew exactly what they were doing, not slow and stupid looking like movie zombies.

  Hydan looked at me, “Have you fought necrosouls before?”

  “Ah, not that I can recall,” I said hesitantly.

  “Then how do you know how they move?” he asked me, logically.

  Three of them tumbled into the room through a window frame and scrambled to their feet. These were not as big as the one in the door, but still formidable. Their flesh was quite dead looking, but these weren’t the slow zombies of movie fame.

  “What should we do!” I yelled.

  Hydan gestured to Fiona, “Now you get to see what a pissed off sorceress of the Second Tier does for fun.” He scooped up someone’s mug of beer and said, “Personally, I’m going to take a seat and watch!” And he did just that, plopping down into a chair which had a good field of view of Fiona.

  She glanced at him and said, “Aren’t you going to help?”

  Hydan grinned and replied, “Nope, not a lick.”

  She didn’t have time to reply, since the first creature had made it through the window, and had leaped forward to slash its clawed hand across a young couple standing in its way. The blow instantly decapitated the woman and cut through most of the man’s neck.

  “Shit, those things are STRONG!” I exclaimed, backing away further.

  Hydan nodded, “They are magically enhanced by their necromancer.”

  “What necromancer?” I bellowed.

  He shrugged, “He must be near.”

  Then it leaped fifteen feet, coming at Fiona through the air with outstretched claws.

  I was too slow to go to her aid, and its leap had been too fast. I realized, in horror, that nothing could stop this horrid undead monster from reaching the beautiful Fiona; his claws were going to rip her pretty face to shreds. It would be like destroying the Mona Lisa with a chainsaw.

  Just when the outstretched claws were about two feet from her calm face, a wall of flame suddenly appeared in its path. The monster howled, but could not change its trajectory in mid-flight. It hit the burning wall and its body was completely incinerated. Now, I don’t mean burned, I mean instantly gone! A bit of dust residue landed at Fiona’s feet.

  Two more necrosouls ran at her from the window area, but she pointed down and a hole opened up in the floor. The two creatures fell into the pit, which sealed itself with them inside; their howls were cut off by a quick crunching sound.

  Hydan was grinning, like a spectator seeing a seal show at Sea World. He took a big swig of beer, leaving a foam mustache on his upper lip.

  The big one at the door turned and howled, and then headed for Fiona, casually smashing furniture and people out of its way to reach the sorceress.

  She made a slashing gesture, but nothing happened, and the big monster kept coming. She gestured again and an unnatural wind howled in the small room, the force of it going right at the monster. It was slowed but kept coming.

  “Uh oh,” Hydan exclaimed, and got to his feet.

  “Are you going to help now?” I asked.

  But it was Fiona who answered in a worried voice, “No, Nick, get out of here, quickly! This… it feels like an Archimage!”

  Hydan had taken a step toward Fiona, but now he stopped and called out, “Which Archimage?”

  Fiona took a step TOWARD the oncoming monster as she drew her knife from her waist.

  “Well, this Archimage is a necromancer, which narrows things down considerably,” Fiona exclaimed, and then swung her long dagger in a horizontal arc which would have taken the head off the charging beast, but the large necrosoul leaped back nimbly, knocking over a table and several chairs.

  Hydan took a step backward, his eyes widening, “We’re screwed, but it can’t be…”

  Fiona interrupted, “Think about it, Nick stole something from The Dragon, and now an Archimage necromancer is coming! I can feel his power getting closer!”

  “SHIT!” Hydan exclaimed, and I could finally hear real worry in his tone.

  Fiona circled, so she was covering us from the charge of the large necrosoul, which was sizing up all our positions.

  “Run!” Fiona called to us, “The Dragon is coming for Nick. I think I can hold him off for now, at least until he gets closer, but hurry! Get out of here!”

  I started to ask, “Who is The Dragon…”

  But Hydan grabbed my arm and pulled. I desperately wanted to get an answer, but I felt Hydan’s urgency, so I turned, and then better sense prevailed, and I ran with Hydan out the back door into the kitchen area.

  Ahead of us, as we entered the Kitchen, I heard a door smashing open. It was the exit to the outside. It burst open, and we heard the snarls of more of these living dead necrosoul things.

  “By Baal’s nasty balls,” Hydan yelled, then spoke in a more normal tone, “That’s damned inconvenient.”

  “Inconvenient!” I exclaimed.

  He nodded, “We’ll have to escape another way.”

  “And, how are we going to do that? There aren’t any more exits!” I pointed out.

  He stepped to a clear spot on the floor and replied, “We’ll have to make one. Unless The Dragon has a StarWard blocking this area, which I doubt since he is currently dealing with Fiona, we should be able to Five Point travel.”

  He pointed with a finger at the ground and started making patterns in the air. On the ground, fiery lines were burning into the cement floor, following the pattern his hand was creating. First, he drew a Five Pointed star, and then he made a circle around it.

  But three of the necrosouls spotted us, and rushed toward our position, and they were closing fast.

  Hydan looked up, and pointed at the three undead monsters hurtling at us, and they all turned into white chickens.

  Hydan barked a short triumphant laugh.

  I did a double take when I noticed that the beady-eyed chickens looked kind of dead, with cloudy eyes and motley feathers, but they were still moving like they were alive; they were zombie chickens! Those undead fowl kept coming at us, but when the first one arrived Hydan booted it in the breast, sending the big rooster flying back in a cloud of mottled feathers.

  I took his cue and practiced an extra point kick on the second necrosoul, which was an undead hen. My kick connected solidly and sent it flying up into some hanging frying pans, which made a horrendous racket, not to mention more falling feathers. One of the frying pans fell
onto the table near me.

  “You handle the chickens,” Hydan exclaimed, and turned back to his circled pentagram and started drawing a second slightly larger circle around the first one. Down on the floor the whole pentagram and circles were burning in six-inch-tall red flames. He started adding a few symbols between the two burning rings.

  This left me to deal with the third necrosoul chicken. It was coming fast across the floor, so I snatched up the black cast iron frying pan, and when the undead rooster launched itself at me off the ground, I Sam Gamgee’d the thing, like a cricket player taking a pitch. It made a very satisfying crunch, and a dull metal ringing sound, as it sent the undead chicken flying back the way it had come.

  Hydan looked up at the sound of the exploding chicken and grinned, saying, “Don’t you just love chickens!” Then he pointed at the pentagram on the floor and added, “Alright, it’s ready, go ahead and hop in!”

  I shook my head, “Are you nuts? That thing is on fire!”

  I was referring to the flaming red pentagram, circles, and symbols on the ground.

  Four more necrosouls started coming through the door from outside.

  “You want to stick around and meet The Dragon?” he demanded, but didn’t wait for an answer; Hydan gave me a hefty shove in the upper arm and shoulder, causing me to lose my balance and step right into the burning circle.

  Just as I stepped in I saw two of the necrosoul human undead jump at Hydan, coming over the table in a dive, with outstretched claws.

  But that is the last thing I saw of the Rose and Crown because I felt my body spin around like I was caught in a very narrow tornado funnel. Everything went into a blur of spinning motion as I rapidly spun around. The blurred cylinder around me suddenly got darker looking, and my rotation started to slow. I arrived on a stone surface and took a staggering step, then I fell down onto the grass. I then looked around. I was certainly not in the Rose and Crown kitchen anymore, but a moment later I recognized the place, I was back near the center of Stonehenge, and it was the dark of night. I got up and moved over toward one of the Trilithons.

  Hydan appeared a moment later, standing right on top of the same fallen stone. He took a staggering step as well as he halted his spin, yet somehow managed to keep from falling off the stone or from spilling the mug of beer in his right hand.

  “You brought a mug of beer?” I asked him incredulously.

  “Hey, it was right on the counter, ready to be served, so I didn’t want to waste it!” he explained.

  I shook my head as he took a big swig. Then I asked, “Those really were living dead?”

  “Well, close enough. They were trapped souls, shoehorned into some dead body by a necromancer, and converted to undead chickens by me.”

  “A necromancer?” I exclaimed, once again getting angry at the whole ridiculous affair.

  “Well, yes, at least one, and from what Fiona said, The Dragon,” he said with a shake of his head, as if not even believing his own words.

  His mention of Fiona suddenly had me worried about her, “What about…”

  “The Albus Second? I’m not too worried about her, that girl has some pizzazz! She can take care of herself, and certainly better than a couple Thirds, even if you were working with a brain that had all its coins in your purse.”

  “But you said this ‘Dragon’ is an Archimage, doesn’t that mean he is more powerful?”

  “Yes, but a Second is not much less powerful than a First, what we call an Archimage. The difference in power between mages of close Tiers is not that great, often the intelligence and experience are the main difference. Though I doubt she could defeat The Dragon, she probably had enough to get free once she didn’t need to stay and protect us.”

  “Should we wait for her here?”

  Hydan shrugged, “Probably not, she has no idea where we went. She would have to track our names, and I don’t really want to go bandying them about right now to let her get an easy fix; that Archimage might track us as well. I am assuming he was after you.”

  “Me… why?”

  He shrugged, “You seem to be a hot commodity; did you piss off some mage?”

  “Well, I may have insulted that Stewart dude.”

  His smile crept up onto his face, “You insulted Stewart Hentan, to his face?”

  “More than once, really.”

  Hydan laughed. “Good! I never liked him anyway, but insulting a senior Hentan Second would do the trick, but he wasn’t behind these necrosouls or those werewolves. So, what did you do to attract the attention of the evillest being this side of the Big Bang? Why on Earth, or any world, is The Dragon after you?”

  “I haven’t got a clue,” I said honestly. “Maybe it has to do with the secret I learned from The Dragon, the one Fiona thinks I swiped.”

  He just looked at me, and I had no idea what he was thinking.

  I looked around at the large stones arrayed in a rough circle, “Why did we come back to Stonehenge, and how did you get us here?”

  “A mage of sufficient power may Five Point travel to any place they can easily picture in their mind. Of course, it has to have stone to arrive on, and you must have the time and available power to make a Star on stone to begin with. I picked this place because I remembered it, and I haven’t seen many other places on Earth yet. The only other places I had been to recently would have taken us back into the pub main room, and that didn’t seem like much of an escape; Stonehenge just came to mind, so I went with it.”

  “So, where should I go now?”

  “I hear Paris is a hoot,” he exclaimed.

  “You are coming with me?” I asked, “Even after you know this Dragon person is after me?”

  He grinned, “Well sure, that makes it all the more entertaining! Besides, I want to see that big metal coat hanger thing.”

  “The Eiffel Tower?”

  He nodded enthusiastically, “Yeah, that’s the place. Some Fourth did himself proud there! What a complete waste of magic and time; I definitely approve!”

  “Gustave Eiffel was a wizard?”

  “Gustave Eiffel Sivaeral, one of your House. We often drop the House name and use one of our middle names as a last name while on Earth. What is the saying here, when you roam…”

  “No, it’s when ‘in Rome’,” I said absently.

  Hydan shrugged.

  I shook my head, “I meant, where should we go to find Fiona again?”

  “Oh, no idea,” he said, but then added, “If you want I can try to track her name, if she, or someone near her, says it in the near future I could get a fix. Wait, she is a Second, so that might make it hard,” he added, in almost an afterthought.

  Then I said, “Maybe we can just go to Camington Castle, that’s supposed to be her home.”

  “OK, but it’s probably glamoured.”

  “Glamoured?”

  “Hidden, so you can’t find it unless you’ve been there.”

  I thought back and found I could recall what Pox had said, even though I’d ignored it at the time. So I said, “Pox told me to follow my feelings.”

  Hydan’s face brightened, “That means you were there before! OK, which way?”

  I shrugged, “I have no idea.”

  “Trust your feelings, just go toward where you THINK you should go,” he replied.

  I thought about that, and then headed down the road away from Amesbury, but I stopped a moment later. “This is ridiculous, I’m just guessing.”

  “That’s good enough for me, come on, and keep guessing at every turn.”

  I set out, grumbling about stupid ideas and odd folk with blind faith as we walked down the road. Hydan was busy finishing his beer, as cheerful as a school boy in the girl’s locker room.

  A few miles later, I decided to turn up a simple country road. Hydan didn’t say a word, he just followed me.

  We came out of some trees, and could see for some distance. The sun was just starting to come up in the east. I came to an abrupt stop.

  “Why
are you stopping?” Hydan wanted to know. “Let’s keep moving; I’m out of beer!”

  I gestured ahead of us, angry for even listening to this whole ‘trust your feelings, Luke’ nonsense. “Listen, Jedi Plastered, I’m stopping because we can see for miles ahead of us, and there is no castle in sight! I’ve led us on a wild goose chase!”

  “What are gooses?” he inquired.

  “In a group they are called Geese; they are a big kind of bird.”

  “Like a chicken?” he asked brightly.

  “Sort of, but bigger.”

  “How grand!”

  I scowled at his exuberance. “I’d give you a grand if you could get us to that castle.”

  “Well, if you could remember the look of the place, we could Five Point travel there!”

  “I don’t remember anything about it,” I answered.

  He shrugged, and said, “Then we should keep walking.”

  “For untold miles?” I said in exasperation.

  “For as far as it takes to find it,” he answered, without a worry.

  I snarled something ugly, which he ignored, and then started forward, only to run into a gate that wasn’t there. Well, it hadn’t been there a moment before. Now a tall wrought iron double gate, with a curved top, adorned with golden spikes, was barring our way. Not only that, but there was a big stone wall going off to the left and right. Ahead, over a manicured lawn and garden, was a towering castle which CERTAINLY had not been there a moment before. Truthfully, it was more of a manor house, or palace, than an old style fortified castle.

  “Ah, Camington Castle,” Hydan said as if nothing odd had just taken place.

  “How do you know?” I asked belligerently while rubbing at my bruised nose.

  He pointed at an engraved sign on the gate, “Because that’s what it says, right there.”

  I started muttering about invisible god damned castle gates.

  Hydan reached up and pulled a chain which went to a series of hanging bells above, mounted in the wrought iron. A musical tone played.