Rebel Angels

by Michele Lang

  But at the time, the melee seemed completely insane. The silence of the night was shattered by reverberating screams, the braying of camels, and curses in many different languages I couldn’t identify.

  Someone—Raziel or maybe even Viktor—grabbed me and pulled me to the rear of the alcove.

  “We’re trapped,” I gasped. “We have to get away.”

  “Follow the candlelight,” Raziel said at my elbow, and in an instant I saw what he meant.

  A secret trapdoor had opened at the back of the alcove, and a spark of flame disappeared down the stairs.

  “Let’s go!” I said, and together we rushed for the stairs. I could just see Ziyad’s head as he disappeared into the darkness, holding the candle high above his head.

  We ran down, and the assassins closed ranks behind us. The short, round one, the one caught by the bludgeon, groaned as he ran. The other one slammed the trapdoor closed behind us.

  Down we clattered, smelling a fetid stink that rose up from below. We ran too headlong for me to ask where we were going, but I could guess: special guests of the caravanserai had a secret escape built into their accommodations.

  Ziyad made a sharp left and I skidded in the filth under our feet and almost fell. Raziel caught me under the elbow and together we pelted after him.

  “Up!” Ziyad cried. He launched himself up a sudden staircase that rose from the tunnel where we ran.

  The stairs were stone, slippery, and worn almost completely away. We came back to the surface in a stinking alleyway behind a trash can crawling with rats—I could hear them scrabbling and fighting inside. I didn’t stop to find out what they were tussling over, instead I followed Ziyad out onto the street, where his auto waited for us. I now understood why Ziyad had pulled up down the street before parking for the night …

  A great cry echoed from the entrance to the caravanserai. I could not translate, but the meaning was as clear as day: “There they are!”

  We hurled ourselves into the car even as Ziyad pulled away from the curb. I slammed the door shut as the Mercedes caromed wildly down the street, all but running down the men streaming out of the entranceway.

  “Hold on,” Ziyad said, his breath coming out in little heaves. None of us was in much better shape.

  He stepped on the accelerator, and we rattled over the uneven cobblestones. And so, unceremoniously, we fled the city of Baku in the night. We were lucky to get away.

  No other automobiles chased us as we ran. After ten minutes of bone rattling, Ziyad eased off the accelerator for a bit, and pulled into the hills northwest of the city.

  Such a near thing, our escape. “What was that?” I asked in shaky German.

  “That was the Institute,” Ziyad replied, his voice so slurred I could hardly understand him.

  “The Institute? This was the place you spoke of in Istanbul? I imagined it as some kind of university,” I said, a shaky laugh in my voice. “If these are the professors in your country, I am afraid to meet the Cheka.”

  He looked at me in the rearview mirror through the shadows, eyes wild. “No, the Institute is worse. It is the Institute that brought down the magic of the czar, in the Revolution. They know my people, the ones who weave the carpets of magic. And now the Institute knows that I have returned.”

  The way that Asmodel had known my trail would lead to Budapest, sooner or later. Did the ancient demon also know I searched for the gem here, in Baku?

  Ziyad leaned forward and hunched over the wheel to peer through the windshield. Downtown Baku had been granted the marvel of streetlights, but the streets outside Baku were dark, and only white paint applied in rings to the trees lining the streets illuminated our path out of the city.

  He didn’t have to explain any further; the thugs from the Institute supplied all the information we needed. Ziyad had many enemies in Baku, and as far as I could tell he, not me or Raziel, was the object of Stalin’s intentions.

  I don’t mean to say that Josef Stalin himself set this desperate band of men and spirits upon us. From the outside, Stalin’s empire was superficially much like Adolf Hitler’s.

  But Hitler’s Reich used their own Teutonic magic to enforce their iron rule over the ordinary people. They claimed magic for the state, and the magic in Hitler’s world was malign, corrosive, and part of his apparatus of social control.

  Stalin, however, repudiated magic, saw it as the chief enemy to his aspirations to world domination. As a materialist, he sought to stamp out magic as the one thing he could not control. So in his world, magic was a subversive force, something his people were working to eradicate.

  In Azerbaijan, one of the captive countries of the Soviet Union, the magic was indigenous, something Stalin did not know how to control. It was not officially treason to consort with magicals or, as a mortal, to resort to the use of magic; magic was far too thick on the ground in Azerbaijan to attempt such wholesale suppression.

  Stalin himself was no stranger to the magic of the Caucasus, and the royal magic wielded by the Russian czars. The Communists fought the royal magic bitterly until it was destroyed. Stalin and his fellow Bolsheviks hated magic, believed it a tool of oppression and nothing more. And so they founded the Institute for Brain Research in Leningrad, to study and measure magic, to make a science of it.

  They believed that once they understood and quantified the magic they could then control it, and ultimately destroy it.

  Given these articles of Communist faith, magicals occupied a precarious place in materialist Soviet society. They could not rip the magic out of themselves, so they were inherently a threat to the system Stalin, and Lenin before him, had imposed over the vast lands previously controlled by the Russian czars.

  Where did that leave a foreign witch and her outlawed Azeri guide? In a very dangerous place, indeed.

  “Where are we going now?” I asked.

  “The temple of fire,” Ziyad replied. “We must. The priestess there will offer us sanctuary.”

  He said something to the man in the passenger seat next to him, and the other bent over, muttering low in Azeri, his voice harsh and hoarse. I realized with a start that the tough old assassin was weeping.

  “We’re going somewhere very bad,” I told Raziel in Hungarian.

  He shrugged and leaned forward, squinting into the night, trying his best to identify the dangers looming ahead of us.

  In the gloom I saw trains running like shadows to our left, boxcars sliding along the tracks, thunk thunk in the night. “Do you know of the temple of fire?” I asked Raziel. As a man, he was raw and still mostly untested; as an angel, he had seen wonders and terrors I could never have imagined.

  “This is a Zoroastrian temple. Do not be afraid,” he said, and grabbed my hand, as if he’d forgotten he was no longer an angel. “No matter what you see.”

  Somehow I did not find his words reassuring.

  10

  We reached the temple of fire at dawn. The assassin in the front seat wept anew at the sight of the sun. I looked at the back of Ziyad’s head and decided not to trouble him again for an explanation. Sometimes words fail.

  We sped through a sleepy village to a fortress ringed by a thick stone wall. Ziyad pulled into the entrance, and a metal grating clanked down behind us.

  It was clear: there would be no leaving here without the permission of the fortress holders. Ziyad cut the engine, and we sat, wordless, in the hot, sweaty dawn.

  The engine ticked over, then fell silent. All that could be heard now was birdsong. Finally, Ziyad sighed and pulled a handkerchief from his front pant pocket. He mopped at his face and rested his forehead on the wheel.

  The temple of fire. I smelled cigarette smoke again. But I didn’t need Viktor’s warning to know this was a place of danger.

  We got out of the car. It was stifling hot, unnaturally so for November, like the air had been siphoned outside the temple walls.

  Ziyad shuffled to the far side of the entrance arch, and we followed him. Sweat stuck his shirt to
his back. He rapped on the wooden door with his bony knuckles, and after a few moments slowly the door drew backward.

  I expected some kind of terrifying ghoul to greet us, but instead a very young woman, with glossy black hair parted in the middle, met us with a bow. Her face looked strangely familiar. The young woman said something in Azeri and we followed Ziyad and his men inside the walls, into another courtyard.

  At first it looked like a castle court, nothing too far out of the ordinary. A covered well stood in the middle of the courtyard, with a tower above it.

  But something seemed terribly off about the place, wrong in a fundamental way that I couldn’t consciously identify. It was far too hot for so early on a day in November. The courtyard hung lopsided, the walls not square but bulging outward like they had melted even as they were being built.

  Wooden doors built into the walls surrounding us crouched too low, built for an army of children or imps. The fortress looked like it had sunk a good meter into the ground sometime after its building.

  Dreadfully hot. Hot and dark, the flames burning but not illuminating. And the colors were hideously wrong. The grass under our feet grew yellow, not dried and dead, but alive and yellow. The stone of the fortress was a dull red with flecks of bone gray. And the tower over the closed-up well was painted a garish orange. It seemed to glow in that unnatural heat.

  My skin began to crawl, and a moment later my conscious mind caught up with my senses. That was no covered well.

  It was some kind of furnace.

  “She wants to know if you worship the fire,” Ziyad was saying to me. I looked at him and he crossed his arms, as if he had been repeating himself and I’d only just heard him this last time.

  I looked at her, really looked, and she smiled back, in her place of power. It belatedly occurred to me this girl was a witch.

  Not a witch of spells, like I am. Not a witch of lore. But a servant of the fire.

  “Tell her I am her sister. But I do not know the fire.”

  As Ziyad translated my missive, the girl and I smiled at each other from across the great gulf of our language, our disparate lives. She recognized my power as I recognized hers.

  She said something in her quiet voice, and Ziyad said on the heels of her words, “She welcomes you to her temple.”

  “Who are these fire worshipers, Ziyad? And do they serve your cause?”

  In answer he leaned toward the girl, and they spoke together in the soft, sibilant language of Azerbaijan. “She says to speak magic and you will have your answer,” Ziyad finally said.

  His voice was calm, but he stepped backward as he spoke. I glanced at Raziel, who scratched at his jaw and shrugged.

  “Sh’ma…,” I sang, softly. Not a prayer I used to work spells, but one to focus my intention, bring my power to rise.

  My words turned to fire in the air, as if I had lit a parchment with the words and held it while it burned. The flames licked at the air and disappeared.

  “You speak in fire,” the girl said, and Ziyad translated.

  I smiled at her, shy now. I knew better than to work a spell in this girl’s holy place. “Thank you for your sanctuary.”

  The assassins had stayed in the car, muttering to each other and glaring darkly through the windshield at us. “Why are they so afraid of this place?” I asked Raziel.

  “I fear it, too,” he said.

  “But why?”

  “This is the native magic of this country,” Raziel said. “It is hungry, the fire. When the fire worshipers die, they put their bodies to the flame. Some say…” He glanced at the girl with us, still smiling, not understanding his Hungarian. “There are rumors that the fire devours living souls in this land as well.”

  I studied the girl with us. “No, this girl does not sacrifice unwilling victims to the fire. I can assure you of that, my love.”

  He licked his lips, and his face didn’t relax. “This girl does not, this temple does not. But in the hills. At the Mountain of Fire. There they practice the old ways.”

  I whispered the Ninety-first Psalm into the air, watched in wonder as the letters sparked into the sky and faded away. “I need to find the gem in those mountains. As long as the fire worshipers do not try to stop me, I have no quarrel with them or their ways.”

  “They have their own interest in what you seek,” Raziel said, his voice reflective. He took a tentative step toward the furnace set into the ground, held his hand out to sense the heat radiating from the earth. “Gem sorcery is of the earth, but jewels are tempered with fire, Magduska. There is a reason that the sapphire has remained hidden so long.”

  His voice sounded melancholy, but his face remained serene. “It was bad enough I hunted The Book of Raziel,” I said. “Do you think the gem will cause even more trouble?”

  He sighed. “Given the fact that Hitler has the Book now, and it has been empowered by the Soviet anti-magic, I don’t think we have a choice but to bring the Heaven Sapphire into the war.”

  The girl motioned for me to step closer. She actually grabbed my wrist as she leaned forward, and she stared into my eyes with a terrible intensity as she spoke.

  “We are persecuted for worshiping death,” she whispered. Ziyad translated for us in a trembling voice, one that tripped over the difficult words. “The professors of the Institute for Brain Research. They hate death, seek to vanquish it as the only enemy, the strongest one.”

  “But death is not the enemy,” I said. I hated to admit it, but I knew it to be so, at least for me. “In the end, much as we fear death, it is part of life.”

  “No. You are my sister, you know it to be truth. To have the light, we must have the dark. The fire must prevail, and the fire consumes as well as shines.

  “Do not fear the fire. For it will consume only that which can be burned away.”

  We stared at each other in the sudden silence.

  Her fingers tightened around my wrist. “You seek a dangerous object in this land.”

  “Yes,” I said, unable as well as unwilling to hide the truth.

  “You will be tempted by many lesser treasures, including that of your life. But hold fast to your quest, and do not relinquish it when you have found it, not until it is time.”

  “I won’t.” I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheeks in thanks, Russian-style, three times with a hug at the end. Like Gisele, this girl possessed the gift for far-seeing, but as far as I could tell she did not suffer the visions the way Gisele did.

  With my kiss the spirit of second sight left her. The girl took a deep breath and stepped backward, letting my wrist out of her failing grasp.

  Her eyes fluttered, and she swayed on her feet. But then she regained her footing, her eyes opened, her lips again stretched into a polite smile.

  “Welcome to the temple of fire.” She had forgotten her own prophecy. “Please enter and seek sanctuary here.”

  * * *

  However fearsome the local sect, the fire worshipers had evidently cast their lot with Ziyad’s folk in the mountains. They quickly arranged for transportation to the north—Ziyad’s auto was too modern for the northern provinces and would be noticed immediately.

  But when our transport arrived the following morning, I almost refused to ride. Something terrible had happened in the night. Ziyad and his comrades the fire worshipers had secured for us a hearse.

  I had never seen a vehicle like it. It was modern in that it had an engine, not a horse or mule, powering it. But it was painted pink and white, a birthday cake of a contraption, and its windows were festooned with gold and pink curtains all around—even the windshield was framed in shimmering gold curtains, tied off with sashes to the sides.

  I did not realize this contraption was a hearse until Ziyad made his appearance. He looked absolutely ghastly—as if his soul had disappeared into the fire overnight. I checked him for signs of demonic possession or malignant curse, but no. It wasn’t magic that assailed Ziyad Juhuri. But death.

  “You may ride in the
back,” Ziyad said, his voice so hoarse I could scarcely understand him. “And there is a place to hide quickly in case of trouble. Though for the sake of all that is holy I hope that matters do not come to that.”

  The back cabin was hot and airless, a rolling tomb. And planted in the middle, cushioned on a small mountain of rugs, was a coffin, painted white and gold, with a beautifully intricate portrait on the face.

  A woman’s face, with the same visage as the woman captured in the threads of Ziyad Juhuri’s finest carpet hanging on the wall of his showroom in Istanbul. It was also the same visage, I realized now with a shudder, of the girl who had welcomed us to the temple of fire the day before.

  I stared at that face for a long time, casting about with my magic for a name to match. I looked up at Ziyad, considered asking him for the woman’s identity, her fate, but decided against it.

  The poor man misread me. “I am sorry, Miss Lazarus, but none of this can be helped. It is a burden you must bear.” Sobs choked his voice, but his eyes stayed dry.

  I considered asking him whether the coffin was empty and, if not, why the priestess didn’t go into the fire, but I decided for once not to try to satisfy my curiosity.

  Instead, I just said, “Oh no. I understand. I’ve ridden in hay wagons, in the back of a Nazi Black Maria. We travel now in luxury, compared to that. And with any luck, nobody will think to question you, in a hearse. I only wish I could have bidden the priestess farewell.”

  “Do not fear, the fair maiden has not been fed to the fire,” Ziyad said, his eyes now sparkling with tears.

  I glanced at the coffin again. Perhaps our hostess had only stayed away from us, and not died in the night?

  “I wanted to thank her for her help,” I said gently.

  Ziyad’s expression grew hooded and fierce. “You can thank her by finding and capturing the gem.”

  So we left the environs of Baku, without even a single bystander to wave good-bye—probably better for the bystanders’ sakes.