Alex Verus Novels, Books 1-4 (9780698175952)

by Jacka, Benedict

  Instantly Starbreeze swept in around me. For a moment a whirlwind clouded my vision, and then there was a tingling through my body and I could see again. Looking down, I saw my body fade away, becoming mist and air. Then we were in the sky, flying at incredible speed into the darkness.

  There’s no feeling as amazing as being carried by an air elemental. Imagine flying in a hang glider, soaring over the city by night. Now imagine that you’re going ten times as fast, so that the streets and lights and crowds below roll by like an unfolding blanket. Now add the feeling that there isn’t a breath of wind, and that you’re lying in midair watching the land zoom past below. When an air elemental carries you in its body, the rushing wind doesn’t touch you; it’s like swimming through the sky.

  Tonight, though, I didn’t have much time to enjoy it. I had one brief glimpse of a huge curving roof, a pale green dome forming a bubble out of the centre, before Starbreeze turned me back from air and dropped me to the ground so fast that I was standing on flagstones almost before I knew what was happening. I was standing under the night sky in a massive dark courtyard, in the shadow of a vast building. Opposite the building was a high fence with a pair of tall gates, and through the closed gates I could see lights and passing cars. The courtyard itself was almost pitch-black, and for a moment I was disoriented, and then I saw the massive columns to my left and suddenly I knew exactly where I was.

  Starbreeze swirled upwards. “Starbreeze, wait,” I whispered up to her. “Don’t you want the brooch?”

  Starbreeze paused in midair and stared blankly down at me. “Brooch?”

  I sighed inwardly. “Here.” I held out the silver butterfly. “This is for you.”

  “Ooh!” Starbreeze said raptly. A puff of wind whisked the butterfly out of my hand and Starbreeze leapt up and away out of the courtyard and into the night sky, spiralling higher and higher, tossing the brooch from breeze to breeze until she disappeared into the air and vanished.

  I was left alone. I took a quick glance around me and got to work.

  chapter 3

  The spot where Starbreeze had dropped me was just outside the British Museum. The courtyard was bordered to the north by the museum itself, to the east and west by outbuildings, and to the south by stone walls, tall gates, and a high iron fence with spikes. Beyond the fence, buses and cars tracked steadily from left to right to left along Great Russell Street, casting light and sound through the railings, but the courtyard itself was silent.

  As I waited for my eyes to adjust, I looked through the futures and saw that if I moved forward I’d run into a line of massive columns, behind which was the museum’s main entrance. Starbreeze had said something about mages trying to open something. It might be Lyle’s relic, in which case this place would be under Council guard. Otherwise, it might be someone’s secret project. Either way, it was a safe bet nobody inside would be happy to see me.

  If there’s one thing all diviners share, it’s curiosity. We really can’t help it; it’s just part of who we are. If you dug out a tunnel somewhere in the wilderness a thousand miles from anywhere and hung a sign on it saying, Warning, this leads to the Temple of Horrendous Doom. Do not enter, ever. No, not even then, you’d get back from lunch to find a diviner already inside and two more about to go in.

  Come to think about it, that might explain why there are so few of us.

  In any case, even if this wasn’t what I was after, I couldn’t resist having a closer look. I flipped the hood of my mist cloak up over my head and walked into the shadows of the huge columns. In the wall beyond were double doors of metal and glass. Through the glass I could see an open area with two men at a security station, one sitting, one standing. The only way through into the museum proper was to cross in a clear line of sight of both men. I stood watching for two full minutes, then opened the door and walked inside.

  Everyone knows diviners can see the future. But what does seeing the future mean?

  Most people think it’s like reading a book. You skip a few pages ahead, see what’s going to happen. That’s impossible, of course. You reach a fork in the road: do you go left or right? You might go one way; you might go the other. It’s your choice, no one else’s.

  What a diviner sees is probability. In one future you go left; in another you go right; in a third, you stop and ask for directions. A hundred branches, each branching again and again to create thousands, for every one of the millions of people living on this earth. Billions and trillions of futures, branching in every way through four dimensions like a river delta the size of a galaxy.

  You can’t look at all that at once. If you opened your sight to all the possible futures of everything around you, even for an instant, the knowledge would destroy you, wipe away your mind like an ocean wave rolling over a drop of water. Seeing into the future is a constant discipline, always keeping your guard up, always focused. The real reason there are so few diviners is that most of them either go crazy or block their power off so that they don’t have to deal with it anymore.

  The diviners who don’t go crazy learn to see futures in terms of strength. Everyone develops their own code, a way of interpreting the information. To me, futures appear as lines of light in the darkness. The stronger and more likely the future, the brighter the glow. The next thing you learn is how to sort futures, search for groupings of events in which things happen a certain way. And once you’ve done that, all you have to do is look back along the strands and find out which actions lead to them.

  In ninety-nine out of a hundred futures, opening the door and walking in led to my being spotted by the security guards. I searched for the future in which I wasn’t spotted, looked back to see what I had to do to make it happen, and did it. I didn’t have the faintest idea why I had to move that way. I just knew it would work.

  To anyone watching, it looks like pure fluke. One guard points at something, and the other turns just as I open the door and close it behind me. They carry on talking and I stand quietly in the shadow of the doorway. One looks away briefly and I walk out across the floor as the second bends down to fumble in a drawer. I walk past, staying behind the first one as he turns back, and pass through the exit at the other side just before the second one looks up again.

  Afterwards, when the balloon goes up, both guards will swear they never took their eyes off the door.

  The Great Court of the British Museum is massive, more than fifty feet high with the huge cylinder of the Reading Room running from floor to ceiling at the centre. Floor and walls are painted white, reflecting the light and emphasising the empty space, and the ceiling is slightly domed. An equestrian statue stood to the right; to the left, a stone lion snarled down upon an information desk covered with pamphlets. I crossed the floor, half my mind on keeping my footsteps silent and the other half searching the possible futures for more guards, noting as I did that a patrol was due in about three minutes. I picked a map off the desk and glanced at it. The bulk of the ground floor was taken up by the west wing, mostly filled with permanent exhibits from ancient Greece and Rome. Somehow I couldn’t see Lyle’s relic being one of those; if the Rosetta Stone or the Elgin Marbles were magical, I was pretty sure someone would have noticed by now. At the back, around the fourth floor, were some rooms marked in brown as Exhibitions and Changing Displays. That sounded hopeful. I slipped the map into my pocket and started for the stairs.

  As I climbed the curving staircase around the Reading Room and mapped out my path through the museum, the back of my mind was puzzling about why any kind of magical item would be here. Mages, as a whole, are not the most public spirited of people. If they find something they want, they take it. They don’t leave it on display.

  Unless in this case they couldn’t take it. If the Council couldn’t move it to a safe location, that might explain why Lyle was desperate enough to try contacting me.

  I’d just reached Ethiopia and Coptic Egypt when something pinged on my precognition. Two guards were ahead. I paused until I knew neither was
looking in my direction, then peeked my head around the corner. The men were about thirty feet away, standing in front of a staircase leading up, and they were carrying…

  Bingo. The security guards at the door had worn the black uniforms and pullovers of British Museum security, with a silver BM on their epaulettes. These two wore plain clothes. They carried no obvious tools or weapons, but I could sense the auras of magical items, and from the way one had moved I’d spotted a gun in a shoulder holster and that made them Council security. Mages don’t do sentry duty, not unless it’s literally a matter of life or death; they’re too important for that. Instead they have private soldiers equipped with modern weapons and magical aids.

  These two weren’t mages, or even adepts, but they were alert and competent. As well as that, I could tell from here that the top of the stairwell behind them was warded with a barrier. The barrier would contain a well-hidden alarm; anyone entering the fourth floor without the magical key, whether by foot or by spell, would set off a silent warning signal. Knowing the Council, the guards wouldn’t be trusted with the password key. An elemental mage could blast through the guards and the barrier but would set off the alarm. A more subtle mage would be able to avoid raising the alarm but wouldn’t be able to get through the barrier.

  It was a typical Council defence: cost-effective and ruthless. The job of those two guards was to be, basically, cannon fodder. If a mage attacked them, their chances of survival were nil. Their only purpose was to raise the alarm and give advance warning to Council reinforcements gating in. But no matter what I thought of the methods, I had to admit it was a fairly good setup. For a normal mage, getting past both the guards and the barrier without raising the alarm would take hours of preparation, if not days.

  It took me slightly over five minutes. When you know exactly what will set off an alarm, then you know exactly what won’t. Think about it.

  The fourth floor was sealed off from the rest of the museum with boards and screens. Worn red carpet covered the floor and a scattered handful of lights cast the room in a dim glow. Standing in the centre of the room was a statue.

  I should probably mention at this point that what I was doing was, under mage law, illegal as hell. The Council might turn a blind eye to torture and murder, but trespassing, well, that’s serious. With my reputation, I’d be in serious trouble if I was caught. However, I was pretty sure by this point that I’d be in more serious trouble if I stayed home. I had no particular desire to sit around waiting for the next guy in line to take a shot at me.

  I scanned the room. A few other exhibits had been pushed into the corners: a vase, a standing lamp, something that looked like a totem pole. None radiated magic. A lift was at the far end, but it was dark and unpowered. There were no windows. Apart from the stairs I’d climbed to enter this room, there was no way in and no way out, which meant I was standing in a dead end if anything went wrong. I would have to work fast.

  The statue was of a man, life size, wearing robes that looked like ancient ancestors of the ceremonial gear Light mages wear to formal occasions. He looked in his fifties or sixties, with a flowing beard. His right hand grasped a wand, while his left hand was held out in front of him, palm up and slightly cupped as though asking for something. The face was superbly detailed, right down to the age lines and the set of the eyes; the sculptor had obviously used magic to preserve his work. The expression and pose of the man was commanding, proud. I circled the statue once more, then after a moment’s hesitation reached out and touched it.

  Nothing happened, as I’d known it would. The statue looked and felt like stone, though slightly cooler to the touch than stone should be. This was Lyle’s relic, all right. Even without my mage’s sight, I could feel power radiating from the thing. I looked around the room, putting together what must have happened. The museum had gotten hold of the statue and brought it here. The Council had found it, sent agents. Their orders would have been to study the item, determine its power. First they would have tried to activate the statue, and then if that didn’t work they would have tried to move it.

  What had happened then?

  I turned back to the statue, studying the face. The expression was calm, but with a hint of something else—arrogance? Danger? Looking closely, I could see traces of old scars. A battle-mage, then, and a good one, if he’d lived to that age. The more I looked, the more I felt there was something expectant about the statue, as though it were waiting for something.

  The outstretched hand lay there, open and inviting. I looked into the future to see what would happen if I put something into it.

  I watched the scene unfolding ahead of me for just a second, then broke off the vision and stepped back hastily until my back fetched up against the wall. Suddenly I understood exactly why Lyle and Cinder needed a diviner, and what had happened the last time someone had tried to activate this thing. The statue had been perfectly preserved—and its defence system had been perfectly preserved, too. I’d learnt all I needed to know. It was time to get out of here.

  I’d taken two steps towards the door when I heard the sound from downstairs. It was a quiet sound, the sound of something soft and heavy falling, and it made me stop dead.

  Remember what I said about diviners learning to focus on the futures that tell you what you need to know? Well, it comes with a drawback. If you’re focusing on one set of futures, you aren’t paying attention to the others. So if you’re about to be cornered by some people you really don’t want to meet, you won’t notice it until something draws your attention—something like the sound of a body hitting the floor.

  It was not turning out to be a good day.

  Most people’s first response to danger is to run away. It’s a survival instinct which natural selection has done a good job of encouraging. It’s an old saying that if you’re being chased, you only have to outrun one person. If everyone else runs away and you don’t, by default that makes you the one person. Hence people whose first response to danger isn’t to run away tend to get weeded out of the gene pool by teeth, or bullets, or fireballs, as the case may be.

  Personally, my first response to danger is to take a closer look and see what’s going on. Refer back to what I said about diviners being curious. Also refer back to what I said about there not being many of us. I looked into the future of what I would see if I ran downstairs, following the gaze of my future self.

  The first thing I saw were the two guards who’d been stationed on the landing. Both were now lying on the floor, quite dead. Standing over them were three figures. As my future self saw the figures, they saw me, and I got one glimpse of what they’d do before I cut the vision off abruptly. Just that look was all I needed to know that I did not want to be found here.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and I knew I had less than thirty seconds. Running was out, fighting was out. The only choice left was to hide. I moved into one of the corners, sliding in behind the totem pole so its irregular shape would break up my outline, then pulled the hood of my mist cloak over my head. The footsteps below stopped, and I knew they’d reached the barrier. There was a flicker of green light and the barrier was gone. Figures strode in.

  There were three of them, two men and a woman, quick and quiet, their heads turning as they checked the corners. All three were masked and wore dark clothes, but even with the masks I recognised the hulking shape of the nearest. It was Cinder. He looked straight at the corner in which I was hiding, but his eyes swept past without seeing. “Empty.”

  “Find some more,” snarled the second man. It was Khazad. Apparently going after me hadn’t been the only item on his todo list for tonight. He was limping and smelt of rotting vegetables. Maybe he’d hit the Dumpster on his way down. “I’m not done.”

  “Enough,” the woman said sharply, and the sound of her voice made me forget all about Khazad. The clothes hid her shape and all I could see was a pair of blue eyes, but even a glance at them made me go still. I couldn’t place her voice, but somehow I felt as though
I’d met her before. “Cinder, do your tests.”

  Cinder made a gesture and dark red lights sprang up around the room, small red flames smouldering in midair. In the red glow, he studied the statue, turning his back to me. “How long we got?”

  “They’ll still be getting out of bed,” Khazad said, his voice simmering with anger. “They get in our way, too bad for them.”

  “We aren’t here for you to play,” the woman said. She checked a watch. “Two minutes. Cinder?”

  The woman’s voice was sending chills through me. Something about it kept nagging at my memory, but I couldn’t quite match it. If I could just see her face…but in the red light, all I could make out were her eyes as she stood with arms folded, staring at the statue. She was average height and moved with a smooth grace.

  “Trying,” Cinder muttered. He was holding up his hands, weaving glowing red threads around the statue. I could recognise it as a divining spell of some kind, but a crude one. He wasn’t going to learn anything useful. Cinder must have realised it the same time I did, because he lowered his hands and let the light die. “Need a diviner.”

  Khazad looked at Cinder angrily. “You say something?”

  Cinder returned Khazad’s gaze. “Said you’d bring Verus. Said you didn’t need any help.”

  Khazad showed his teeth in a snarl. I could feel the hate radiating off him, and I made a mental note to make sure I stayed out of Khazad’s way for a while. I was getting the impression he wasn’t the forgive-and-forget type.

  “Cinder,” the woman said again, and Cinder looked away from Khazad, breaking the standoff. I couldn’t help but grin. Hey, don’t sell yourselves short, guys. You did manage to bring along a diviner, you just can’t see him. Destroying the barrier had triggered an alarm, and Council reinforcements were on the way. I already knew that Khazad’s guess had been accurate. The reinforcements were going to be too late to do me any good.