Read Online Fated: An Alex Verus Novel by Benedict Jacka - Free Book Online Page A

shot at the elemental. A second later the stairs flashed white and there was a crack of thunder as the elemental took a shot back. I didn’t know whether I’d been spotted and I didn’t hang around to find out. I made it back the way I came into the Great Court and to the top of the staircase with a speed that an Olympic sprinter would have had trouble beating.
    The Great Court showed no signs of battle; the three Dark mages had probably bypassed the doors and gated in. The good news was that there were no security guards.
    The bad news was that the Council reinforcements had just turned up.
    There were five of them, just entering through the front doors. The battle mages of the Council are more of a police force than anything else, but you still don’t want to mess with them. This group were shielded, armed and ready for trouble.
    But they didn’t have advance warning and I did. As I reached the top of the staircase I pulled the crystal marblefrom my pocket and threw it to shatter at the foot of the stairs. Silvery vapour surged out, filling the Great Court with an obscuring mist, and the mages disappeared from view in an instant. I sprinted down into the mist, relying on my magic to avoid a fall.
    If I’d been lucky, that would have been it. I could have passed them in the mist and left them to fight it out behind me. But their leader was fast, already throwing up shields, shouting orders, and I knew I’d never make it through the door. I made a snap decision, jinked right, ran across the Great Court into the West Wing and just made it into the doorway before one of the other mages evaporated the mist to nothingness with a surge of air magic.
    I’d been forewarned in time to freeze in the shadow of the door, my mist cloak gathered around me. The mages were clustered around the main entrance, defensive spells glowing around them. ‘Where’d he go?’ the leader snapped. He was a tough-looking man in his middle years with iron-grey hair.
    ‘Can’t see him,’ another mage said, scanning the court. ‘Didn’t feel a gate.’
    ‘He couldn’t have made one that fast …’
    ‘We don’t know that,’ the leader said. ‘Ward the door; we need to push up.’
    With care and persistence, you can track down even someone in a mist cloak. I knew the mages of the response team would be able to find me given enough time. I also knew they weren’t going to get it.
    The air mage who’d blown away the mist heard the sound of running footsteps first and called a warning to the others. The response team swung their attention to thetop of the staircase just as the three Dark mages appeared at a dead run. Even at this distance I could see that Cinder and Khazad’s clothes were smoking. The leader of the Council mages started to shout something up at them, and the ensuing conversation would have been very interesting if the elemental hadn’t followed them out a second later.
    Elementals are living, sapient manifestations of the building blocks of our universe. They’re not usually all that smart, although calling them stupid isn’t quite right either – ‘limited’ is a better word. Either way, one thing they’re not is weak. Take Starbreeze – she isn’t particularly powerful as elementals go, but she could still transform you into air without breaking a sweat. She could also, should she feel like it, scatter that air across so many thousands of cubic miles of atmosphere that your body would be in every time zone at once. With that in mind, you can see why mages avoid picking fights with even lesser elementals.
    The elemental hovering at the top of the stairs was definitely not a lesser one.
    Standing upright it would have been maybe twelve feet tall, a rough humanoid shape with two arms, two legs, a body and what could have been a head, every part of it crackling blue-white electricity. It didn’t walk so much as fly, blazing a jagged path through the air to light up the Great Court with dazzling light, staring