The Archimage Wars: Wizard of Abal (4 page)

I heard commotion in the room where I
had just broken the glass, then the sound of a door opening and the
woman’s terrified voice retreating down the hallway. Then I heard
someone leap and land on the balcony; I could hear their feet
crunching on the broken glass. My assailant must have bought my
ruse because the footsteps went into the woman’s room.

I gave them enough time to get out of
the room into the hall, where they hopefully would not hear me as I
again tossed my bag and then jumped to the next balcony. I repeated
this quickly until I was five balconies away, at which point I
found a sliding glass door which was slightly ajar.

I opened the door quickly to the dark
room and heard movement from the bed.

“
I’m sorry! I’m Bernard, of
Hotel security,” I said in Egyptian, “We are in pursuit of a
prowler who jumped the balconies. Please close and lock your
sliding glass door, we’ll alert you when the culprit has been
found.” As I spoke I had quickly crossed the room to the hallway
door and unlocked it.

“
Are we in serious danger?”
a man’s voice asked as his fumbling fingers finally turned on the
light on the nightstand.

He was just too late to see me; I had
already opened the door and was slipping out into the hall. “No,
I’ll send a man to watch this hall immediately, now lock both your
doors,” I finished, closing the door. A few feet further down the
hall I slipped into the stairwell and made my way toward the lobby.
It was only now that I wondered what happened to Pox. He had not
followed me across the balconies.

I cracked the door open slightly so I
could peer out into the lobby and get the lay of the land. A
slightly balding guy in a bad suit, that had to be the hotel
security man, dashed into an elevator. I waited until the doors
closed and then started to open the stairway door. My heart leaped
into my throat as I saw my buddy, Stewart Hentan, the tourist
killer, exiting another elevator into the lobby.

He was not hard to pick out of a
crowd. Not just because of his 6 foot, three-inch stocky frame or
the long black coat which went from his burly neck nearly to the
floor, he stood out due to his piercing eyes and the strange glyph
on his cheek. Those dark eyes scanned the lobby for prey, seeming
to see into every shadow and crevice. People instinctively stepped
out of his way, mothers pulled children to their sides and men did
not meet his glance.

My eyes narrowed as two men, who bore
a striking facial resemblance to Stewart, suddenly faded out of the
background and met him. I was not near enough to hear what they
said, but the slight negative shake of their heads told the story.
They had not seen me as they watched the lobby. Both of these men
had the very same Glyph on their cheek as Stewart.

I closed the door and tried to think
clearly. They knew I had escaped my room, and Stewart had lost me
upstairs, they would leave one to watch the elevators, and send at
least one to check the stairway! I looked at the closed door before
me in horror, not daring to open it again to see if they were
coming, and not knowing how close they were to opening it and
discovering me.

I tiptoed swiftly to the stairs and
started back up, running up two stairs at a time as quietly as I
could. I reached the first floor and opened the door into the
hallway, just as I heard the door below open. “Shit,” I
subvocalized since this about summed it up. I tried to close the
door both swiftly and silently, which is not easy. I managed it
somehow.

Now alone in the hall I ran down
toward the end, carrying my bag. I considered dumping it, but I had
tossed the purse with all the credit cards and cash on top the
clothes inside before sealing the suitcase. Besides, if I dumped it
and one of them saw it they might put two and two together and know
I had gone this way. I lugged it along.

I finally made it to the end and
located a fire escape stairway. After opening the door slightly, I
listened, but I did not hear any movement on the stairs. Quickly I
made my way down two levels where I came to a door marked with an
EXIT sign. In red letters, it proclaimed, "Only for emergencies,
alarm will sound!" I figured this qualified. I kicked open the door
and barreled out and up the short flight of stairs to street level,
alarms ringing all over the place. I did not wait for the police,
the fire department or the knife-wielding trio to arrive; I just
got the hell out of Dodge.

At the airport, I booked and paid cash
for a flight to London. During the wait, I picked an out of the way
area where I could sit with my back to a wall and have a field of
view which showed me anyone approaching for some distance. I
watched people for thirty minutes, looking for Glyph tattoos before
I finally relaxed slightly.

Eventually, I got up and went to one
of the shops in the concourse, they sold various things,
newspapers, books, magazines. I noticed one book with a boy on the
cover, and he had some kind of mark on his forehead, kind of like
the Glyphs I’d seen, but this was in a different place. It was
marked as a best seller, so I picked it up and read the back. Turns
out the boy in the story was some kind of wizard, hidden in the
real world. I eventually put it down and I glanced at the front
page of a newspaper. After a moment, the image on the front page
registered on my recently abused gray matter, and with a rustle of
paper, I snatched up the publication. On the front page, I saw a
picture of the chamber in the Temple of Karnak where Stewart had
gone on his murder spree. I read the article quickly. For the most
part, I knew more than the writer, however, the article did mention
a pentagram burned on the floor. The article went on to say the
investigators were looking into the idea of a satanic cult being
involved but were not ignoring terrorists or other possibilities
for the bizarre killing spree. It also mentioned the bus driver
being questioned in connection to a suspect. Next to the article,
printed for all to see, I found myself staring at a poor likeness
of my face as rendered by the police artist.

I looked around guiltily, but no one
seemed to be noticing me.

Looking more carefully at the picture
on the front page I could make out black lines drawn on the floor:
two circles one inside the other and a pentagram inside the inner
circle; interesting. Could Stewart be some wacko Devil worshiper?
He sure seemed evil enough to me. I found it strange that he had
taken the time to go back to the murder chamber and draw something
as intricate as this pentagram after he had chased me clear
outside. Perhaps he was some religious zealot.

I looked at the artist’s conception of
me again, and then realized something odd; they had not drawn the
nautilus Glyph mark on my cheek. You would think my glyph mark
would have stood out to the bus driver. Still, I purchased a
baseball style hat and a pair of reading glasses. I went to a
bathroom and used the mirror, the hat and glasses helped to change
my appearance, but I could still plainly see the nautilus Glyph on
my left cheek.

Unfortunately, reading glasses aren’t
meant for distance viewing, and the blurred vision worsened my ever
present headache. When I finally got on the plane I took off the
damned glasses and rewarded my patience by carefully breaking them
in half. The destruction felt good.

The Stewardess came around with
magazines, so I took whatever she had on top and started paging
through. There were articles on various tourist sites in the United
Kingdom. I stopped on one which mentioned Salisbury England, but it
wasn’t the town that caught my interest, it was a picture of a
place nearby called Stonehenge. It showed a group of large stones
arranged in circles. This particular photograph had been taken
during a full solar eclipse giving the whole thing an eerie look. I
was intrigued by the formation, though something felt wrong about
it. Still, I knew I’d been there. It was a bit of memory which
belonged to me, something I had very little of and so I treasured
it like the finest gem.

Then I knew where I was
going.

Salisbury was brisk, but not freezing
this time of year. I bundled the wool coat closer to my body and
followed the tour guide along the path toward the lonely stone
sentinels standing in the English field. The tour stopped well
short of the actual site, at a place where we could see, but not
touch or damage, the ancient Megaliths.

I listened to the Tour Guide with half
an ear; she was droning on about all the different people that had
used or changed the site since approximately 2800 BC. It had been
used for various ceremonies and religious rites by many different
cultures down through the ages. At various times different cultures
made physical changes: the double circle of bluestone Menhirs in
2,100 BC and the five horseshoe shaped Sarsen Trilithons in 2,000
BC. All very interesting, but it did not get me what I wanted.
Simply put, I had a strong urge, or call it a compulsion, if you
will, to stand within the inner circle. It drew me like a puppy to
his mother’s milk.

The tour moved on, and so did I,
breaking away as soon as possible. As much as I wanted to go there
now, I had to wait for dark to make my illegal foray into the
center of the circle. I went back to the small hotel where I had
checked in after arriving by bus from London and rested while
waiting for dark.

I slipped over the fence handily and
dropped to the ground on the other side, pausing to listen for
sounds of discovery. The stillness of the night seemed undisturbed.
By moonlight the Megaliths seemed silent sentries to time, guarding
this place by their very strangeness. The length of time they
survived the onslaught of human progress shows the measure of their
success. Mountains leveled for housing tracks, the earth plundered
for ore and minerals, rivers dammed, oceans and air polluted, yet
here this circle stood, damaged, but surviving.

I reached what remained of the outer
ring of Sarsen stones, with their uprights and top lintel stones,
there I paused. I could feel a current of power emanating through
my body; it was a heady sensation. I reached out a hand and touched
the nearest of the massive stones, but felt no increase in the
strange sensation. I took a step forward toward the center and the
Sarsen Trilithons.

I then looked back at the outer ring;
which used to extend all the way around. Nowadays, there was only a
single grouping of three openings, with three other single
arches.

I suddenly wondered what in the world
I was doing out here in the cold night around some old boulders
which some religious nut made his people drag across the
countryside. I spoke aloud, “I should be going to see this Fiona
Albus, not standing around freezing off my arse!”

At this point, I felt an unnaturally
cold wind blow across me and the world seemed to wobble, though now
that I think of it, perhaps it was my balance which
wobbled.

Out of the dark night, a woman’s voice
spoke, sounding soft and near. It did not sound as if it was coming
from the outdoors it sounded as if we were within someone’s room.
Her voice was right out of every adolescent’s dreams of the perfect
woman.

“
Nicholas, dear, where are
you?” she asked.

My reply was both witty and succinct.
“Wha...” I said, dumbfounded, spinning around to try and spot the
girl with the sexy voice; she had to be close.

“
Oh, I’m sorry to startle
you; I know you’ve lost your memory. I grew worried when you didn’t
arrive and wondered if something had happened. I thought it worth
answering your summons.”

I still looked around the old stones
for some sight of the woman who was speaking as if she was standing
within five feet of me.

“
Summons? Who are you?” I
finally managed to say.

“
Oh, I thought you knew.
Pox called and left a message telling us you were coming to my
place in England.”

I took a deep breath trying to regain
my nerves. I must have sounded a little squeaky during my last
attempt at questions.

“
Then you are the friend he
told me to visit?” I asked.

In a reassuring voice, she answered.
“Indeed, where are you now?”

This is an interesting question for
someone to ask when they sounded as if they were next to
you.

“
Don’t you know? Are you
not here as well?”

“
Of course not, I’m at my
home,” she answered as if that was the most normal thing in the
world.

I sighed mentally; I just hated not
knowing what in Hades these people were talking about. “Then, if
you aren’t here, and you don’t even know where I am, how in the
hell are you talking to me?” The last part came out a bit stressed,
all right, more than a bit.

She answered in a soothing tone, “I
answered your summons and created the bridge between us; if we keep
it short it is unlikely a Hunter will detect the connection. Don’t
worry, just come to my home, the one Pox told you about, and we
will see about getting you straightened out. When did you last see
Pox?”

Her sudden shift of subject threw me
off for a moment and I mentally scrambled to find an answer. “Back
at my hotel in Luxor, where some guy was after me; he wants to
mount my head on his wall as a trophy!”