Alex Verus Novels, Books 1-4 (9780698175952)

by Jacka, Benedict

  I set about making sure I’d have something to apply that leverage to. I dressed in a warm shirt and jeans, then put on a pair of black running shoes before turning to the items scattered around my desk. My first choice was a crystal sphere the size of a marble with a fingernail’s worth of mist swirling inside—I dropped it into my right-hand coat pocket, checked to see that I could reach it quickly, then did the same with a small glass rod in the matching pocket on my left. Next was a packet of trail dust—my last one, I’d have to get some more. A tapering crystal wand about eight inches long was clipped into my coat, then I filled the rest of my pockets with a general selection of odds and ends: a jar of healing salve, a handful of tiny pieces of silver jewellery, and two vials containing a pale blue liquid.

  Next I went on to my mundane items. Most mages aren’t fond of technology but I prefer to take every advantage I can get. A small, powerful torch went on my belt, along with a few tools and a slender-bladed knife held securely in its sheath. I reached for the drawer which held my gun, paused, then decided to leave it behind. It would probably be more trouble than it was worth.

  Finally, I went to my wardrobe and took out my mist cloak. It’s not the most powerful item I own, but it’s the one I most trust. To casual eyes it looks like a length of some kind of grey-black cloth, thin and light and soft to the touch. If you keep looking, the colours seem to shift and flow at the edge of your vision, subtly enough that you might think you’d imagined it. Mist cloaks are woven from moonbeams and the webs of snow spiders, and they’re rare and little-known items. They’re imbued items, not simple focuses, and as I put it on the colours rippled quickly before going still. I patted it affectionately, then turned to look at myself in the mirror.

  I saw a tall figure, angular lines blurred by the shadows of the mist cloak. From beneath the hood a pale, quizzical face looked back at me, guarded and watchful, spiky black hair framing a pair of dark eyes. I studied myself for a moment, then turned to the door.

  Time to get to work.

  The sun had long set by the time I stepped off the ladder onto the roof of my flat. A few muted stars shone down from above, their faint glow almost drowned out by the yellow blaze of the London lights. Rooftops, chimneys, and TV aerials were all around me, shadowed in the darkness, and from below came the sounds of the city. The air carried the scent of car exhausts and old brickwork.

  Mages like to think their magic sets them above everyone else, and I guess in some ways that’s true. But when you get right down to it, mages are still people, and just like other people, they gossip. Lyle might think his Precursor relic was a secret, but I was willing to bet it wasn’t anywhere near as secret as he thought it was. And if the news was out, I knew someone who’d have heard all about it.

  The roof of my flat is maybe twenty feet square, peeling white paint bordered by a small parapet with a dusty chimney sticking up on one side. If you’re a good climber you can cross to other houses, and often I do. I stood in the centre, took the glass rod from my pocket, and wove a tiny thread of magic through it, whispering as I did. “Starbreeze. Dancer of the air, friend to the clouds, you who knows the secrets of the mountain peaks and all between earth and sky. I am Alexander Verus and I call to you. Come to me, lady of the wind.” A faint breeze sprang up, as the whispering wind swept my words away and into the north. I repeated it again for south, west, and east, then looked into the future.

  The good news was that Starbreeze would be here soon. The bad news was that the assassin stalking me would be here sooner.

  It’s nearly impossible to surprise an alert diviner. It’s how we survive in a world of things bigger and nastier than we are. I’d detected the man hunting me even before I’d stepped outside my door. The only question was what to do about it.

  I don’t usually let people pick fights with me. It’s not hard to give someone the slip when you can see the future, and the kind of people who like picking fights tend to have lots of other enemies. It’s easier just to keep your head down and wait for someone else to deal with them. In this case, though, if I shook this mage off, the first thing he’d do would be to try to break into my shop, and that would risk his finding the cube. I was better off dealing with him directly.

  Of course, that didn’t mean I was going to fight fair. I hopped down to the roof of the house next to me and kept going until I reached the roof of a small block of flats to my south, five buildings down. The building had been renovated ten years back and the roof now held a couple of ventilators, but it still had the old chimney stacks near the edge. The combination of old and new made the roof cluttered, giving plenty of cover. I checked the roof to make sure the layout was as I remembered, then leant against one of the ventilators, closed my eyes, and waited.

  Not much light from the streets below reached up to the city rooftops, but there was plenty of sound. From all around I could hear the muted chatter of people on the streets below, mixing with the rumble of cars carrying their passengers home for the last time before the weekend. The breeze carried the scent of Indian and Italian food; the restaurants were just starting on the dinnertime rush. All around was noise and bustle, but the roof itself was quiet. The only sound from nearby was the rustle of wings from roosting pigeons across the street. As I listened, the rustle suddenly went quiet.

  I spoke into the darkness without opening my eyes. “You’ll miss.”

  Black lightning cut the night air, slashing through the space I’d been in as I twisted away. The bolts were jet black, visible only as a greater darkness against the night sky, and they made no sound but a low hiss. I completed my spin with my back pressed against the ventilator, and as suddenly as it had begun, everything was still.

  I leant just slightly around the ventilator’s edge. “Told you.”

  The mage who’d attacked me was on the next roof over, a dark shape crouched behind a chimney. Looking into the futures in which I approached, I could see he was a small man, spindly and thin, wearing dark clothes and a mask that hid his face. He was squinting in my direction, one hand lifted to shield or strike. “Come out, little seer,” the man said when I didn’t move. His voice was harsh, with a trace of an accent.

  “Why don’t you come over so I can see you better?”

  I sensed the man’s lips curl in a smile. “Because I can see you…right now.” As he said the last word another stream of black lightning flashed from his hand.

  The black lightning was death magic: a kind of negative energy that kills by shutting down a body’s systems, especially the brain and heart. Death magic is incredibly fast, as quick as the lightning it resembles. As if that weren’t enough, this particular attack was augmented with kinetic energy, giving it a physical punch as well. It’d be a real bitch to shield against, even if I could make shields, which I can’t.

  But all the speed in the world doesn’t matter if the target’s not there. I’d ducked back out of sight as the man had cast his spell, and the bolt struck the edge of the ventilator where my head had been, the lightning grounding as the impact made the metal shudder. I heard the man swear. “You know, I was expecting Cinder,” I said conversationally. “Was he busy?”

  “Cinder’s a fool,” the man snarled. I could sense he was off balance; he wasn’t used to missing.

  “He didn’t try to pick a fight with me,” I said, then smiled into the darkness. “I’d say that makes him brighter than you…Khazad.”

  The man—Khazad—stopped dead. “How do you know my name?”

  “What’s the matter, Khazad?” I asked. “Bitten off more than you can chew?”

  There was a moment’s silence, and then from behind the chimney, Khazad stood up. Darkness flickered around him as he wove a shield. “I don’t scare as easy as Cinder,” he said quietly, and began walking towards me.

  So much for ending it the easy way. “So is this your way of asking me to join your team?” I asked as Khazad closed in. “Because I’ve got to say, your sales pitch sucks.”

  “You can
help us or you can die,” Khazad said, and I could tell he was smiling. “I don’t mind which.”

  Khazad had reached the parapet separating one roof from the next. He began to climb over it, slowly and carefully, keeping one hand free and his eyes on the ventilator. I took the opportunity to move back into the shadow of the chimney stacks, keeping the ventilator between him and me. Khazad’s feet came down onto the apartment roof, and he straightened. “Running already?” he said mockingly.

  “You know, I can see why you make enemies like Morden,” I said. “Your group really isn’t great on social skills.”

  “You’re not working for Morden,” Khazad said calmly. “You don’t work for anybody. No one’s going to care if you die here.”

  Khazad had cleared the ventilator, but I’d been moving as well and now there was a chimney stack between us. There was a reason I’d chosen to fight Khazad up here. Death magic is deadly, but it needs a direct line of sight to its target. A fire mage like Cinder could have just burned the whole rooftop, but Khazad needed a clear shot. I changed direction, moving towards the drop to my left. “Just out of curiosity, how do you think killing me is going to help you get this relic?”

  “Who says I have to kill you?” Khazad said. His voice was confident; he thought he was backing me up against the edge of the roof. Good. “All you have to do is do what I say.”

  I’d backed into a dead end. The chimney stack I’d been hiding behind ended at the roof’s edge. Glancing down, I could see balconies and a cluttered alleyway with a Dumpster. Khazad was less than thirty feet away, heading straight towards my hiding place.

  Most mages have some way to use their magic to find people. Fire mages can pick up a man’s body heat; air mages can feel his breath; life and mind mages can directly sense the presence and thoughts of a human being the same way that you can touch or taste. For death mages like Khazad, it works a little differently; they sense living creatures as an absence, a concentration of life where their magic can’t go. That was how Khazad had been able to sense me in the darkness, and it was how he was following me now.

  I drew the crystal wand from my pocket and concentrated, channelling my magic through it. There was no effect to normal eyes, but to my mage’s sight the thing brightened, glowing. The wand is the simplest of all magic items, a battery. All it does is hold the magic and essence of the person who uses it. It doesn’t really do anything, but it’s very noticeable. There was a gutter on the edge of the roof, and I laid the wand in it. “You’ll have to find me first,” I said over my shoulder, and flipped the hood of the mist cloak over my head. I took three quick steps backwards and pressed myself up against the chimney stack, going very still.

  Let me tell you a bit about mist cloaks. They’re imbued items, with permanent magic of their own, and their basic function is to sense their surroundings and shift colour to match, camouflaging the bearer no matter where he is. Right now, I knew the mist cloak had shifted to match the bricks behind me, blending my shape with the chimneys like a chameleon. As long as I didn’t move, the illusion would be perfect.

  But mist cloaks have a second function which very few people know about: they also block detection spells. To magical senses, a human wearing a mist cloak gives off no reading, as though they aren’t there. From Khazad’s point of view, first he was sensing me, and then he was sensing a source of magic coming from the exact same place that I’d been in a second ago. If he’d been paying close attention he might have noticed the flicker as the sources had switched, but he didn’t have any reason to think I’d moved. In fact, he didn’t even slow down. “Find you?” he said, and I could tell he was smiling. “I already have—”

  Khazad came around the corner and stopped. A few steps ahead of him was the edge of the roof, streetlights glowing dimly from below. I was just two steps to his right, pressed motionless against the chimney. This close, I could see the side of Khazad’s face behind the mask. His skin was light brown, and he was shorter than I was, small and lightly built. He was staring down at where the wand was hidden, just in front of him.

  Mages tend to over-rely on their magic. It’s human nature; if you have something that works ninety-nine percent of the time, you tend to forget about the hundredth. Khazad’s eyes were telling him that there was nothing there, but his magic was telling him that there was something just over the edge, and it was his magic he trusted. He moved forward, his movements quick and jerky like a bird, his shield flickering as it dimmed the light behind him. He reached the very edge of the roof and stared down at the wand lying in the gutter.

  I came up behind Khazad and shoved him hard in the small of the back. His shield stung my hands as it took the blow, but while kinetic shields can spread out an impact, they don’t do much to stop it. Khazad went flying over the edge with a shout. There was a crash as he hit the balcony, followed by a satisfying crunch.

  I picked up the wand and dropped it back in my pocket, then turned and walked away, humming to myself. I didn’t bother checking to see how badly Khazad was hurt; he wasn’t going to be chasing me anymore, which was all I cared about. I walked back to my roof, sat down, and waited.

  A couple of minutes later, something tickled my ear. I turned to see a semisolid face made of swirling air just a few inches away, looking at me with wide eyes. “Boo!”

  To ordinary eyes Starbreeze looks like air; that’s to say, invisible. To a mage’s sight she looks like an artist’s sketch done in lines of glowing vapour. Swirls of air magic make up her body, her shape changing from day to day depending on her mood. Today she was in one of her favourite forms: an elfin girl with short hair, big eyes, and pointed ears. “Scared you!”

  Starbreeze’s full name is about half a page long and lovely to hear, the sense of a rising wind over a snowy hillside, carrying with it the hint of spring, with the first stars of night appearing in the sky above. When I first met her I tried to remember it, until I found that she changes it every time she’s asked. Now I just call her Starbreeze like everyone else. Starbreeze is an air elemental, a spirit of wind. She can fly or shift her form with no more effort than it takes you or me to walk. She can feel the movement of a butterfly from across a field, hear a whisper from halfway across the world. She’s ancient and timeless. I don’t know how old she is, but I think she might have been born at the time the world was made.

  She’s also dumb as a sack of rocks.

  “Hi, Starbreeze.”

  “You’re different,” Starbreeze chirped. Then she brightened. “Pretty cloak!” She dived right into me, turning into a swirl of wind around my clothes, sending my cloak billowing out, then starting to tug it over my head.

  “No!” I said, pulling it down.

  “Give me,” Starbreeze called, her voice coming from somewhere around my back.

  I took a firmer grip on the mist cloak. “No. You’ll lose it.”

  Starbreeze reformed behind me, and I turned to face her. She was pouting. “Won’t.”

  “Yes, you will. You’ll forget all about it.”

  “Won’t.”

  “What happened to the last thing I gave you?”

  Starbreeze looked vague. “I forgot.” She brightened. “Air stone!”

  I sighed inwardly. Starbreeze has seen my cloak a dozen times, and it goes clean out of her head every time I’m gone. I suppose I’m lucky she can remember Alex. Actually, I’m lucky she remembers Starbreeze. I reached into my pocket and took out one of the tiny pieces of silver jewellery: a brooch, shaped like a butterfly with wings spread. Starbreeze hopped forward, eyes wide. “Ooh!”

  “Do you like it?”

  Starbreeze floated up into the air and spun around so that her head was pointing down at the roof. She hung upside down with her chin cupped in her hands a few inches from the brooch, stared at it with rapt eyes for a few seconds, then nodded eagerly.

  I closed my hand over the brooch and lowered it. Starbreeze’s face clouded over. “Bring it back!”

  “I’ll give it to you,”
I promised. “But I need you to tell me something first.”

  “Okay!”

  Starbreeze doesn’t rest, doesn’t sleep, and can hear anything carried on moving air. It’d make her the perfect spy, except that most of what she hears goes in one ear and out the other. “I’m looking for a Precursor relic, a new one.”

  “What’s a relic?” Starbreeze said curiously.

  “A powerful magical thing. It would have been found a week or two ago.”

  “What’s a week?”

  “The Council would have been looking into it. They’d have been guarding it, maybe setting up some kind of research team.”

  “What’s the Council?”

  I sighed. “Anything interesting in this city? Anything with magic?”

  “Oh!” Starbreeze brightened. “Men came to the place with the old thing. Tried to open it up.” Starbreeze giggled. “Lightning man came. It was funny!”

  I frowned. “Which men?”

  Starbreeze shrugged. “Men.”

  “Where did they come to?”

  “Blue round place.”

  “Is there anywhere else in this city where men have been doing something magical with an old thing?”

  “No, no, no.” Starbreeze swirled around my head, rolling over in the air. “Go there?”

  I thought for a second. If Starbreeze took me to the “blue round place,” I’d be able to find out whether it was what I was looking for. The only risk was she might get halfway, forget where she was going, and drop me somewhere random. Last time that happened I ended up in Puerto Rico. If you’re wondering why I bring so much stuff with me on these trips, now you know.

  On the other hand, I was pressed for time and this was the best lead I had. I nodded. “Let’s do it.”