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

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