Hellblazer 1 - War Lord by John Shirley Read Free Book Online

a few puffs himself before answering. “I advise only this—remember the path we’re called to by Zoroaster: ‘Good reflection, good words, good deeds.’ The simplicity of this formula is its greatness. Cleave in simplicity to these three principles and the good road will be shown you.”
    Constantine smiled sadly. He had never noticed goodness to be rewarded—not in this vale of tears. Anyway, he felt he had very little virtue to bring to reflection, words, and deeds. Maybe he’d come to the monastery in search of some deeper good. But he suspected he was too tainted to find it. Someone good could do it . . .
    Long ago he’d tried to send his darkness, his sickness, to Hell, with a spell that had created a kind of Constantine golem. The spell had worked a little too well—he’d had to couple with a demoness to get back some of his edge, his balancing darkness. But he lost the balance easily. Slid easily into the dark side of himself: there was always more darkness in a man—because it arose freshly out of anger and out of the choices he made. And there is always more to be angry about; there are always more choices to make.
    He had sharpened his skills here. But the desire he’d nurtured in the back of his mind to become a good man like the Blue Sheikh—
    Wasting my sodding time with that one.
    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