Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (25 page)

“Never heard a word about him.”

“Because until recently, he was buried, gone, forgotten, except perhaps as some strange echo in our genes.”

“What’s our Gatewood lad up to?”

“He took a shower, I gave him some clean clothes—some old things of yours, actually, here for years, I should have burned them—and he was having a nap on a chair outside Mercury’s room, standing watch.”

“Good. Haven’t got any liquor to put in this coffee, have you?”

“I already put cognac in it, because you are a disgusting, hopeless drunk.”

“Here! I’ll have you know I was weeks at a time without a drink at the Blue Sheikh’s place.”

“The Blue Sheikh! How is he?”

“Dead, I’m afraid. Much as anyone can kill him.”

“Is he. Then he is set free. I once saw their monastery, but the brothers would not let me in. Did they take you to the top of the mountain?”

“Not likely. I was never initiated that far. Not sure what they do there . . .”

“I have heard that they go to mountaintops, the Magi, and they read the stars, and they offer themselves to the powers of nature there. They contemplate nature as another monk would contemplate his own soul.”

“The Sheikh was an impressive bugger. Sees everything intertwined, he does. But he says we only see one or the other of the twinings, like, till we grow past that. Maybe it’s easier to see them from a mountaintop.” He took out a cigarette, and she calmly plucked it from between his fingers, crumbled it up, and piled the loose tobacco on the table. He sighed. No use arguing; it was her place.

She smiled teasingly. “And did you meet ‘Ahura Mazda’?”

“Blue Sheikh says we meet him every day. Says the Supreme-o Bigshot, Ahura Mazda, made the ‘twins’ who create reality and unreality. Only later do they become ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Reality is, like,
objective meaning.
Unreality is subjectivity. Seeing things, you know, in our identified, ‘stuck’ kind of way . . . You need the subjectivity though or you can’t function as a mortal, but we mistake it for reality, yeah?”

She nodded. “This all has some . . . some particular
piquancy
for you now, yes?”

“Just wondering, at times, if I only think the end of the world should be stopped because . . . because I’m subjective. Objectively, some kind of cleansing might be part of the big plan.”

He expected her to demur, but she only tilted her head to one side thoughtfully and murmured, “I do know what you mean.” She winced, adjusting her position. “I am at least sometimes weary of this life. I am only forty-five, but I am beginning to get arthritis. Already I’m looking forward to being freed from this body, to the freedom of the astral body . . .”

He leaned toward her and put a hand on her knee. “I rather like that body of yours, creaky as it might be . . .”

“Ah no,
pardonne-moi, monsieur!
Just keep your hands to yourself! My heart will not be vulnerable to Mr. John Constantine again,
mais non!”

“Right. This is good coffee—good cognac. I’ll tell you what disturbs me about all this . . . this god of war business I’m encountering. Well, it’s hard to say what disturbs me most. Levels on levels of disturbing implications, there are, in this bloody business. But . . .”

“Nergal?”

“There he is, bold as brass.”

“He is defeated, gone—no?”

“Are they ever really? They’re immortals. They just change shape and go to ground for a while. He may be behind this—he could be a link to his old pop, N’Hept here. Some kind of family relationship, it seems.”

“If you’re right, and these cultists are starting a world war, then I must help you, John. I cannot continue my researches in an incinerated Paris.” She brushed hair from her eyes and looked at him gravely. “All the people who pay my bills will be dead.”

Constantine laughed. “Shall we do a summoning then, see what we can find out?”

She pretended to pout. “That would seem to be why you have come here, to use me for libraries and summonings.”

“What! All I do is dream about coming here to see you, but every day it gets longer since I last saw you, so I figure it’s a little less likely you’ll want to, you know, open your doors to me, so to speak. So I lose me nerve, don’t I?”

“Oh yes? Or perhaps the women you have been with would not have understood, eh?”

“Women? What women?”

“Oh, John!” She gasped in apparent outrage. “You are the worst actor in the world when you are not trying to con someone from their money! You rogue! You bastard! Oh!”

Her mouth shouting
oh!
was a very kissable circle, and he could not resist. She let him kiss her, only pretending a little to fight him off. Then she melted against him. He ran his hands down her shoulders and arms with experienced artfulness, snagging the straps of her dress and dragging the cloth down, exposing her breasts. She let him kiss his way down her jawline to her throat, her shoulders, her breasts, her brown nipples—one of them had a single curly hair growing out of it, and that turned him on—she moaned—

And then she pushed him away, panting as she did it. “You cannot make love until after the summoning! You will need the energy of that chakra for the rite!”

“I’ve got plenty of chakra energy, more than enough to go ’round, I’ll show you—just put your hand right here—”

“No! Just drink your cognac and do your reading—and think about the Queen Mother in a bikini!”

“Brilliant, now you’ve gone and turned my chakras inside out.”

~

Mercury woke in a modest curtained room, a bit dusty, with much dark velvet in folds hanging on the walls around the old, carven four-poster bed.

She stretched on the down-filled mattress, seeing she was wearing only someone’s borrowed purple silk nightgown. The bed and the gown must belong to the dark woman she’d seen with John earlier. Mercury had caught just a glimpse of them as they’d brought her here. She’d only been semiconscious, but she had a vague, comforting memory of the woman chanting words over her, sending pulses of cleansing energy from her fingers, clinking little bells, driving the Akishra off.

Mercury sat up, looking around. There were figures of Pan and naiads and grape clusters carved into the headboard; the posts were shaped like twisted tree trunks. A candle burned on a low table nearby, giving off a soothing lavender scent.

She felt comfortable for the first time in days, though weak and a bit hungry. The astral worm was gone, and it was an enormous relief. It would take time before she would stop seeing its inhuman face licking at her . . .

“John!” she called. “Anyone?”

No reply. Yet she knew he was somewhere nearby. He and the sorceress were off doing something important, she was sure.

Still, it’d be a comfort to talk to him. So Mercury closed her eyes, lay back, relaxed, extended her sensations to her psychic field, and reached out with her mind, to probe the texture of reality; to try to find John . . .

And she recoiled. She saw the crookedly aligned eyes, staring at her from the shadows of her mind.

The thing in the jar.

It was not here—and yet it was here.

It was still watching her. And if she directed her mind out into the world, if she put out her feelers, it would cut them off. Like a child slashing the antenna of a snail with a razor, it would slice off her psychic feelings. It promised her that.

I have you. I am connected to you. I will watch you. I will wait. They can protect you only when you keep to yourself. Reach out, reach out . . .

It said something else in another language she didn’t understand—it sounded like German . . .

She wasn’t sure what it was saying now. Mercury only knew that she never wanted to see or hear that thing again, not in her mind and not in person.

She withdrew her psychic senses and curled up in bed, like a fetus, whimpering.

13

NINE EYES, CIRCLING

Paris, France

“A
re you sure about this, Tchalai?”

“What do you mean, John?”

“It’s only . . .” How could he explain?

They were on the roof of her building; she was its landlord as well as occupying the best apartment. Constantine and Tchalai stood in the center of an old octagonal greenhouse she used for her invocations. She’d replaced the original tinted glass on the roof with panes of transparent crystal, which made the stars seem to project downward at them on a clear night. It was such a night tonight, but for a few clouds tinged to the color of brass by the smog-yellowed moon. The interior of the greenhouse was tropically warm, and the plants were tropical, too: there were dwarf palms wound about with purple orchids, huge waxy orange bird-of-paradise plants looming over them, and enormous light green fiddlehead ferns, all of them arranged like some exotic shaman’s grove around the magic circle on the floor. Tchalai had created the big magic circle with its pentagram and encompassing names of power from ash-tree withes pressed into the flooring, of consecrated copper and psychically infused crystal; she had fixed her intent in her mind, chanting the names of power, as she’d prepared it, moving in the right direction around the circle; she had made the candles herself, one burning at each point of the pentagram, out of ingredients Constantine preferred not to know about.

The circle was a beautiful magical artifact, using methodology set out by Eliphas Levi, yet they both knew Constantine scarcely needed it. He had the gift of seeing magical symbols in his mind so sharply that it was as if he had spent days drawing them out in dragon’s blood on the skin of a lamb. Constantine’s connection with the Hidden World was implicit, intrinsic to him; an expression, he suspected, of his genetics and perhaps something built up in his soul over the course of many past lives.

They had taken their places on either side of the magic circle, about to step into it and begin, and then Constantine asked if she were sure.

“It’s only, Tchalai, that it’ll tie you into this thing, I’m afraid. Just now the bastards who tried to kill me might figure me for dead, drowned in the Med. That’s what I hope. But this may expose me to them again. It’s like . . . if the Chinese set off a nuclear bomb for a test, NATO
knows
—its tech types pick up the radiation of it, yeah? These guys are going to pick up the ‘radiation’ of this summoning. They may trace it to me, and those with me. Dangerous for you, ‘Star-eyes,’ innit? I reckon I can . . .”

She put her hands on her hips, pretending pique. “And what? You are saying you don’t need me for this?”

“I need all the help I can bloody get, love. But I can
manage
this, anyway—and I just . . .”

He hesitated, knowing he had no time to tell her his reasons; he’d have to recount a series of tragedies. He thought about old bandmate Gary Lester, killed in New York in a ritual; he thought about his girlfriend Emma, killed by the Invunche; about the love of his life, Kit Ryan, driven away by his adventuring; about Agent Frank Turro, a man he’d liked, killed on Constantine’s watch; about his niece Gemma, seduced into magic and caught up in an agenda that she didn’t understand . . . perhaps destroyed herself by now, for all he knew.

He shook his head. “I just think you’d be wiser not to get involved in any of my doings, any more than you have to. You’ve done enough. I shouldn’t have involved you as much as I have already.”

“You told me you weren’t sure you’re doing the right thing in fighting this, John,” she said. Her dark eyes glittered in the candlelight. She had clustered her fingers with special rings, and her jewelry flashed as she gestured. “But you were—you are. I am on your side, so I help you.
We have to choose sides.”

“Do we? I’m not so sure that’s wise. One side or the other loses. If you don’t choose sides, you don’t lose.”

She shrugged out of her gown and stood naked on the other side of the magic circle, her skin golden in the candlelight. Like many sorceresses, she did her best magic nude. Though Constantine had taken off his shoes and socks, he wore his clothes, even his trench coat, which had soaked up a good deal of magical pungency over the years.

“I think it’s almost the opposite, John,” Tchalai said, kicking her dress aside. “Those who don’t choose sides are simply caught in the chaos of the struggle. Look at what is happening in Iraq. There is no escape from the war, whatever form it takes. And you know, I think there is a right side. There is, for us. I think you know that.”

He
tended
that way—certainly the Blue Sheikh had encouraged that idea, that Constantine ultimately belonged to the forces of Light—but he resented it, and he always had. He didn’t like being assigned a rank in an army he’d never signed on for. He didn’t like being drafted. At heart, perhaps, he was an instinctive Nietzschean. He wanted to find his own way in the universe. But still he found himself taking sides. And he knew there was no way around the cosmic laws. If you weren’t part of one thing, you were part of another. Swim out of a current in the ocean and you’ll soon find yourself in another. The thing might be to take part in the whole, while still crystallized into individuality. It was one of the great functional paradoxes. But you had to work your way to that resplendent state.

And he’d rather have a drink down the local, most of the time.

“Just one thing more,” he said. “This entity we’re contacting, it may incinerate us both, if we say the wrong thing. If the bloody great supernatural toff gets in a mood . . .”

She nodded, and gestured at the circle as if to say, Let’s begin. He let out a long slow breath, perceiving that Tchalai had made up her mind, and nodded back to her as he stepped into the circle.

He took up his place at the top point of the pentagram; she stood at its foot. Neither of them chose to use a magic wand, but Tchalai’s jewelry was not picked at random; each ring of a different metal, each metal with a different magical significance, each figured with a different rune. She held her hands out and began to intone, going into her summoning state with a kind of inner dexterity, extending her psychic field out from her spine to her arms, to her hands. It was intensified by the bands of power on her fingers, then sent in widening spirals from the rings to encompass the magic circle. She let her supernatural energies interact with John’s the way the yin flowed with yang, ’round and ’round, each partaking of the other.