Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (6 page)

Hadn’t he seduced that girl who’d come to the monastery selling milk? Hadn’t he paid her to bring him beer? Horrible piss-water that beer had been—made in the huts of some local shepherd, piss might’ve been one of the ingredients, in fact—but it’d gotten him drunk, all right.

He had tried to make up for it by working harder: by sitting longer in meditation, by fasting more, by struggling more with his lower self. But he’d only become weak and confused and his soul had drifted off to London.

“There is, as it happens, very little I could do to help you,” the Blue Sheikh went on calmly. “That is why I am smoking—it does not matter now, as I have to be killed this afternoon.”

Constantine choked on his tobacco smoke—which was not something he did often. “What?”

“Yes: I have what one might call ‘an appointment to be murdered.’ You are the first to be told, as it happens. I will be killed this afternoon by an assassin. The mullahs of this country have sent someone to do it—they believe me a heretic. We are not particularly Muslim here in this retreat, after all—not as the Ayatollah understands the teaching. A Muslim will pull the trigger, but there are those who wish the assassination to look like the Americans did it.” He said “did it” as if it had already happened. As if, to him, it had. “If they arrest me, my followers will be troublesome.”

“But . . . if you know that it’s coming . . . must be some way to stop the bastard.”

“I believe you once saw your own death—so you told me. Do you now concern yourself to avoid it?”

Constantine shrugged. He’d had a vision of one death that might come to him, of drowning. “It was a long time off. Wasn’t like a certainty, either. It was like it
could
come that way—and likely would, but . . .”

“Nothing is certain until it comes to pass,” the Blue Sheikh said, putting his teacup down with exacting attention. “It is a matter of likelihood, merely. I
could
avert this death. But I choose not to. I have outlived many wives, many children. I have only one son alive—he is two hundred years old himself, and busy in Nepal. I will see him in the Hidden World. I will see them all there. I am ready for another stage now.”

“Look here, O Sheikh, you can’t check out now—this world’s a mess. Needs your help, it does.”

“There are others who will help. And there are ways we can help from the Hidden World. In truth, my time has come . . .” The Blue Sheikh looked up at a naked lightbulb overhead, as if somehow it were showing him something only he could see. After a moment he said, “I can feel the assassin approaching. I feel him—and now I
see
him. He is driving a large American vehicle up the mountain pass. He stole this vehicle from an American intelligence agent, after murdering the man. He knows that at this hour I walk in the garden of stone outside the monastery. He is getting out of the vehicle now . . . he conceals himself behind a boulder. He loads his rifle . . . I have asked the guards of our retreat to stay away from the garden today. No one sees him. He waits for me . . . he waits to liberate me . . . I must go to him . . .”

Constantine shook his head. The Blue Sheikh didn’t show his true nature to people most of the time. But Constantine had seen it once—and he was sure the world needed the Blue Sheikh. “Bloody hell,” he murmured.

Standing up from sitting cross-legged on the floor is difficult to do with grace, but the Blue Sheikh did it. He gazed down at Constantine—and his eyes grew to fill Constantine’s vision . . .

Constantine looked away.

“I cannot help you with what you must do, John Constantine,” the Blue Sheikh said, his voice softly hoarse, “and I must go. You will take the road back down the mountain, toward Rasht. There is someone for you to meet on the shores of the Caspian. I cannot see who. I see only that you must go to the Caspian Sea.” He broke off, as if listening. After a moment he added, “Perhaps there is something I can do for you—I can give you a warning. It is whispered to me that when you see a man who cuts the throat of a bird, watch for your enemy—he is within reach. And remember, John Constantine: reflection, words, deeds.”

Constantine nodded. Feeling he wanted to say a great deal and for once unable to speak.

“And John . . . say nothing to the others here about where I go now.”

The Blue Sheikh went to the doorway, walking with simple deliberation. He stopped for a moment, turned back with a mischievous smile on his face. “Oh, by the way, I am glad you didn’t tell me who gave you the cigarettes. I believe the expression is, ‘No one likes a fucking snitch,’ eh?” He tugged meditatively at his beard. “And as for that girl delivering the milk, don’t feel bad—she had a good time. I almost took her to bed once myself. But she was too young for me.” He winked, and then he slipped through the curtained doorway and was gone.

The old servant returned, dropping Constantine’s clothes, laundered and folded, on the floor beside him. “Now,” Bahktiar said, snatching the hookah hose from Constantine’s mouth, “he tell you, you are here enough. You can make dressing in those, and you get out. You have brought bad things here. You go.”

Constantine stood up, feeling awkward as he shrugged out of the robe, and began to pull on his clothes: boxers, white shirt, black tie, black trousers, black shoes, trench coat. It had been a while since his trench coat had been so clean. “You hear where your master’s going, Bakky?”

“My name is not Bakky!”

Reaching for patience, Constantine buttoned up his shirt, and repeated, “Did you hear him say where he was
going?”

“No. He does not tell me where he goes.”

So it’s true. The old bastard doesn’t know his master is slated to be shot dead in a few minutes.

He had been asked to say nothing about the assassination. But he couldn’t just stand by. He could interfere with the assassination himself. Could be the Blue Sheikh might change his mind, given the chance . . .

Constantine danced into his socks and shoes, elbowed Bahktiar out of the way and headed for the door.

“You leave this place! Do not come back!” Bahktiar called after him.

“You can kiss my arse,” Constantine growled at him, pausing in the doorway. “You’re just a bloody hanger-on here, Bakky. Hanging around for fifty bloody years. Never learning a fucking thing.”

Bahktiar looked crushed—Constantine had struck a nerve. And he regretted it. Reflection, words, deeds. He’d already cocked up one of the three.

“Oh Christ, forget it, Bakky.” And he set off to find the Blue Sheikh and the road to Rasht.

~

The monastery of the Blue Sheikh was almost indistinguishable from the mountainside. It was an ancient warren of tunnels and ventilation shafts cut into a cliff of Mount Damāvand, overlooking a misty valley laced with attenuated waterfalls. Constantine hurried out the wood-and-brass front gate and stopped in the cool gray dawn, looking around for the monastery’s master. He picked out the familiar blue robe almost immediately against the dull backdrop of stone fifty yards down the hill, the sheikh strolling along the graveled path into the “stone garden.” Constantine saw no cars, though the sheikh had predicted one, and no gunmen.

More like something you’d see in Japan than Iran, to Constantine’s eye, the stone garden was made of rubble from hundreds of years of tunneling, set up along a gravel trail meandering down the terraced slope. Some of the stone sculptures, of stone chips roughly mortared together, were shaped like man-sized poplar trees in full leaf; some were fashioned like flames; another resembled a frozen fountain of water; and one was a pillar of smoke with a woman’s face. The Blue Sheikh was said to have made them himself, around two hundred years before. The sculptures were artfully spaced between shapeless boulders of gray stone streaked with cinnabar. There were almost no plants in the garden; the Blue Sheikh strolled to the single tree, a Persian hornbeam on a craggy terrace halfway down the garden path. He stopped there, waiting in dignified expectancy, at the base of the gnarled, nearly leafless tree . . .

“Xodavand!”
Constantine called out. He didn’t know the man’s real name and he’d have felt stupid shouting
Blue Sheikh!

There was no response from the magus—or none spoken aloud. But as the monastery’s spiritual master stood there, calmly awaiting death under the hornbeam tree, Constantine seemed to see him in some greater context. He understood the significance of the blue robe and turban: it was the exact color of the “blue current,” the discharge of power glimpsed when a great adept transfers energy from himself to someone he is healing. Constantine had once seen the Blue Sheikh emanate a pulse of this blue light when laying hands on an ailing monk. The man had been near death; the next day he was on his feet, sweeping out his cell and singing.

Now the garden itself seemed to have a fuller meaning to Constantine. Its images were of fluid, changeable objects—flame, water, smoke, women, growing trees—but captured in stone, the symbol of the cessation of movement, of the static. The garden declared that what seems firm is fluid, is part of an energetic change, and what is fluid is also, in some way, forever; the transitory is preserved at the place where a single consciously sensed instant connects with eternity.

And the only lively color in that garden of the changing and the unchanging was the robe of a conscious man: the blue of the energy of life itself.

Constantine stared, then shook himself out of his reverie and started down the path, into the stone garden. “Sheikh! You can’t—”

Inevitable as the cymbal clash in a symphonic composition, the gunshot rang out—and the Blue Sheikh staggered back against the tree. He slumped down, knees drawn up, gazing across the valley, at the sun rising between the hills.

Constantine found himself running down the path—stumbling in his haste across the uneven ground, and it was a stumble, perhaps, that saved his life. A bullet struck chips from a low boulder beside him and he looked up to see a man with a smoking rifle in his hands, poised behind another boulder, near the road. Constantine could just make out a red-streaked black beard and deep-set eyes. Someone shouted at the man, he turned to reply, and Constantine, heart hammering, took the opportunity to jump behind a sculpture of a rising flame. A car horn honked and the gunman drew back, gone from sight. A dusty blue Ford SUV roared out from behind a screen of boulders and went bumping down the dirt road, into the valley.

Constantine ran to the sheikh and knelt beside him. His eyes were glazed; his chest, red with welling blood, barely moved. A breath. A breath. And . . . a final breath. And spoken with that were a few words in some language Constantine didn’t understand. It wasn’t Farsi or Arabic. An Egyptian dialect perhaps—maybe Coptic. But what the words meant, Constantine didn’t know.

And then the Blue Sheikh was dead. Constantine looked around, thinking to see his spirit, perhaps to have a chin-wag with the sheikh’s ghost. But he saw nothing but the rustling of dead leaves, the last leaves from the previous year, tugged from the branches of the tree to spiral away into the garden.

Constantine sat beside the body for some minutes, trying to feel the acceptance, the rightness of this death that the sheikh had evinced. He was trying for “good reflection” on what had happened. But all he felt was the bitterness that always came in contemplating a pointless death.

He watched the mist curl and dissipate in the valley below them.

After a while he heard footsteps, clattering gravel. He was aware of Bahktiar standing nearby with some other men, talking in Farsi.

“Did you tell him, the Abi Sheikh, he must come here to the garden?” Bahktiar said.

It took Constantine several moments to realize this was a question directed at him. “You wot? No I didn’t bloody tell him to come here, you daft idjit. Who tells the Blue Sheikh where to go? Didn’t you see that car?”

“We come out, a car drove away . . .”

So that was why the gunman had left before dealing with Constantine: he’d seen the others approaching. “Well they didn’t need any help from me. The sheikh saw it coming . . .” He realized his voice was breaking. He shook his head.

Stupid,
he told himself.
You hardly knew the guy. He gave you maybe a total of thirty hours of direct instruction. Rest of the time you were in the back of the class, trying to figure out what they were talking about.

But the Blue Sheikh had let him come into this monastery. Him, a guy prone to going on drunks and chasing women; the sheikh had taken a chance on a man who had Lucifer himself perpetually angry with him. Constantine was not exactly a lucky talisman.

He took a risk having me here. He took a chance on me. He tolerated my vanity, my bad attitude . . .

Could it be that the sheikh’s death was somehow Constantine’s fault? Lucifer might well have decided to stop Constantine from learning any more at the monastery. He might’ve whispered a suggestion into some human’s ear:

Kill the Blue Sheikh . . .

The limp-brained human getting the suggestion would make up his own reasons for the murder. The Devil wouldn’t bother to tell him it was to keep Constantine from learning too much.

But there was no way of telling if Lucifer was involved. People were capable of generating their own evil without the Devil’s help. Constantine was sure only of his own sense of loss. He’d felt a kind of gut-level acceptance from the sheikh that he’d gotten from no one else, ever.

The monks were weeping now as they picked up the body of their master. Two of them, bearded, robed, and red-eyed with grief, glowered balefully at Constantine.

“You can just drop that whole line of thinking,” Constantine said, getting to his feet. “I had nothing to do with it.”

Not that I know of.

He started across the garden, picking his way, heading for the road. One of the younger monks came after him, tried to hold him back.

Constantine tore his arm free and whirled, raising a hand—not a fist, a hand. An incantation trembling unspoken on his lips.

But the monk was looking into Constantine’s eyes. He saw grief there—and turned away.