by John Shirley
Konz felt weak himself and sick to his stomach, but he did not want Barasa’s death to be wasted, so he made himself pull the spear free and then he used his knife to finish removing Barasa’s head from his shoulders. As he did so, he said, “Barasa, you died so that we can take revenge for our people . . . Do not trouble me with your spirit, but give me your blessing in the battle to come.” He carried the head to the blocky altar and placed it in the center, so it gushed blood into the runnel marks on the side. And he gazed at the painted image of N’Hept, a face like two animals and one of the Old Ones, and he called out, “N’Hept! This man was my friend! I have given him to you in battle! Come to me and give me the strength of ten! I have heard of the strength of ten from Bregg, whom you know!”
There was no reply, but he sensed that N’Hept was waiting for something more. It was not yet done . . .
Konz took his bronze knife and—gritting his teeth so that he could bear the work—he scraped away the skin from Barasa’s staring, startled face; he scraped away his scalp, and wiped the bloody bone with Barasa’s loin cloths, till it was clear enough to begin the carving. Then he incised the runes. He knew them by heart; they were carved, as well, on the surface of his mind.
His hands were covered in blood when he was done; his nose was full of the stench of drying blood in the first stages of decay.
He put his right hand on the skull and stretched out his other, palm upward, toward the image of N’Hept on the wall. “I have given you blood in battle! I have carved my intention on him as I was bidden! Now will you not give me the strength of ten men that I may kill my enemies?” And he called out the incantation in the language of the People of the Sea, that he had learned from Bregg.
A voice came into his mind . . .
Carve away his eyelids, so that he may look unflinchingly on the task before him, in the Hidden World.
Konz was shaken by this voice, ringing in his head like the bronze gong rung in the barrows before the call to the Greengod. But he did as he was bid so that the skull’s eyes stared without eyelids, unflinchingly looking at death and the Hidden World.
And again Konz called out, “N’Hept! N’Hept! N’Hept!”
“Konz!” came Pel’s voice, echoing down the tunnel. “Konz, why did you bring us here? The men of the blue paint are nearby, that was their fire you saw! They have taken this place as a hunting camp! They are coming! Konz, we must run!”
Konz had known the men of blue paint were nearby; he had assumed he and the others would be found here. He had planned for it that way, and now he continued to chant, at the top of his lungs:
“N’Hept! N’Hept! N’Hept!”
“Konz!”
“N’HEPT!”
Then he heard the voice in his head again.
Here is my power, because you have come to me: the one who lives within you and is so easily forgotten. Because you have remembered the god inside you, who taught you and your kind to kill, now remember killing . . . now remember the true joy of killing . . .
Then Konz saw N’Hept himself, his face glowing before his mind’s eye, N’Hept’s mouth opening as if to roar—but out of it came no sound, only a feeling, a feeling that rippled from N’Hept into Konz.
It was like the strength that came into him when he had coupled with Venn, his only mate, who had died two years before.
He still remembered the power he’d felt when driving himself into her, as if he were a god himself.
It was like the strength that had come into him when he’d killed his first man, the man with the braided beard, from the northern tribe . . . The power and the joy of it, roaring through him . . .
But so much more strength than that—ten men more!
“Konz! They’re coming!”
Konz picked up his knife and spear and ran back through the cave. He could see Pel silhouetted against the mouth of the cave, jabbing his spear at something, backing toward him.
“Pel! Feel the power of the War Lord!” Konz shouted. “Feel it, from me! Come with me and kill them, in memory of our people!”
And Konz rushed past Pel and out of the cave, into the group of close to twenty blue-painted men. They were naked, clothed only in blue paint, with red rings around their eyes, shells on sinew string around their ankles and wrists, their hair caked in dung; their spears, mostly of flint, were short but lethal close in.
“Pel!” Konz shouted, as he stabbed with spear and knife, “Call to N’Hept! Feel his power!”
“N’Hept!” Pel shouted, rushing into the fight.
Pel was feeling it then, flowing from Konz to him, and he shouted, “N’Hept! The Tin Mound!” and thrust his spear close in at the men of blue paint, shrieking like a hill cat, and red blood spurted to make blue paint run.
At first the men of blue paint backed away, frightened by their fury, stunned by six quick deaths in seven breaths; many had fallen under Konz and Pel’s onslaught, twitching in their dying, as Konz rushed the others, shrieking.
But then the leader of the men of blue paint shouted in their outlandish language and rallied them and in moments Pel and Konz were surrounded by a ring of jabbing spears. Konz left his knife stuck in a man’s breast and took hold of his spear with both hands and began to thrust, and thrust again. His spear was longer than theirs and it kept them back a few moments more. He felt the power of lightning, snake, and tree in him; he felt the rage of N’Hept. He stabbed and he stabbed and he laughed and he stabbed . . .
Konz turned to see Pel howling with kill fury, and his face, Konz saw, was the face of N’Hept. The face of Pel had been quite replaced by the face of N’Hept.
If the men of blue paint saw this god face they did not react to it, but only pushed in closer, knocking Pel’s spear haft aside, jabbering kill words and stabbing him with their spears, again and again, piercing his stomach and side and neck and eye. Pel went down, shrieking rage as he went.
Konz was stabbing the leader of the men of blue paint with his spear in the soft place under the arch of ribs in front, but he felt their spears slam into him at the same moment. He felt no pain, no weakness then, just the sensation of impact. He twisted his own spear in the guts of his enemy and howled for vengeance. “For Selem! For Zal! For the Tin Mound! N’Hept, N’Hept!”
He drew his spear out and smashed it into another raging blue face, shouting in glee: “You cannot kill me! I have the power of ten warriors in N’Hept!”
But he felt something then that he’d never felt before, a heaviness in his limbs, a sudden draining of strength, and he looked down to see that a spear was driven between his ribs and into his heart. His blood ran thickly out of the wound, to twine along the shaft of the spear.
He looked up to see the blue-painted face of the man who’d driven the spear through his heart. The man grinned with his yellow, filed teeth. And for a moment, the man’s face became the face of N’Hept . . .
And that was the last thing that Konz . . .
. . . that Constantine saw . . .
Before the red clouds filled all the world and the sun set forever.
Paris, France
Tchalai was on the cellphone, talking to her contact at the French secret service, when Mercury opened the front door of the apartment, expecting the man delivering groceries, and finding instead four heavily armed men in black ski masks.
One of the men backed Mercury into the room with a silenced pistol against her forehead. He lifted a free hand to his mouth, one finger pressed to his lips, as he looked at Tchalai, standing in the midst of the living room with the phone at her ear . . .
He looked at Mercury, he looked at his gun, he looked at Tchalai—and pressed his finger again to his lips.
Tchalai nodded miserably—and hung up, tossing the phone aside.
Two of the big men went silently to Tchalai, one of them taking a syringe from his coat pocket. He took the cap off the syringe’s needle, and squirted a little fluid into the air as he approached her, smiling. The mask hid everything but his cold blac
k eyes and his cold bright smile. Tchalai’s parrot, Spitlove, began to squawk, to flutter . . .
“Tchalai . . .” Mercury began, stammering, lips trembling. “I see something—they plan to . . . they’re going to . . . I think we should run . . .”
“C’est trop tarde,” Tchalai replied huskily as the man stabbed the needle into her shoulder. “It’s too late . . . They . . .”
Then she collapsed.
Mercury did try to run for the hall door—and one of the men struck her down with the barrel of his pistol.
She lay there on the rug, stunned, unable to think, her mind seeming truncated—looking up to see Spitlove the parrot flapping furiously around the room, shrilly squawking, “Burn in hell, bastards! John Constantine, John Constantine, John Constant—”
Until the man with the silenced pistol shot the bird, in midflight, so that Spitlove smacked bloodily into a wall and tumbled down, shedding green feathers.
London, England, the twenty-first century
The first thing Constantine became aware of as he came back to himself, was Gatewood’s saying, in a voice of despondent amazement, “She was right there, John, and I couldn’t say anything. I was looking at Tchalai through the window of the car, but it was a tinted window and something wouldn’t let me talk and—”
“You’re talking my bloody ear off right now,” Constantine growled, rubbing his head.
Constantine was sitting up on a cot, next to the one Gatewood was chained to. He looked around, at first thinking himself back in the Catacombs. He was underground, in a tunnel, wasn’t he? Wrong underground.
He needed to make up his mind which way to move, what to do—but he felt almost numbed by what he’d seen. Lost. He was sickeningly disoriented, being back here in the twenty-first century again. He could still taste blood in his mouth; could still feel the spear through his heart; could still feel Barasa’s skin peeling away under his bronze knife . . .
Get oriented. Get involved in this life again. Take stock.
There were lights on overhead; there was a familiar multifarious smell in the air. Wet concrete, rodents, dirty socks, and very distantly, curry.
“London!” he burst out. He was in the London Underground—a tube station. An abandoned one, by the look of it. The train tunnel was walled up on one side; the other mostly blocked by debris.
“Yeah, John . . .” Gatewood and the cot he lay on were shackled to a guard rail at the end of the tube platform. “We’re in Britain . . .”
A group of men stood about thirty feet away, looking into a television monitor. Dyzigi, Coggins, Simpson, and two men he didn’t know. One of them was MacCrawley, maybe—he was rumored to be related to Crowley and this man looked much like the Great Beast. As Constantine watched him, the man turned and smiled almost charmingly at him, nodding in acknowledgment. He knew Constantine, surely.
“It’s London, yeah,” Gatewood went on. “You’ve been out of it for like twenty-four hours. In a coma or something.”
Gatewood was shackled lying on his back; Constantine was only chained up by his wrists. He wondered vaguely why. But it was hard to think, just then; he felt distant from everything. Here and not here. Some part of him still clung to Konz . . .
“What happened to you?” Gatewood asked.
“I was someplace else,” Constantine muttered. “Just . . . someplace else. And some time . . . else.” N’Hept. It had been nothing planted in his mind, no illusion. The memory of Konz had been his own genuine memory. He did have a strong connection to N’Hept . . . perhaps he’d always known—but tried not to know.
He was sitting on a cot, on a dirty gray, cracked platform near the train tracks. The place was coated with dust, clearly not maintained. Not far away was the chest that Dyzigi had opened to reveal the staring skulls. Constantine was glad it was shut. It was sitting on an altar of stone, brought to the platform just for a ritual, he supposed; there were runes on the altar and a circle on the floor around it, in which images and names of power were written. They were not the names of power he himself used—not anymore.
He looked at Gatewood and realized why he was so thoroughly shackled: it was so he couldn’t remove the pendant that had been strung around his neck. The pendant showed a leering face—Ba’al, probably—carved in onyx. It was capable of blocking contact with the spirits. It neutralized Gatewood’s mediumistic power.
“What were you saying about Tchalai?” Constantine asked.
“She was . . . oh God I’m thirsty, they haven’t given me anything to drink for a full day . . . They took us out of there, you they carried, me they forced at gunpoint. They brought us up to the street, loaded us into a limo. I guess they blew off the chopper because the authorities were coming. Tchalai came in another car with these two guys, and a bunch of French special forces types arrived with ’em—they just ignored us. Diplomatic plates, Dyzigi said, like he thought it was funny. ‘We are someone special.’ They didn’t see us through the tinted window of the limo we were in. I couldn’t seem to speak. We drove off and went to a helicopter and another limo and . . . here.”
“These blokes she was with, what sort did they seem?”
“Like—spooks. Not my kind of spooks—secret agent types.”
“Yes,” Dyzigi said, walking up. “Your friend Tchalai Dermitzel is an agent for the Direction Centrale Police Judiciaire. A branch of the French secret service. Indeed, one of the men with your friend that night was a certain Monsieur Vallee, part of their ‘esoteric investigations’ branch. A branch which does not exist in the French government’s budget meetings.”
Constantine shrugged. “I always suspected she was tied in with the French secret service. When she saw the missile, she had her priorities. I don’t blame her.”
“It was too late to fire the Tomahawk, thanks to that lunatic Ukrainian,” Coggins said, coming up to look Constantine over. “But it doesn’t matter, we didn’t need it, really. Just wanted to prime the pump.”
“I heard ’em talking about it, John,” Gatewood said, his voice raspy. “It’s not a nuclear weapon, not really. It’s kind of a dummy.”
Dyzigi smiled, watching Constantine as he spoke. “It would have exploded with a certain amount of radioactive material in it. Something like a dirty bomb. Not so much to create damage—more to spread suspicion. It would have been blamed on Iranians. We saw to that . . . but its deeper purpose was to spread a certain yellow compound—the bones of ancient warriors, consecrated to N’Hept.”
N’Hept. Constantine shuddered, remembering N’Hept staring at him from the face of the man who’d killed him—who’d killed Konz. And he remembered his death in another lifetime . . .
Dyzigi saw how the name of the War Lord made Constantine react. “You saw what and who you were, Constantine?”
Coggins was pacing, looking at Constantine and Gatewood and again at his watch. “I get that you had a reason to keep this one alive . . .” He nodded at Constantine. “But why the other one? They’re problem people, they should be eliminated. We’ve only got thirty-eight minutes before the targets are in place. I say we kill these two.”
“Interested in bringing about the apocalypse, are you, squire?” Constantine said. He shook his head. “Whatever these others have in mind—it isn’t your Christian fantasy ending. And you know it, too . . .”
He sensed grave doubts working in Coggins. Another influence on him . . .
Coggins stared at him in angry shock. Then he backhanded Constantine, making his nose bleed. “You work for the Father of Lies, you Brit sleaze. That’s obvious as all hell. Keep your yap shut!” He turned furiously to Dyzigi. “You heard what he said—he’s trying to psyche-op me, dammit! I say we kill them and fast!”
“You will not kill them,” Dyzigi said calmly. “I had intended to use someone else besides Mr. Gatewood, but he is handy; I will need him in the ritual. And I have reason to believe that Constantine here will serve N’Hept quite willingly. It is in his blood and bones and soul. He knows how little this
faulty, house-of-cards civilization matters—don’t you Constantine?”
Constantine swallowed. Dyzigi had struck a chord with that one. “Know what you mean. Been to Hell. Been out of me body. Seen people melting into Nepenthe like they never were. Seen the dance of maya, like. After that, this world seems . . . temporary. Doesn’t seem to matter much if you blot it out and start over. So much wrong with it—it’s worth a try, innit?”
Coggins snorted skeptically. “That’s all just talk. I don’t want him alive, Dyzigi, that’s my last word on it. He’s dangerous to the cause. He’s not a real believer. He’s a loose cannon and he’s a problem.”
“It’s you who’s not a believer,” said Dyzigi, amused. “It’s you, General, who’s a loose cannon, as you put it.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Do you think I don’t know they’ve tainted your mind? The enemy? The angels and their ilk?”
Coggins stared at him. “The angels . . . the enemy?”
Constantine snorted. “Sounds like you’ve outgrown your usefulness, ‘General Ripper.’ You don’t get it yet? You and Morris and all you lot’ve been deceived like a lot of retarded school brats. Revelations had nothing to do with our time. You suspected it to, yeah?”
Coggins licked his lips. “No . . . they—” He looked desperately back and forth between Dyzigi and Trevino, who was walking up, smiling sadly, hands clasped like the ex-priest he was.
Trevino shrugged expansively. “I gave up that dream years ago—another kind of kingdom will come . . .”
“Strucken was my man, General,” Dyzigi said, “and a valuable man. You shouldn’t have killed him. You have been tainted by their dream sendings. You’re dangerous. And we don’t need you anymore. You gave us The Blossom; we had your logistical support in Carthaga. But Morris was of more use, esoterically. And that imbecilic ‘Christian apocalypse’ scenario. Constantine is right—that business in Revelations was all about the Romans, I’m afraid. It really had nothing to do with our time at all.” Dyzigi was clearly enjoying twisting the knife of truth in Coggins’s vitals. “You make your book of Revelations seem to predict anything you like—and we made use of that ambiguity. It was one of our little games.” Dyzigi turned his nasty crooked smile at Constantine. “I tell him this now because I wanted you to hear. To know I labor under no illusions. I want you to know exactly what it is you’re signing on for so that you can involve yourself immediately, once we begin the true Transfiguration.”