‘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, 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 mid- air 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 disorientated, 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 mid-air and stared blankly down at me. ‘Brooch?’
I sighed inwardly. ‘Here.’ I held out the silver butterfly. ‘This is for you.’
