Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (19 page)

He saw immediately that the deck was slanting to port, and they’d left the launch on the starboard side. He tried to clamber up the steepening deck to the starboard rail, but it was like going up a slippery roof that was shifting in an earthquake and he was soon sliding across the foredeck, cursing roundly as he went past the mechanical windlass, fetching up at a stanchion beside the port hawsehole.

He fumbled desperately for a hold but pitched over the side, catching the stanchion at the last moment.

Dangling. Cursing. Wondering if the ship was about to flip over onto him and bear him to the bottom of the sea.

Constantine hung there trying to remember an invocation that would be of use. Hoping his cigarettes hadn’t gotten wet and crushed. (After all, he might survive.) Cursing some more . . .

“Constantine! Let go!” came a voice from below him.

“What? Who’s that?”

“Gatewood! We came around below you! Hurry! Just drop!”

The ship lurched once more and the decision was made for Constantine; he lost his hold and dropped less than a yard down into the boat, falling on his feet but pitching onto his back. “Ow! Buggerin’ shit!”

His head had fallen into Spoink’s lap. Dazedly, Constantine looked up at Spoink—at his upside-down face, from this vantage—and past the long hedge of beard, seemed to see another face entirely, a kind of furious ape, almost like the war god he’d seen on Carthaga.

Constantine sat up hastily. “Bony lap you’ve got there, Spoink.” He looked to see that Mercury was safe—she was curled up in the bottom of the launch. “Here, where’s that chopper, Gatewood?”

At the tiller, hurrying the motorized launch away from the sinking yacht, Gatewood replied by pointing. Constantine looked and saw that the gunship was headed away from them. Thinking its job done, he hoped.

“Where’s Morris and that other guy?” Gatewood asked.

“Dead. Couldn’t get them out.” Constantine shifted on the seat, trying to get more comfortable in his wet clothes. He could feel sea salt rasping his underwear against his rump. He fished the half-carton of cigarettes from his pocket and found an uncrushed pack. There were only two packs intact, blessedly protected from the water by their cellophane. He tore the pack open, extracted a cigarette, lit it, then found the whiskey bottle in his other pocket and had a pull at it. He wanted to get the image of Morris’s soul being dragged down to Hell out of his mind. “Ahhh . . . Christ on a fucking exercycle. Needed that.”

Gatewood snorted. “Man, you really think this is the time to get sloshed? We don’t even have any water in this thing. Drinking makes you dehydrated.”

“Wouldn’t dare not drink, now. Be defying God.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a bloody miracle this bottle didn’t get broken when I was chucked around on that yacht.
Supposed
to drink it, obviously—God’s will!” He lifted the bottle to the heavens. “Thank you, Lord.” He took another drink.

“Okay, you still got the bottle—what about the saint’s hand?”

Constantine felt in the inside pocket of his coat. Funny, unpleasantly funny, to feel a hand there—as if returning his touch. “There it is . . . No worries . . .”

He watched the yacht’s forepeak disappear beneath the waves; it went with a melancholy parting gurgle. There wasn’t a great deal of suction from the sinking yacht now; the water here wasn’t deep and the yacht ended up only a few feet under the surface. But there were big holes blown in its side.

“There goes a half million prayer donations, down the loo.” He turned to look Mercury over more closely. She seemed asleep, breathing regularly—or in a protective trance of some kind.

“What now?” Gatewood asked. “I don’t think it’ll be safe to hit the shore around here, man. All this action will attract the Syrian military.”

“Yeah. Maybe Lebanon, up the shore.” Constantine was eyeing Spoink, who seemed uncharacteristically quiet.

“I doubt we’ve got that much fuel.”

“Oh shit,” Constantine said, spotting the gunship coming their way again. “Not enough to shoot the yacht out from under us. Seemed sloppy, yeah? Like to be thorough, these bastards.”

The gunship had flown in a wide circle and was on a flight path that would take it right over the launch.

“And they’re coming right straight for us,” Gatewood said.

“Got a knife on you?” Constantine asked.

“What? You’re going to fight a helicopter with a knife?”

“Just give me the fucking knife.”

“Uhhh—no. Wait, yes, there’s a knife in this little boat kit here, for fixing line or something . . . Here.”

He handed over the small pocketknife. Constantine opened it and without hesitation slashed the heel of his left hand. He stretched it out so the blood would drip into the water. He intoned,
“Undina Acqus Deis! Undina Acqus Deis . . . Ave!”
He sent emanations from his psychic field along his arm, into the spreading splash of blood in the water. It was as if the blood were an amplifier for a signal, transmitting his call, both psychic and verbal, into the depths of the sea.
“Undina Acqus Deis! Undina Acqus Deis . . . Ave!”

The gunship was getting closer . . . A few hundred yards off . . .

“Undina Acqus Deis . . . Ave!”
He felt no answer to his call, and he went into the deeper level of the incantation, using words that were known to only a few; they were in the nearly forgotten language of Atlantis:

“Aq’ye’M’his’zoharzus! Und’neh’immenum! ’Immenum Gi’es’quis!”

He was aware of Gatewood staring at him; of a peculiar low growling from Spoink. Of Mercury shifting restively in the bottom of the boat. But he kept his focus, concentrating every ounce of psychic strength into the call. And his blood dripped, filtering down into the sea, merging with it like a promise, a promise made with his lifeblood . . .

“Undina Acqus Deis! Aq’ye’M’his’zoharzus! Und’neh’immen’m! ’Immenum Gi’es’quis!”

The chopper was almost upon them.

“Undina Acqus Deis! Aq’ye’M’his’zoharzus . . .”

He felt the response, then: a probe from the depths of the sea. It was looking in his mind for his native language, sensing he knew only a few words of its own. Then a voice rang in his head . . . A voice that seemed female . . .

Who calls upon us?

“It’s John Constantine! I’ve dealt with the Elemental Folk before.”

The Green Lord told us . . . We have heard . . . We have seen your soul pass through our realm, on its way to a strange destiny . . . We have known your ancestors . . . Rather irritating, they were . . . And you humans—we are reluctant to do you any favors! You have taken for more than your allotment of fish—and you have poisoned the rest! You have killed large portions of our realm!

“That’s not me—I’m against all that! And anyway, ah . . .”

The machine gun projecting from the side of the chopper was tilting down toward them. Constantine could see a big man grinning down at them as he centered the launch in his sights. Constantine turned to Gatewood and made a motion to zigzag the boat, to make a more difficult target. Gatewood nodded and began to weave the boat across the sea, away from the shore.

“. . . and I’m sorry about my irritating ancestors,” Constantine went on. “Like to make up for it—I’ll owe you one big-time, if you can help us out. That machine is about to kill us; it’s only about fifty feet over the water.”

How will you repay us?

“I don’t know—I’ll think of something, got no choice and I’m as good as my word!”

But your word does not always mean what it seems, so we have heard. You regard an oath as subject to interpretation.

“Won’t be around to repay you if you don’t do something—”

The machine gun opened fire and 16 mm bullets stitched down into the surface of the sea, the last rounds of the burst smacking the launch’s prow, showering Constantine with splinters. But the strafe missed hitting anyone in the boat. The chopper pulled up short and wheeled about, hovering so the gunner could fire again . . .

Very well, John Constantine—but as you say, you will owe us
big-time.
And one day we will collect . . .

Constantine had expected the elemental to manifest as a shape of water, the way Mercury had that day, but the she-giant who rose from the water was more a thing of ooze and slime and seaweed, pieces of old shipwrecks, with seawater taking the place of her blood.

And yet the whole came together with harmonious beauty as she rose gigantically from the water. She was made of seaweed and plankton and algae and wood, but her body was translucent—the sun struck through her, making an emerald light that lit the silhouette of her skeleton: a ten-story-high roughly human skeleton made of parts of sunken ships, its ribs the ribs of shipwrecks, its skull sections of hull; her hair was streaming seaweed and her eyes were whirling jellyfish in seafoam; the bones of her hands were spars. And in all she was a breathtakingly magnificent creature, woman shaped and roaring with surging currents. Some elementals were more substantial than others; it seemed to Constantine that this one amounted to a sea goddess.

He felt an unholy thrill looking up at her. She was here of her own accord, of her own free will, but still he, John Constantine, had prepared the way; he alone had summoned and persuaded her. This statuesque, glorious expression of the sea was an expression, also, of John Constantine’s will.

Moments like this explained why he was a magician, though it seemed to keep him always with one foot in Hell.

Distantly he made out astonished faces in the gunship staring at the giant elemental. And then she reached out and her fingers closed over the man at the machine gun. He screamed as she plucked at him, trying to pick him like a fruit. But his harness held most of his body in place, so that she was only able to pull his upper half free.

Vermin!
Came her voice, reverberating in their minds.
Vermin—infesting my realm!

Burlington’s upper half separated sloppily from his lower half, so that he was gone from the waist up except for his spine, which stuck out from his quivering, blood-spouting lower parts, waggling in the air and dripping spinal fluid.

She flung Burlington’s remains into the sea, and sharks came, bid by the sea elemental, to churningly feast.

The gunship began to back away, but she grabbed it by its landing struts with her coursing, solid-but-liquid right hand, her left reaching under the rotors toward the men in the chopper—but she hesitated, seeing the sky suddenly boiling over them then, clouds thickening to black, spitting lightning, and parting for a hideous face.

The gigantic face of the Carthagan battlefield showed itself in the clouds: a thing apish and reptilian at once. It came to Constantine that the face was familiar from some childhood moment of rage. Constantine had seen that face for a flicker when he’d punched Jamie Ellis, the day Jamie had peed on his new shoes. And again, he thought it stirred even deeper memories. Now it reached out taloned paws from the sky, and from the ground, and from the stars, and from the center of the earth all at once. It reached out to slash at her. She let the chopper go and struck back—a force, Constantine saw, not of water and slime and wood, but of psychic presence compacted into the shape of a hand, the power of one colossal soul striking at another. Lightning and water exploded together, a great cloud of steam hissing up to hide the combatants. There was something in the pillar of steam that was like two vaguely human-shaped storms clashing, storm front to storm front. Great waves were lifted up by their clash, threatening to become a tsunami which would smash over the church on the shore and the settlements nearby.

The chopper was making a break for it, heading for the horizon.

And Constantine could see that the tsunami was building strength.

“Oh holy shit, what have you done?” Gatewood shouted.

Constantine shouted,
“Undina Acqus Deis! Great elemental, your task is done—I render you gratitude! Those who would destroy me flee! Now return to the peace of your domain!”

Your kind have stolen the peace from my domain with your echo machines and your black spills and your poisoned rainfalls. But I go. Only, remember—gratitude is not enough. I will extract a price from you one day . . .

There was a reverberating finality in these last words, and the elemental suddenly collapsed into the sea with a thunderous surge. Steam dispersed in streamers, and he saw that the brutal god was gone from the sky as well. Instead, a great wave was roaring toward the launch and the shore, carrying barnacled spars and fragments of wooden ships on it, like weapons in a fist.

“Hold on!” Gatewood shouted, turning the boat, trying to outrun the wave.

They raced along for a handful of protracted seconds; then the surge caught them, lifting the boat up and nearly capsizing it. The launch’s side was smacked by a fragment of masthead, cracking but not quite stoving in. They spun sickeningly, water cascading over them . . .

But when the wave subsided they were still afloat.

The wave passed on to crash heavily on the beach, but below the church. Merely a dire hint of what a tsunami could be.

“Shit, man,” Gatewood said. “We barely got through that. Hey, Constantine, were you responsible, a couple years ago, for that big tsunami that smashed into Indonesia and India and—”

“No! Christ! Everyone tries to lay it all at my door. You can sod off with that.” Constantine groped for another cigarette. He was feeling nearly exhausted by the psychic effort of the invocation and emotional turmoil from so much happening in so short a time. But at least the gunship was gone . . .

Or was it? There it came again, a chopper on the horizon, bearing down on them. “Oh no,” Constantine muttered. “I can’t call the elementals again . . . They won’t come a second time today.”

Gatewood stared at the oncoming chopper. “Uh-uh. That’s not the same helicopter. That’s one of ours—should be the one I called from the radio room. My cousin Norm’s the pilot . . . I hope he’s not too fucked up. He’s scary when he flies loaded.”

11

WHERE FLOWERS DEGENERATE . . .