Sorcerer's Creed Books 1-3

by N. P. Martin

  Grayson looked away for a moment as if considering his daughter. "She was the reason I didn't leave back then. She needed me. I needed her. It seemed like the wrong time."

  "Jordan killed that guy Farnes on the same night as you--sorry, the spirit--killed those seven people. Maybe there was some destiny at play." I paused, then smiled. "Or maybe it was just a coincidence."

  "My daughter did what had to be done," Grayson said, his confident demeanor faltering slightly. "What I myself could not do at the time."

  "You thought about killing Farnes yourself?"

  "Worse. I ignored him as I chose to throw myself into my work instead."

  I nodded. Said nothing.

  To Grayson, his daughter murdering a man was her awakening as his guardian angel. That's how he put it, what he called Jordan. His guardian angel. He knew he would need someone to help him and keep him safe in his quest, and Jordan would fit the role perfectly. She was young of course, but while Grayson kept them both sheltered for a few years in the wilds of Canada with the money he had saved, he also trained her to be his bodyguard. Every day, Grayson would train his daughter in all manner of disciplines, including armed and unarmed combat, surveillance, how to tail people, how to set people up for abduction and murder, how to con people into doing anything. Grayson didn't do this personally. He only oversaw things. To help him, he paid an ex-CIA operator to train Jordan instead. By the time she was twelve years old, Jordan was a deadly weapon. Her unarmed skills were lethal and based largely around simple, fundamental strikes that combined with her deadly speed and agility. Which meant she could take on opponents much bigger than herself. She could also shoot with any gun you put in her hand, could handle a knife like a seasoned butcher, and had senses so keen you just could not sneak up on her, but she could sure sneak up on you. On top of this physical training, Jordan was also educated to a high degree in the use of technology, psychology, and chemistry. She also spoke five different languages fluently.

  On hearing all this for the first time, I sat there in Grayson's office dumbfounded, and also sickened by what he had put his daughter through at such a young age, and all for his own ends. I could hardly imagine how brutal her regime must have been to get her to the level that Grayson needed her at. And she was still just a fucking child, for Christ's sake! "What is it with you people?" I said, unable to hold my anger. "You think people are just puppets, and that you can pull their strings as you see fit? She was your daughter, Grayson."

  "Yes," he shouted back. "And I ensured she served a higher purpose in life!"

  "Your purpose, you mean?"

  His eyes flared up with magick then, and I found myself wishing I still had my own magick so I could blast the cunt out of his fucking chair. But I didn't, so instead, I had to sit there while Grayson reached out a hand and seemed to clamp an invisible vice around my heart. I dropped my glass to the floor as I clutched at my chest with both hands as if I was having a heart attack. Then as I was about to fall out of my seat, the pain stopped.

  "Don't dare judge me, Creed," Grayson half snarled. "Everything I have ever done has been for the greater good, for the good of humanity. And the same goes for my daughter. She played her part more than you will ever know. Besides, a man like you is in no position to judge anyone."

  A man like me? That hurt my feelings. Sure, I'd made some mistakes, a lot of mistakes, but I would have liked to have thought that the good I did over the years outweighed any bad I may have caused. That was the only thing that kept me going sometimes, in fact, and I wasn't about to question that for Grayson or anybody else. I could have told Grayson to go fuck himself and stop being a hypocrite. That he and men like him were experts at justifying their actions and linking them to some imaginary greater good that was no more than a fantasy in their heads. A fantasy they would go to any lengths to see realized. A fantasy that always had a grab for power and control at its heart. I could have hit him with all that, but what would have been the point? Men like him also never listened or let themselves be swayed by mere moral arguments. They listened only to their own twisted desires and what they saw as being right. So instead, I sat back in my seat and calmly refilled my glass with the expensive whiskey, then said, "Point taken. Please don't do that again."

  Grayson snorted and shook his head at me. "You know I had you all wrong, Creed. I thought you were a man of principle, despite working each day to facilitate the status quo. But now I see that you are really just a man who is very good at taking a lot of shit and then getting back up again. You must have proved very irritating to your foes over the years."

  "You have no idea."

  Narrowing his eyes, Grayson stared at me a moment. "Well, I can tell you this much, Creed. You won't be getting back up against me, should I decide to put you down."

  I shook my head slowly as if weary and accepting of the control he had over me. "Just finish your story," I said. "I promise to be a good boy and listen." I held up my hand. "Scouts honor."

  Grayson shook his head slightly at my sarcasm but nonetheless continued talking while I continued to wait for an opportunity to arise, even though I knew none would. But you had to have hope, right?

  "After nearly four years of training," Grayson said. "Jordan was ready to go on the road with me. So off we went to Europe."

  In Europe, Grayson started his search for the Holy Grail. I say started, but he had already put things in motion while in Canada, cultivating leads and mapping out likely places to search in Europe where he thought he would most likely find the Dark Codex.

  "I didn't even know what I was looking for at that point," Grayson told me. "I had never heard of the Dark Codex until I was several years into the expedition. Up until that point, I was still trying to find proof that the idea of the Holy Grail of knowledge even existed. The second I stumbled across a mention of the Dark Codex in another book, I knew it had to be real. I knew it had to be the thing I was searching for."

  I shook my head at his crazy commitment. "So you go to all that trouble initially, turning your daughter into your bodyguard, going on the road for years, before you even knew the book was out there?"

  "Yes."

  "That's some kind of faith."

  "Indeed," Grayson said. "Sometimes I wonder if my very belief brought the Dark Codex into existence."

  "I doubt that," I said. "Considering it had already been a thing for centuries."

  "Yes, but no one had ever laid eyes on it, had they? So no one could be sure it even existed at all."

  "I suppose not."

  "Whatever the case, there is very little doubt that the book would have remained hidden forever if I hadn't of found it."

  A bit of a stretch, but I could see his point. "So how did you find it?"

  Very early on, Grayson's expedition steered him towards the occult underground in Europe. After all, if you want to find a magick book, you go where people might know about that sort of thing. Not that Grayson had been previously aware of any occult underground, or even of the supernatural. Barring his encounter with the evil spirit who killed Grayson's seven guinea pigs, the man had had no previous contact with anything supernatural. But as he and Jordan started their search in Paris, they kept running into things they couldn't readily explain. Magickal occurrences. Strange people with glowing eyes and sharp teeth. Men who looked like wolves. People who could do impossible things. It didn't take long for Grayson to realize that there was a whole other world hidden within the everyday one. A world of the supernatural. And instead of being scared by this, he embraced it, even became excited by it as he knew the answers he sought lay in that realm of the unnatural. That's when Jordan really had to become her father's bodyguard apparently. As Grayson led them further into the occult underground, they inevitably started rubbing shoulders with dangerous beings. Vampires. Werewolves. Witches and sorcerers. Luckily for Grayson, his daughter's skills were up to the task, and she kept him safe against all manner of supernatural creatures that for whatever reason, wanted to kill Grayson
.

  "Driven by my desire to find the book, I pushed hard," said Grayson. "I asked questions and didn't care who that upset."

  "Because you had Jordan to protect you."

  "Yes, but I developed my own defenses eventually as well. As soon as I discovered magick, I had to learn it, if for no other reason than the scientist in me was curious about it."

  "Nothing to do with the power it gave you then," I said, telling myself to slow down on the whiskey lest I become too pissed to function at my best, which admittedly, I was little off from anyway.

  Grayson gave me a tight smile. "Don't be a hypocrite, Creed. You've spent your whole life studying magick. You couldn't live without it."

  He wasn't wrong. "So you taught yourself."

  "Yes. I found I had a knack for it. It came easy."

  As his magickal power grew, and as his daughter became more of an accomplished killer, the two blazed their way through Europe for a further decade, leaving a trail of bodies behind them. The bodies of those who tried to stand in the way of Grayson's crusade. "It's surprising how many never wanted the book found," he said, seeming genuinely baffled by this. "I think I'm proving it can be a force for good, no?"

  Christ, he was serious. Or was he? Maybe he was just enjoying playing the role of revolutionary, and he secretly had other plans. I didn't exactly know. Not that it mattered. He would still have to be stopped. "You can't really believe this will all end well, do you?" I said. "You're going to end the world as we know it, and not in a good way. You'll destroy everything. The people will destroy themselves."

  "Some of them will, but others will rise like phoenixes from the ashes, and those people will rebuild the world again."

  "Rebuild it how?"

  Grayson shook his head. "I don't know. That remains to be seen. It's what makes this all so exciting. I have faith this will work out."

  Fuck, is he really that deluded? I was finding it hard to believe that he was. "So what about you, Gordon, where do you fit into all this? What's your role in the new world order going to be?"

  "My role?" he said as if he had never considered it, which of course he had. Many times, no doubt. "I see myself as purely a facilitator of change. A guiding light, if you will."

  I couldn't keep the smirk from my face as I shook my head. "Forgive me, Gordon, if I remain somewhat skeptical when it comes to your motives and apparent modesty. I simply don't believe you."

  Grayson almost smiled. "And why not?"

  "Because I've come across your type a thousand times over the years, and to put it bluntly, you are all selfish bastards. You only want more power."

  "My, your father did a number on you, didn't he?"

  "Tell me I'm wrong then."

  "You're wrong."

  "I still don't believe you."

  "Well," Grayson said. "Only time will tell."

  "It sure will. It always does."

  Grayson smiled as if he found me amusing. "Would you like to hear how I found the Dark Codex?"

  "Sure," I said, genuinely interested, but maintaining my sarcastic tone. "Why not."

  Grayson's first real lead on the book came roughly fifteen years into his search. Say what you like about the guy, you couldn't fault his commitment. Most sane people would have given up trying to find something that clearly didn't want to be found, but not Grayson. He refused to give up, no matter what the cost. Even at the cost of damaging his only daughter beyond repair.

  While in Rome, Grayson met an old priest who claimed to have been privy to the secrets of the Vatican vaults, where apparently all manner of religious and magickal objects were kept, supposedly for safe keeping, but mostly because the items, by their very nature, contradicted the church doctrine, and the Vatican couldn't have that, of course. Grayson met with the old priest, who was in his eighties by then, and the priest told Grayson that he used to maintain the inventory of the vaults, so he knew exactly what was down there at all times. The priest told Grayson that the Dark Codex was once on the inventory, decades ago, but disappeared one day without a trace. Or so it seemed. The priest claimed that the book was actually appropriated by a secret and shadowy group known as the Protectors of Light, of which no one knew anything about except that they were linked in some way to the Knights Templar, and they took it upon themselves to protect certain artifacts that were deemed too dangerous for the world, of which the Dark Codex was one.

  "It took me another few years to finally track down the Protectors of Light," Grayson said. "They were hard to find, let me tell you. Most people who knew about them also feared them. Most were prepared to die before they gave up any information."

  I refilled my whiskey glass one last time, deciding I'd drank enough. "And let me guess, you were happy to oblige those people."

  "We did what we had to do."

  "You mean, Jordan did. I'm assuming she did all the torturing."

  Grayson stared at me for a moment, and I wondered if that was guilt I saw in his eyes, or anger at me. Probably both. "Jordan did her job as she was supposed to. Very well, I might add."

  Sickening, I thought as I shook my head. How mentally scarred Jordan must be after everything her father forced her to do. Then I thought, forced her? Why didn't she just run? That was something I would have to ask her when I next saw her.

  Eventually, Grayson found someone who was willing to talk under duress. The victim gave up a lead, a location in the Himalayas. But by that point, the Protectors of Light had already gotten wind of Grayson's intentions to get the Dark Codex, and the group took preemptive action. When Grayson and his daughter arrived in India, they were attacked shortly after that. Jordan managed to defend them, as did Grayson with his magick, but Jordan almost died in the confrontation as they were attacked by figures who resembled ninjas in dark hoods. Grayson went into hiding after that while he nursed his near dead daughter back to health using medicine and magick.

  "I almost lost her," he said.

  "So why didn't you stop?" I asked.

  Grayson looked away in silence for a moment before carrying on with the rest of the story as if I'd asked him nothing. Bastard, I thought. Even if he'd lost Jordan, he still would have carried on.

  After the attack, Grayson took precautionary measures and used magick to prevent the Protectors of Light from tracking them any further. Grayson and his daughter effectively became invisible to their hunters, which allowed them to carry on with their quest. It took them a further two years to track the Protectors of Light down in the same Himalayan mountain range but in China. Grayson, unwilling to take any chances, hired a small army of local Chinese mercenaries and led them into the mountains along with Jordan. Once there, they located the Protectors of Light's secret hideout on one of the highest mountain peaks, and there, an epic battle ensued. The Protectors of Light were essentially warriors, so they weren't easy to take down. Grayson had more men with him, however, and after nearly two days of fighting on highly dangerous ground, all of the mercenaries Grayson had hired were killed by the end, and only one of the Protectors remained standing. Grayson himself went into the huge cave hideout and killed the last Protector himself with lightning magick.

  "The cave was like a treasure trove of magickal items," Grayson said, his eyes lighting up at the memory. "I'd never seen so much magick in one place."

  "Let me guess," I said. "You took it all."

  Grayson shook his head. "That's where you are wrong. I only took what I was there for. The book."

  "So you finally found it, after nearly twenty years of searching."

  "A lifetime of searching."

  "Was it everything you hoped it would be?"

  A wide smile appeared on Grayson's lined face as he spread his arms out. "We're here, aren't we?"

  Yes, I thought. Unfortunately, we are. "So what now, Gordon?" I asked. "Are you going to kill me?"

  "Kill you?" He shook his head. "Why would I kill you, Creed? I don't see the point. There is nothing you or anyone else can do to stop what's happening anyway."


  We'll see about that, I thought, though I wasn't exactly filled with confidence. "So what then? You keep me prisoner here?"

  Grayson considered a moment. "I'll be releasing the magick formula soon. You are free to leave after that. I have no doubt the people on Earth will need your assistance and expertise. The new world order will take a while to settle."

  I almost laughed. "Take a while to settle?" Then I did laugh. "You crack me up, Gordon, you really do."

  Grayson merely smiled at me like I didn't bother him one bit. And once again, I got the impression he was hiding his true agenda. "I'll see you in the great hall, later, Creed."

  I got up to go, then stopped. "What about the book?"

  Grayson frowned. "What about it?"

  "I'd like to see it."

  A smile spread across Grayson's face. "You really know how to push your luck, don't you?"

  I shrugged. "I just thought, you've told me so much about it, you've demonstrated its power to me. After all that, I'd really like to see the thing for myself. See what all the fuss is about."

  Sitting back in his chair, Grayson considered my request for a long moment, then he said, "Alright, but before I do." He stood up. "If you try anything untoward, I will simply vaporize you in an instant, and it will be as if you never existed. You know I have the power to do that."

  I didn't doubt him. "Understood."

  "Good." Grayson smiled then as if he was looking forward to finally showing someone else the book he gave half his life, and most of his daughter's life, to get. He made a series of complex hand movements in the air, and a few seconds later the Dark Codex materialized into view, and then floated down onto the desk. Grayson stood over it like a proud father. "Isn't it the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?"

  For once I had to completely agree with Grayson as I stood there in near awe staring down at the Dark Codex sitting on the table. It was indeed one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Regarding dimensions, the book was about the size of a MacBook, but obviously much thicker since there were hundreds of pages between the covers. The book cover itself appeared to be made from a hard, white substance that could have been bone, but much whiter, and much smoother. On the cover itself, intricately detailed patterns were carved, along with symbols that I had never seen before, and the whole book seemed to give off a whitish glow that just made you want to stare into it while you got lost pondering over what mysteries the book contained inside. I was lost for words.