by Michele Lang
I groaned again and started picking pieces of gravel out of my arms. “Are you? Poor angel.”
His laughter surprised me. “You certainly make my assignment more challenging.”
I managed a rueful smile, even as the night whirled faster around me. “You sound like my mother when you say it that way.”
His hands held me steady, and only after he kneeled to me did I realize how close I had come to fainting. “Peace,” he whispered, and a warm current of energy flowed through my bedraggled body. I breathed in his healing, accepted it. After a few moments, I could see again, though gray splotches still moved across my line of vision.
“What now?” His words were whispered so softly I first mistook them for my own unvoiced thoughts.
I looked up at the embankment, saw my shoe perched halfway down from the tracks. Avoiding his gaze and question both, I rose unsteadily to my feet and untangled myself from his hands.
“First I get my shoe,” I muttered, and the gravel slid under my feet as I clambered up the slope. I reached hard overhead, grabbed the shoe, and slid down as gracefully as I could.
Two shoes on my feet. Progress. I looked up at the sky, edged with predawn pink. “I’ll have to cast,” I said. “Find somebody who will help me, some coven of witches, maybe a hidden enclave of Jews.”
“Those poor souls are hard-pressed to help themselves. And you know it.”
I bit my lower lip, chewed at it as I willed myself to think through the sting of my banged-up arms. “They don’t have to do much. Help me clean up, hide me before I go. To Amsterdam.”
“Amsterdam.” His voice vibrated with disbelief.
“Of course, Amsterdam! I will have to walk across the borders now that I have no papers at all. Perhaps I can find a boat to ride up the Danube.”
I sounded ridiculous, a petulant child, but my wounded outrage was my only bulwark against Raziel’s kindness.
“Forget finding safe haven in Austria. The land itself is against you.”
Raziel did not say it: that he could not rise up against the land itself to protect me.
So evil, in this particular case, prevailed. Why? My unspoken question tasted like cigarette ashes in my mouth. Raziel’s presence was a comfort, but nothing more.
The cinders poked at the soles of my shoes as I shifted my weight. “I’ll just start walking then. Hide in the woods and cast by day, see what I can find.”
“You will not like what you find in these parts.” His sadness was tinged with a fury that drove deep into my bones.
Bountiful or evil land, I had to keep moving regardless. I shrugged and took up my satchel. Knew the tracks pointed north, so I turned due west, away from the rising sun. “I will walk to the Swiss border, try to reach Amsterdam the long way.”
He shook his head in apparent disbelief, opened his mouth to speak and closed it again when I turned away from him and started walking. He unwillingly trailed behind me as I moved into a copse of fir trees, while the dawn broke in pink and golden glory over our heads. We walked together in silence for a few minutes, and when I admitted to myself I was being stubborn and wayward I slowed, then stopped. Raziel closed the gap between us and stood next to me, waited for me to make up my mind.
I studied his face, those hooded, deep brown eyes, the aquiline nose, sculpted features serene even despite his disapproval of me. I couldn’t stand the hurt in his expression; I needed his blessing to go ahead.
I unclenched my fists and clasped my hands together, my fingers shaking. “Why did you write it?” If you had told me a week before that I would have the temerity to ask the Angel Raziel such a question to his face, I would have laughed in yours.
But danger made me reckless. “What possessed you to endow a book with such power?”
He stood and stared at me, and for a moment I thought he would not answer. But a slow, sad smile caught at his lips, and he shrugged.
“Why did I write The Book of Raziel?” he finally said. “The world was young. I felt sorry for humanity.” His laugh was sharp yet not unkind. “The Almighty had granted me His dispensation, but I learned quickly that my sympathies were misplaced. Humankind can take care of itself. Better than the celestials, I found out soon enough.”
His smile faded away. “I was wrong to write it. Leave the book alone.”
“We both know it’s too late, now.”
“Too late?”
“The Staff seeks the Book now. It is my suspicion that a group of Azeri rebels, represented in Budapest by one Ziyad Juhuri, seeks that book too. My own boss wants it for his profit. Honestly, Raziel, if I don’t claim my book, somebody else will. It might as well be me.”
A bird chattered somewhere above our heads, and I cleared my throat. “I better sit down now, before I fall down,” I said. I came to rest on a bed of fir needles.
Raziel loomed over me, and then slowly, with a swan’s grace, he came to rest by my side. His wings unfurled behind him where he sat cross-legged, an ever-expanding radiance, a peacock’s tail made of golden godlight. “Let the Book go. Let its curse fall upon their heads, not yours.”
His talk of curses sounded quaint to my ears. “Raziel. The witch of Ein Dor said my life was curse enough. The entire Reich wants me dead, wants my sweet little sister dead. At some point, curses are redundant, don’t you think so?”
Raziel half groaned, half laughed as he reclined on the blanket of fir needles under our bodies, and rested his head in the cup of his left hand. “Let me convince you why the Book must remain hidden, Magda.”
I considered my predicament. Undoubtedly, the Staff waited for my train at Linz; by now, he must have discovered I had escaped before the train ever pulled into the station. Certainly he and his minions still hunted me. I could not outrun him, could not shake him. And the land would not hide me.
“If I stay here in the woods, hiding, I am surely doomed. That book is my only faint hope now.”
“You are my human ward. If you only listen and understand, I may yet save your life. Stay here with me; I promise you they will not find you in these woods if I hide you.”
I inclined my head, said nothing. The fir needles smelled clean and wild under my body. And I let him think my silence meant my assent.
His wings became a diffuse light that shielded us from all of Austria. “Now, listen, Lazarus mine, to what I have to tell you.”
8
The Angel Raziel spoke, his voice a low murmur. His words echoed through past and future, seemed to erase time itself as we hid away among the fir trees.
“Here is all that I will tell of The Book of Raziel, the book I wrote when the world was young.
“My book was not the first book. Before Adam was raised from the mud by the hand of the Almighty, the Torah contained the world within it. The very angels demanded to keep it, and when our prayers were denied and the Torah granted to the children of men, the seeds of discord grew among our ranks.
“I saw the grief of Adam and his children, felt their exile as mine. I came upon the children of Adam as they toiled, as Eve’s daughters bore their young in agony. And I watched death stalk the children of Earth, imagined the pain of death, and walked two steps behind these mortal ones in their stumbling path.
“The sages say I bequeathed the Book to Adam himself, to ease the grief of his exile from the Garden. But that is not true. It was to Eve I gave The Book of Raziel; and I entrusted it to her and her daughters because of the demonesses who from the beginning sought to destroy her and her kind.
“The world is woven through with holy speech, in the angelic tongue Eve and her daughters spoke. I wrote the words in her language and mine; the Torah, written in the Lord’s own speech, Hebrew, undergirds all I gave to Eve. Her people waited endless generations for the Torah to come to the world of men; The Book of Raziel stood Eve’s children in its stead in its early days. And instead of the Father tongue, it was written in the Mother’s.
“Eve bequeathed the jewel of Raziel through her lineage; in eac
h age did the Book assume a form that could speak to her children. But Lilith, Adam’s first wife, escaped to become the Queen of Demons, along with her innumerable daughters. Ever did the daughters of Lilith seek to steal the Book and cast the children of Earth into utter darkness.
“In the days before the Great Flood, the daughters of Eve tempted the angelic host to fall from grace. And so they fell, Asmodel, Semyaza, and their host, my brothers, and they loved the daughters of women, and taught them the arts of adornment, of witchcraft, of transcribing speech into written words.
“In the devastation of the Flood, the jewel of Raziel was lost in the deeps of the water. My brother Raphael, moved as I by human grief, retrieved my book from the depths of the sea and returned it to the children of Shem. And the women kept it, the daughters of the watchers, the daughters of Eve.
“The Book became lost again, found again, ages of blindness, ages of sight. The daughters kept the Book in the days of Judges, the days of Saul, the days of the Kings.
“The Witch of Ein Dor, the most illustrious of your kin, kept the Book well and made her fame with feats of generative sorcery. She put the Book into papyrus, the court rolls of King Solomon. She devised the amulets, the numerology, the metaphor of the Book you now seek in your world. In her age of Solomonic wisdom, the Book spoke clear.
“Ever the Witch of Ein Dor battled the daughters of Lilith; taught King Solomon how to bind Lilith’s children, Obizuth, Onoskelis, and Enepsigos, in service to the Lord. And Solomon himself learned to compel the most ancient of demons to manifest the will of God, to lift the Temple’s very cornerstone into place.
“But within temptation, destruction. Solomon, tempted by woman as the angels themselves fell by women in the days of the Flood, abandoned the way of the Lord and his dominion fell into ruin and death. And your forebear of Ein Dor, abandoned to her fate by the king, battled long and valiantly against the ascension of Lilith, before she lost the fight.
“The Book of Raziel disappeared with the destruction of the First Temple; prophets, in the long exile in Babylon, recalled remnants of it. The Second Temple, bereft of the Book, was doomed to fall into ruin, the demons trapped within the temple stone finally freed to roam the earth and feast upon men during the long Exile.
“Ever have I loved the daughters who honored my book and kept it faithfully. Ever have I watched over them in their turn.
“In every age, the Book calls to the daughters of Lazarus, ready to protect them and their children from the plagues of Lilith: fire, death in childbirth, the smothering of infants in their sleep. The amulets your grandmother of Ein Dor made are still invoked to protect her daughters in their times of need.
“Your blood now calls the Book to light. Turn away and it may slumber once more. Do you not see? Hitler and his demonic horde remember the Book’s scourge, and seek its power for their own. Better the Book stays hidden.”
The wind whispered in the fir boughs for a long time when the Angel Raziel had finished. His words stirred me strangely, but not even an angel of the Lord could stop me from my determination to save my girls from their horrible fate. “That is quite a story. What is its moral? Do I go home, let Eva and Gisele die? You know the time is short, that Hitler is mad enough to believe the world is his by right.”
I rubbed my eyes, forced my voice to steady. “The world is at the edge of the abyss, and one young witch with nothing to her name isn’t going to change anything. But—”
“What?”
“Gisele.” My voice caught, but I steadied myself by looking into the sky, speaking to the new dawn unfolding over our heads. “And Eva. Who will save them if I don’t try?”
“You don’t understand. I fear your success, not your failure. You are more qualified than you know to reclaim the Book and bring it back to light. But I don’t know what you will become.”
I smiled up at the sky’s blind face, shook my head against the angel, against the Germans, against every thing and every living creature arrayed against my little apartment on Dohány Street and its beloved denizens. “By now, I don’t care what happens to me.”
Our gazes met; Raziel’s face had turned to chiseled stone. His voice stayed soft, but it froze me to the bone. “Who are you to put the world in peril to save three girls from a fate greater than any of you can even understand? You presume, Magda. So did Asmodel, before he fell. So did Ephippas, so did Rath, so did Beelzeboul.”
His face was pale with fury. How I hated to disappoint him, my family angel, but I could not abandon Gisele to her fate. He sighed, hunched his impressive shoulders with his frustration. “Now I understand why celestial hosts with more sense than I stay far away from their human charges, stay quiet and distant no matter how they suffer.”
I reached out, daringly took his hand in mine. The grief in his gaze pierced me, threw me into deeper confusion than any of his words had managed to inspire. “I’m the one who forced you to come here. Heaped sin on my head, using you as the instrument. I will make a bargain with you, my guardian angel.”
“I do not strike bargains.”
I brushed at the fir needles caught in the skirt of my ruined suit. “I have the power to call the terms, so let us not call it a bargain, then. Teach me the witches’ art. How to cast spells, how to vanquish evil ones like the Staff. And then in exchange I will gladly let you go.”
Raziel shook his head and laughed, truly laughed for the first time since I had encountered him. His laughter boomed and echoed among the trees, startled the birds overhead out of their birdsong. “Did you not hear anything I told you? I am not a witch, nor Fallen. Those arts are beyond my ken.”
He smiled, held his hands open, helpless. “Keeping me won’t get you my book. Only you can find it—it belongs to you and your clan, not to me. If I had a choice in the matter, I would keep the Book hidden. You may do more harm than good if you succeed.”
I considered his words. They sunk in slowly, their implications burning like hellfire. “But—I thought you were the author. That the Book was in fact yours.”
“No. As I told the Staff, I am only the scribe. A messenger. The jewel of Raziel is yours, not mine. I gave it away, a gift long ago, with only the best of intentions.”
Ah, good intentions. My battered satchel suddenly felt too heavy to hold. “It really is up to me, then. But I’ll never be able to do it by myself, never.”
“So let it go. Come home, with me.”
The choice tore me apart. All roads seemed to lead to death. “No.” But I wavered, and Raziel knew it.
He hugged me close, whispered in my ear. “Love drives you forward. Do what you know is right, come home with me.”
The tears flowed freely now, and I made no effort to restrain them. “I have to try. I swore I would, I have to . . .”
He stroked my hair and kept silent. We both knew that words could no longer tip the balance one way or the other. I listened to the songbirds trilling overhead, and I thought of Gisele, her squeaky little laugh, her chubby cheeks, and my promise to protect her to the edge of death and beyond.
I hugged Raziel tighter to me. The heat of him burned against my skin, and his wings wrapped around us, hid us inside a holy fire.
“You did your very best to save me, angel. But I must have your book. I know very little of Hebrew, but I know your name means ‘secrets of God.’ My mother taught me that much, at least. I need your secrets, or Gisele will die.”
One of his hands stroked my hair, slowly, like my mother used to do when I was little and had sustained some real or imaginary hurt. But his voice was rough where it caught on his words. “Gisele will die one way or the other, little star. You choose a dangerous path.”
“The Witch of Ein Dor told me as much—but I have chosen. I swear not to call upon you again. I know I mustn’t. One mortal sin is enough, no? Farewell, Raziel.”
The pressure of his fingers receded, faded into a caressing breeze. I closed my eyes against his passing.
I opened my eyes, took a de
ep, alpine breath, and saw that the world was still the same. I watched a crow fly over the tracks to reach a cluster of his brethren waiting on the other side. But I was all alone.
9
My lips itched to whisper Raziel’s name, to force him to return. But I had insisted on retaking what was originally his, what he had wanted to keep hidden. And I had sworn to go forward without the divine protection any ordinary human being could call upon Heaven to send.
I wished I could take back my solemn oath.
The sun rose higher into the sky, making my search for a safe haven all the more urgent. Austria was closed to me, cold and hostile. I would cast to find hidden witches or Jews; either population would welcome me as one of their own, a sister member of a hated minority in need of shelter.
Time was my enemy. I had to get to Amsterdam. Undoubtedly the wizard would get there first, but if I didn’t get there soon, I needn’t bother getting there at all. I took a grounding breath, centered my feet on the spongy moss, and tentatively sent my inner senses through the fragrant fir trees, toward the small villages nestled in the countryside.
I sensed a clot of human misery, thick and horrible, to the east. No, this land was not safe; hidden away among the perfect little villages and magnificent stands of evergreens grew dreadful, hidden secrets, multiplying like a cancer. A cloak of invisibility hid the place in plain sight, unnoticed by the folk living their ordinary lives. No magic necessary to hide it—the people simply didn’t want to see it. A name whispered into my mind: Mauthausen.
I turned my inner eye away, sending a prayer to those enchained souls but nothing more; I had nothing more to give them. Narrowing my focus, I surveyed the forest with my second sight, and sensed the air around me thick with spirits, most of them born of the forest, rivers, and stones. Benign, ancient, indifferent at most to human affairs.
But in the air, wafting among the branches . . .