Free The Archimage Wars: Wizard of Abal by Philip Blood

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