Veiled by Benedict Jacka Page A

why exactly are you trying to kill me? I’m guessing it’s got something to do with what happened last night?”
    No answer. I couldn’t see the guy’s eyes behind the dark glasses, but the rest of his face was expressionless. Usually when someone attacks you, they want to talk, either to justify themselves or to convince you to give up. When they’re silent and blank-faced, it’s a bad sign. It means they’ve already written you off and they’re not going to waste time talking to a dead man.
    The air mage fired off another useless spell at the forcewall, then stopped. His head tilted up as he looked at where the forcewall met the platform roof and I knew he was studying the spell with his magesight. Forcewalls transfer energy into whatever they’re anchored to when they’re attacked, which makes them very hard to blast through. Air magic isn’t much good at blasting through stuff. It’s much better at moving things around.
    Unfortunately the forcewall only went as far as the platform edge.
    Magic curved around the mage as he floated into the air. He flew out over the train tracks and right around the wall.
    Shit!
I was already moving, jumping off the other edge down onto the tracks, putting the concrete bulk of the platform between us. I’d been hoping that the guy would chase after me, fly low over the platform where he’d have trouble manoeuvring, but instead he flew straight up, coming all the way over the platform roof to arc down on top of where I was hiding. I had to scramble back onto the platform to look for cover.
    The mage did an attack run, sweeping past. Bullets of hardened air threw up chips of concrete as I darted behind the advertising boards at the platform centre. The shots tracked me as I moved, tearing through the flimsy plastic of the boards, punching holes in the posters from Transport for London announcing that
Being Careful Won’t Hurt You
and urging everyone to
Report Anything Suspicious to Our Staff or the Police
. The boards went dark as the lights behind them fizzled and died, and the air mage soared up into the sky again, disappearing from my sight.
    This was bad. As long as this guy stayed airborne I couldn’t touch him. Running was useless; it was too far to the main road. I glanced up at the indicator. Three minutes until the next northbound train. Could I hold out that long?
    The air mage did another flyby. The first attack was a hail of daggers made of hardened air, the second a whirlwind that would have picked me up and thrown me out onto the tracks. Next was a wind blast like a solid punch, and after that was another implosion spell, shattering more of the poster boards and sending a hollow boom echoing out over the construction site. I ducked and dodged, jumping behind the platform, using the forcewall as a barrier, pulling every trick I could think of to shake him. I was holding him off, but I wasn’t stopping him. Magic doesn’t run off some sort of limited resource, and while casting spells takes energy, it’s no more tiring than any other demanding skill—apprentices might exhaust themselves after a dozen or so spells, but a journeyman or master mage won’t. Which means that you can’t make a mage run out of magic. As long as they want you dead badly enough, they can just sit there and keep casting the same spell at you over and over again until you roll over and die.
    And just as I was thinking that, my luck ran out.
    The air mage had fallen into a pattern, aiming spells at the same points on the platform. He started to cast another dagger burst, and I began to jump down behind the platform edge . . . and in midcast he changed target, placing the centre of the burst right above where I’d been about to take cover.
    You don’t have much margin for error when you’re dodging spells. I tried to get to the stairwell before the detonation.
    I didn’t make it.
    There was