The Knowledge (The Circle Book 2)

by Lee Isserow

  Shana and Raven found themselves teleported to an office at the far side of the bank, with a clear view of the counters and customers. The former were vacant, the staff laid faced-down on the floor, along with those they should have been serving, whilst a cloud of shadows hung above them, just a few feet off the floor.

  “Well this looks bloody ominous. . .” Raven grunted, as she threw her fingers into action, and cast to summon her favourite tactical gear from the Epicentre.

  “I feel as though we are somewhat at a disadvantage,” Shana observed. “Not knowing who or what is perpetrating this crime.”

  “You just said it, babes,” Raven chuckled, as she slipped on a pair of knuckle dusters and activated the enchantments, which sent a gleam of flames rippling across their surface. “It's a crime, so it's a 'who' not a 'what. . . And 'whos' can be punched in the face. . .” She reached for the door, and found Shana's hand resting on hers, warning her away from stepping straight into the fray.

  Raven glared at her, and Shana pointed to the bottom of the door. Darkness was lapping at the gap between the frail wood of the door and the floor.

  “Y'think it's booby trapped?” Raven asked.

  Shana shrugged. “I do not know of whether it is boobied, but I would say it is most certainly a trap.”

  Raven rolled her eyes. “Really need to teach you some more slang, darlin'.” She threw both hands ahead of her, and walked towards the wall adjacent to the door. As she did so, she set her intent. Her index fingers danced through the air before their tips met, circled one another, and thumbs tapped twice as she thought of words her tongue could not twist around. Her face hit the wall and her atoms dispersed through those of the plasterboard and glass. They slipped effortlessly through the molecules of the solid wall, and reassembled on the other side as if there had been nothing standing in her way.

  Shana followed, and as she too became solid again, glanced down to the foot of the door, to discover a series of dark, shadowy spikes that would have most likely burst from the ground and torn through them if they had they opened it.

  “Don't you dare say 'told you so',” Raven grumbled.

  “I would never say such a thing,” Shana replied, as she surveyed the scene ahead.

  The cloud of darkness that they had observed from within the office was a cloud in name only. Being closer now, they could see a myriad sharp spikes at its base, each of which was aimed at the employees and customers lying flat on the ground.

  “Need to disperse that cloud. . .” Raven muttered, as she tried to think of a casting that would do the job.

  “Not disperse. . . It might be that whoever is behind this has considered that a possibility. We need to shield the people, let them get out.”

  Shana looked around the room. Sunlight was shining in through the windows, rays cascading down and resting on the dull blue carpeting. She reached out her hand and cast to make use of the sunlight, pulling it from the ground and compacting it, making it brighter and harder, creating a solid sheet of light directly from the sun itself.

  “There's a chance they're booby trapped too. . .” Raven said, as she watched Shana cast. “If you put anything between the shadows and the people, might send all those spikes raining down.”

  “That is where light has the advantage over darkness. . .” Shana said, allowing a smile to come to her lips. “It moves at a hundred and eighty six miles a second.”

  “That's a smart-arse response. . .” Raven mumbled under her breath, as the solid light whipped across the room and slipped between the cloud of spiky shadows and the innocent people below.

  The shards of darkness shot out of the black mass, and as they impacted with the solid barrier of light. The mundanes that lay flat against the ground beneath the plane of light, jumped at the sound above them, each fearing that they were about to be skewered.

  But none of them were. The shield of light held fast.

  One by one they realised that they were safe from the spikes, and Raven leaned down to try and catch their eyes.

  “Hello? Hi! You're safe now. . . Time to get up and bugger off before we start setting fire to the bad guy.”

  “Setting. . . fire?!” one of the customers blurted, as he crawled out from under the gleaming barrier.

  “Figure of speech,” Shana reassured him.

  Raven did not mean it as a figure of speech, and decided to prove it as such by slamming her knuckle dusters together. The air between the enchanted weapons exploded into flames, and she cackled to herself.

  The eyes of the mundane hostages went wide, and they backed away from their rescuers hesitantly, then turned towards the exit.

  Shana glared at Raven momentarily, until she realised―”Did you check the door for boobies traps?”

  Raven parted her lips to respond, but it was too late. Fire burst forth from the door handle and tore through the air. The flames bounced from one escapee to the next, until each of them was ablaze. Raven tried to put the flames out with conjured water, whilst Shana tried to starve the blaze of oxygen―but it was too late.

  Seventeen seared skeletons clattered to the floor, each of them having instantly been char-grilled by the fiery trap set on the door.

  Raven was no longer smiling. Her gaze shifted to the back of the bank. She was going to make the bastards who killed those people pay, and she was going to relish every bloody second of their suffering.

  6

  Completely immolated

  Isaiah Faith sat in his office, his eyes awash with a milky white cloud. The vision of his present locale had been replaced by Shana's point of view, as she watched the cloud of shadows that was once hanging over the mundanes begin to dissipate.

  *

  She could feel Faith's grimace in the back of her mind. It was as if the casting that brought the cloud forth had been made with the intent that it should self-destruct if it was no longer needed. And without hostages to threaten, it was certainly no longer needed.

  Shana stepped around it as the darkness evaporated, and made her way towards the back of the bank. There was a door in their way, a code lock keeping them from passing through it. She attempted to dissipate through the door, and discovered that she could not pass. Her atoms reassembled, and she glared at the door. It had been warded. Bank managers, or maybe the suits back at head office, must have some knowledge of the magickal world, and protected it against incursions, should someone of a magickal disposition wish to bend the law and break in.

  “Warded?” Raven asked, as she navigated around what was left of the shadows.

  Shana nodded.

  “Bastards always think they're so bloody smart with their wards. . . etching sigils into wood and what have you. . .” She cast towards the code lock, and kicked at the door. The lock burst apart into its individual components, that clinked and clanked as they bounced across the floor and desks on the other side of the wall. “Never smart enough to etch anything on the bloody mundy locks though,” she chuckled to herself, and led the way through to the back of the bank.

  “Why do I feel like you have done this before. . .” Shana found herself asking.

  “Not in a bad way,” Raven scoffed. “Only for fun, never for profit.”

  Fire arced across the room towards them, and Raven threw up a fist as it roared through the air. It hit the knuckle duster and the flames were sucked into the metal with a bellowing slurping sound, that reverberated around them and sent a wash of heat across her skin.

  “That all you got?” she grunted as she tore across the room towards the balaclava-wearing figure that had attempted to attacked them.

  Another blast of fire came for her and she rolled under it, found purchase for her right foot and launched herself into the air, fist-first. The knuckle duster caught the assailant under the chin, and fire erupted across his face as he flew up into the air.

  By the time he landed on the floor, his skeleton was as charred as the hostages that had attempted to escape the bank.

  “Huh,” Raven
said, as she inspected the corpse. “Anyone with magick in their blood should have taken the hit and be a little burned. . . not completely immolated.”

  “Are you sure absorbing the fire he threw did not over-charge your punching metal?” Shana inquired, as she looked around for signs of any further bank robbers.

  “Knuckle dusters, and no. I bloody know how they work.”

  “Well what you are implying is not possible. . . For them to burn up like that would mean that they were mundane, and the thief most certainly used magick, we saw it for ourselves. . . They might not have been an adept, but they were certainly no mundane. . .”

  “Get that body back here,” Faith grunted in both their peripheries. “If mundanes have somehow managed to learn magick, this could be the worst catastrophe we've ever bloody faced.”

  “Really?” Raven grunted sarcastically. “Would you say a mundane magickian is worse than that time an elder god tried to cross through, and you had to nuke the thing a bunch of bloody times?”

  “Or,” Shana added, “worse than the man you replaced stealing all the magick from the Circle and trying to take over the world?”

  “Yes it's bloody worse. Get back here.”

  *

  Faith's eyes returned to their natural hue, and he stormed towards his door, wrenching the damn thing open. “Tali! Call everyone in. Need our top people on this.”

  “Yes sir!” she said, with no hint of the belligerent tone she had previously adopted.

  “And get me a face to face with Three. As always, that bastard knows more than he's telling . . .”

  “They not he. . .” she muttered, in an attempt to correct the pronoun.

  “Tell them I'm coming over, and they better have answers!”

  7

  A familiar feeling

  Mark Shapiro was dreaming once again. But this time, unlike the twenty two times previous that the whispers had come to him, he knew he was not alone.

  Loneliness was a familiar feeling to Mark. He knew it better than he knew any other feeling. It was not that he was a solitary creature―it anything, being solitary had been thrust upon him. A divide had come between him and his friends, he had not dated for close to three years, not for lack of trying. It felt as though the Fates were making some kind of point, underlining that he had to live a life by himself, to work on himself for the time being, until he was ready to reintegrate with society as a whole. To be, he hoped, a better person when the time came.

  It seemed as though the time might have finally come, for within the dreamscape, Mark could feel the presence of others, so many others. He could not see them, not yet, but there was an electricity in the air around him that he translated as an implication, that sometime soon this place, the Dream Realm, would be a hub for a myriad like-minded people, all of whom were searching for the same kind of connectivity that had been so sorely lacking from his recent past.

  He did not know how it was that he had come to that conclusion. It felt as though it was an inevitability, knowledge that had been gifted to him along with all the other truths and lessons that had come from the whispers.

  It was a fact, cold and hard. That with time, not only would be no longer be alone. But he―and they as a collective―would be more powerful than any of them had ever imagined.

  8

  We have no masters

  Isaiah Faith stomped through the door from the Epicentre, and walked down a hallway constructed of stone, older than the most ancient relics of mundane man. His shadows arced across the corridor, from the left to the right, then the right to the left, cast by everlit candles in golden candlesticks that had been fixed to the walls long ago.

  The glimmers from the flames reflected off the damp brickwork, as gleaming streams of water trickled from the gaps between the stones, and pooled on the ground underfoot.

  After a few minutes of his footsteps echoing through the archaic hallway, he came to a dark chamber at the far end. Three men stood at the centre of the room in a triangle, facing inwards. Their arms up over one another, skin melded together, with a pit of fire beneath them.

  Despite them having no eyes, and lids that were barely formed, forever fused shut, each of the three turned towards Faith as he entered. And each raised an eyebrow as if to signify that his presence in their domain was not entirely welcome.

  “What the bloody hell do you think you're doing, sending my operatives into the field without recon or a proper bloody briefing?!”

  “It is nice to see you too, Isaiah Faith,” the three of them said in unison, each with wry intent behind the words. “We are well, thank you for asking.”

  “Do I look like I'm in the mood for sarcasm?”

  Three's heads turned from Faith, and appeared to glance to one another sardonically, before they turned back to face him.

  “'Look' is a figure of speech. . . Gods, were you this much of a pain in the arse for Comstock?”

  “Comstock never came to see us. He trusted that we acted in the best interests of the Natural World.”

  “Well I'm not bloody Comstock!” he grunted. “I expect you to tell me everything I need to know when there's a magickal event, and to send agents to the field only when I deem it suitable for them to be sent.”

  “Your preferences for our arrangement have been noted.”

  “So what the bloody hell is going on? Why are my people telling me they think mundanes are suddenly able to use magick?”

  “Your preferences have been noted, but we have no desire to acquiesce to them.”

  “No desire?! No bloody desire?! I am in charge of the bloody Circle, and you work for me!”

  Three scoffs echoed around the chamber, not in unison, but in sequence, one after the other.

  “You work for me, dammit!”

  “That is not the case, Isaiah Faith.” said one of Three's heads.

  “We have volunteered to assist the Circle for the good of the Natural World.” said the second head.

  “But we have no masters, and will continue to advise and assist as we see fit.” said the third.

  Faith glared at each of Three's faces in turn, and growled under his breath. “You want the Natural World to be safe, and so do I. We're on the same bastard team, whether you work for me or are bloody volunteers. What do you gain by keeping information for your own damn self when they fate of the world is at stake?”

  “We maintain order,” Three said, turning its heads back to the centre. “If we were to tell you all that we know, then what we have seen will not come to pass in the manner that it must. There will be a point where all becomes clear, but it is not ours to bring that point closer than it set. The Fates will not allow such change to the natural order, and the Fates, to use your parlance, can be a real bitch sometimes. . .”

  A rumbled sigh left Faith's lips. “At least tell me what we're dealing with, so I can get my people prepared.”

  “That is not for you to know yet. But we can say that you will need your best people by your side. And you will need to make alliances that will not sit well with your instincts. However, your instincts are incorrect. And they will continue to be, even after the ultimate sacrifice is made.”

  “What sacrifice? Are my people at risk?!”

  “That is all we can say at this time, Isaiah Faith. Gods be with you.”

  Three's voice lowered to a whisper, as they began to mutter incantations between their triumvirate of lips. Their vocal chords vibrated together as they cast, and before Faith could utter any objection, light coalesced across his field of vision. But it wasn't the room getting brighter, it was him. His skin became luminescent, a glow pouring out of his eyes, consuming them as he was ripped from the darkness of Three's cavern.

  9

  Willing to learn

  JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

  In a house just off a quiet street in the suburb of Parkhurst, hidden behind a thick wooden door reinforced with steel, and a tall cream wall, the Groenewald family were fast asleep. Each of them was unawar
e that their alarms were soon to go off and rip them from their blissful slumber. But even so, time was one thing they most certainly had plenty of.

  Within their dreams, time was stretched and contorted, seconds strung out to last hours, as there was much they needed to learn. Were they to be taught it in the Natural World, it might take decades, if not centuries. For the Groenewald family was not of a magickal disposition, and thus they were not able to absorb what they were being taught as quickly and efficiently as a person with magick in their blood.

  Unlike dreams that had come to any of the Groenewalds before, they were well aware that they were asleep. And they also knew that the rest of their family were asleep, for the four members of the family were dreaming the same dream.

  Before the dreams came to them, The Groenewald family had never been close, not truly. They had been a family in name and genetics only, not having felt close for a long time.

  The relationship between Chris and Mary was strong for the five years they had been together before deciding it was time to have children, but that decision would change their partnership at a fundamental level. Mary suffered from postpartum depression after the birth of both her children, and Chris had never been able to give her the comfort she required.

  The arrival of their first child, Yolanda, had brought their marriage to a standstill, sapped the love from their relationship, and estranged them to some degree. The decision to have a second child two years later, who they would call Leon, was an attempt to fix what was broken. But alas, it proved itself to only make matters worse.

  And yet, some six years since Leon's birth, Mary and Chris could not bring themselves to part. Their partnership might not be what it once was, but they had promised that they would not let that weaken their resolve. They had promised to stay together for no other reason than to insure their children had a steady and stable upbringing, and once their offspring had fled the coop, they would reassess, and work out whether it was possible to repair what they had.