Alex Verus Novels, Books 1-4 (9780698175952) (6 page)

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.”

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.

T
he 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.

E
veryone 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.

T
he 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.