Hellblazer 1 - War Lord

by John Shirley

  Constantine noticed the floor manager watching him, consulting with a chunky, greasy-looking man in a tuxedo with a coffee stain down the front. The “kingfish” maybe. He made sure to lose a hand, coolly, while these guys were watching. They wandered off.

  He still had four thousand Euro and decided it was enough to get a serviceable car. They couldn’t keep the Balkan’s car and they needed one to transport Mercury—she couldn’t go on a train in her state. They had to pay for a nurse for Mercury, to come with them to Paris. They’d also need plane fare later, he suspected. He got up and went toward the door, and found himself stopping at the crap table. The money was piled up, the dice were rolling; you’d win the casino’s money. Unfortunately he was not significantly telekinetic. Not enough for this. He shrugged and turned away.

  And the mummified hand in his coat made a fierce clutching in his pocket. He shuddered, jumping a little. The floor manager stared at him, scowling. Constantine waggled his fingers at the guy. He started to turn away again; again the hand twitched. He felt an overpowering urge to bet his money on the dice.

  “Don’t be daft,” he muttered at himself.

  But he hadn’t gotten to be the John Constantine—with all the good and bad that went with that—by ignoring powerful intuitions.

  He went to the craps table and put four thousand Euro on sevens.

  Everyone at the table looked at him in astonishment. He didn’t look like a high roller. He looked like he’d gotten high, and then gotten rolled. But he put four thousand down on a bet that the dice would come up two sevens.

  “Daft,” he muttered.

  The dice rolled . . . and almost stopped. Then they gave a strange twitch and rolled sevens.

  He didn’t even count the money they paid out to him. It was a great deal. He thought he ought to give that another try . . .

  But two large thugs in suits were coming his way. They sensed he was up to something. He blew them a kiss and went to the cashier’s window to exchange his chips for cash.

  Best leave while I’m still quids-in.

  The spiffy thugs watched as Constantine stuffed his pockets, debating as to whether they should stop him. But Constantine projected a feeling at them, though his back was turned and he seemed to be ignoring them, a feeling that whispered, Don’t interfere with him. It might be dangerous. Just let him go.

  It was just enough to make them hesitate till Constantine could dart out the door.

  As he went he thought, Spoink, I don’t know how you did that, from wherever you are, but it had to be you. Thanks, mate.

  Paris, France

  Tchalai didn’t seem terribly surprised to see John Constantine at the door of her Paris flat after a six-year absence. She had a gift for divination; she had probably “seen” his arrival days ago.

  “Hello, ‘Star-eyes,’ ” he said, winking.

  “Hello, John. So now you’re here.”

  She was a Gypsy in her midforties; with her long softly curling black hair and dark eyes she was a Mediterranean beauty who might’ve been a consort to a Phoenician king—a Gypsy, but a sophisticated Parisian before all else. She stood barely over five feet tall, small but proportionately womanly. She was barefoot, in a low-cut purple shift clasped at the waist by a belt of gold medallions.

  “You look just the same,” he said.

  “As do you, six years later—or perhaps there are more lines in your face. I believe that’s the same awful trench coat, no?” She had a slight accent, difficult to identify: she was from Hungary but had been raised chiefly in Paris. He was one of the few people who knew she had a degree in quantum physics; she’d written her paper on the intellectual tension between Niels Bohr and Einstein. But she made her living mostly doing Tarot for French movie stars. She was also, quite discreetly, a sorceress, which is one reason Constantine had come to see her.

  The other reason was, he hadn’t been laid since that milkmaid. He was hoping to get lucky.

  “So you are hoping to ‘get lucky,’ is that why you’ve come here?” she said, either reading his mind or his eyes.

  “What? Me? Who hasn’t come around for years? Here, I’ve no illusions. Just wanted to use your library, darling, that’s all.”

  Her full lips—almost too full for her face—twisted with amusement. “Don’t darling me. But come in, and introduce your friend.”

  “First, got to tell you that my goddaughter—you remember Mercury—she’s out in the car. Hired a nurse to look after her, but we need to bring her up. Thought you could help her, I’ll explain, once she’s inside.”

  “Little Mercury! I remember, I met her once! Of course, bring her in!”

  They got the nurse—a dour woman with a cap of brown hair and a fuzz mustache—to help bring Mercury upstairs in the gurney they’d stowed in the back of the SUV. “But, monsieur, we need to take her to a doctor, no?”

  “Le docteur arrivera bientot,” Tchalai said smoothly, helping them with the gurney. They stowed Mercury in Tchalai’s guest room, paid the nurse, and sent her on her way.

  Gatewood seemed self-conscious as Tchalai returned to the living room; he was embarrassed at his ragged, dirty state. He’d stopped and bought a pair of jeans and a blue workshirt, but he was unshaven, his hair dirty, there was still sand from the beach in his shoes, and he hadn’t brushed his teeth since the Medusa’s Revenge.

  “This is Paul, Paul Gatewood. Talented boy, he is.”

  “Oh? He sings, he dances?”

  “He dances with the dead when he wants to.”

  Tchalai sensed Gatewood’s discomfort and smiled, putting a hand on his arm as if she were a lady with a fine gentleman at a nineteenth-century ball. “Spitlove and I are very honored to have you here.” She indicated an enormous, evil-eyed red and green parrot in an opened cage near the sunny bay windows looking out on the boulevard.

  Constantine snorted, noticing the parrot. “Oh God, he’s still alive . . .” He remembered Morris’s remark: You lack only the parrot. Odd. “I’d have thought someone would’ve strangled that flamboyant buzzard by now.”

  “John Constantine, John Constantine, eat my shit, merci!” the bird chanted, bobbing its head. Then it made a spitting sound, with which it punctuated most of its comments; hence its name.

  Gatewood laughed. “He’s served you, John!”

  “I’d like to serve him with barbecue sauce.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Tchalai said. “He and Spitlove are old friends.”

  Constantine looked around and found the flat largely unchanged, just a little more cluttered. There were houseplants dripping from most of the shelves, figurines of goddesses stood on the floor, adorned paintings in frames—goddesses from every culture. There were a few Gypsy good luck charms on the walls, some hanging from the cobwebby chandelier.

  “Come,” Tchalai was saying, guiding them toward the kitchen. “I’ll make you some tea, and perhaps a salad, and you tell me what has transpired. Nothing normal with you, John, I’m sure, except the normally abnormal, yes?”

  “You’re too bloody right, Tchalai.” He was glad she seemed to have no grudge against him for leaving—and for staying so spottily in touch. He’d sent her the odd postcard now and then, and a few minor gifts. A book, a charm, a pressed flower. But he hadn’t been back to her bedroom in years. She always had been a forgiving sort, unless you really got her ire up.

  If she was well and truly mad at you, she just might enter your bedroom, quiet as a shadow, and slit your throat as you slept.

  But, fair is fair; she’d have a good reason.

  ~

  Tchalai’s library was comfortingly redolent of incense and the peculiar perfume of old book paper. Most of the volumes crowded on the shelves of the little room were at least a hundred years old, though she had a special section with the most up-to-date works on quantum theory. Constantine was seated at a low Japanese table, on floor pillows, feeling his legs cramping badly after two hours, as he went through half a dozen relevant grimoires and mythol
ogues. The declining sun was streaking through the window, making ballet dancers of dust motes as he pored through the brittle old pages.

  “Ah Hulneb, Alaisiagaie, Anat . . .” he muttered. The names of gods of war. “Anhur . . . Banbha . . . Begtse . . .” He scanned descriptions of the gods, based mostly on statuary and fragmentary tales. “Six arms . . . three eyes . . . not my chap . . . Honos . . . Ogoun . . .” There was good old Mars, there was Wotan, there was Tyr—that one almost felt right, so old was Tyr. The entity he’d encountered on Carthaga was something very ancient, he was sure of that. It was Tyr but not Tyr, somehow.

  He selected another volume, Warlords, by a fellow named Jameswood. He’d never seen the book before. Early nineteenth century by the look of it. Who the devil was Sir Churchill Jameswood?

  Constantine felt himself drawn to this volume, and he pushed the others aside, closed his eyes, raised his hands over the pages, and murmured certain words of power. Then he closed the book, held it balanced on its spine, and removed his hands so it fell open. It had opened to a page near the end, a description of “Donar.”

  Teutonic, was Donar . . . Corresponding to the Norse God Thor . . . some relate him to Nergal . . .

  Constantine sat up straight. “Nergal!”

  . . . A very ancient Sumero-Babylonian deity: the overseer of the Netherworld. Sometimes he is the evil aspect of the sun god Shamash. He rules a certain particularly bleak and charnel level of Hell with his consort Ereshkigal. Nergal is an evil god who delights in war, pestilence, fever, and devastation. It is difficult to imagine any devotee actually worshipping Nergal although a temple was built to him in the sinister city of Kuthu. Likely he was simply conciliated—or called down on one’s enemies . . . His attributes are the club and the sickle . . . There are of course more ancient versions: his supposed father (some texts say “sire”), N’Hept is perhaps just another manifestation of Nergal, or he may have been a separate deity. A purer god of war, N’Hept was known to men of the age of stone, and earlier, to those beetle-browed Others who still roam the mountain fastnesses. N’Hept is the primal wargod from whom all others descend. He is the original image of whom the others are distorted reflections. His face is brutal, animalistic, both crocodilian and baboon. It is he whom the handsomer gods of war mask: behind Mars is N’Hept . . .

  ~

  “ ‘Men of the age of stone,’ ” Constantine said, as Tchalai came in, bringing cookies and a cup of coffee on a small lacquered-wood tray. Was he, Constantine wondered, referring to Neolithic men? Even earlier men? He glanced up at Tchalai. “How’s Mercury?”

  “I have removed the psychic parasite. She sleeps now. She was exhausted. But there is still some kind of enchantment on her.”

  “I’m just glad you got the Akishra off her. I knew you were the one to do it.”

  Tchalai shrugged. “I often work with addicts, helping them get free of their sickness, and the Akishra normally swarm around addicts, feeding off the energy they lose to their addictions. The Akishra speak to the deep wiring of their brains, keeping them in their addiction.” She glanced at the book Constantine had open, and his notes. “So you have found N’Hept. When you described what you saw on Carthaga, I thought it might be him. The primitivity of the features argues as much. I may have an unpublished transcript by Jung on him, somewhere. The archetype of all wargod archetypes. Some call him ‘the War Lord.’ ” She knelt beside him, looking at the book.

  “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 f
rom 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.