Rebel Angels

by Michele Lang

  Raziel laughed and I turned to face him. “It takes a lot to amaze you, my love. But Uzziel has managed it.”

  “I had thought you were one of a kind,” I replied, too serious as usual.

  My husband laughed louder, and I imagined Raziel’s golden wings that he had lost, stretching behind his shoulders once again. “No, not really. These are the Yazata I told you about in Baku—seraphim who fell to earth for love of women. They are fallen, but not demons. They live as men, untouched by hunger for power, free of the evil that the ancient demons possess. I asked to fall, and the Almighty gave me permission. But Uzziel and I walk the same road.”

  Uzziel motioned for us to follow him across the room, which was empty except for rugs piled over the floor, in layers so deep that we sank into little hills of rugs as we walked forward.

  “Are you hungry? Thirsty?” he asked, his palms open.

  “Thank you, no. Azerbaijan, so welcoming to strangers. But such a terrifying place nonetheless,” I blurted out.

  He met my eyes—his own were black as obsidian, enormous, and filled with a sadness I did not understand. “Your fear is born of wisdom, Lazarus.”

  I gulped and shivered at his words—was it that obvious to the fallen ones that I was a Lazarus witch? Was I that exposed to their scrutiny, and did my weaknesses shine out as obviously? “I am afraid,” I admitted. “Maybe you can tell me why.”

  “We’re not stomach hungry,” Raziel said. “The people all along the way have fed and watered us whether we needed it or not. But we are hungry for knowledge.”

  Uzziel sank into silence at Raziel’s words. He closed his eyes and sighed. “I know, I knew it the moment I saw you once again. The great Raziel does not walk the earth for trifles. For you, my brother, for you … I have no secrets from you. The secrets that you keep I know you keep on behalf of the Maker. And so it must be.”

  “Your secrets are safe,” Raziel said, and though his voice stayed soft, I startled at the sound of it. “I don’t care why you first fell from Heaven. Does it matter, really? What matters now is that Stalin and Hitler have made a pact to destroy the world. And Magda and I want the gem of Raziel.”

  Uzziel sighed and looked away, even as he began tapping at the carpets on the floor with his foot. “The sapphire. You know better than anybody why that gem is hidden away.”

  “Of course. But I am telling you, the gem will come back into the world of men now, with our allies or in the hands of Hitler.” Raziel winced, as if his words hurt him physically. “And you know who is the parasite of Hitler.”

  “No, my friend.” Uzziel’s voice contained a wary note. “Hitler is bad enough by himself, no?”

  Raziel closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Asmodel.”

  The silence that descended over us, thick and heavy, almost took my breath away. I looked from one former angel to another, trying to figure it out without asking. “Do you know him?” I finally asked in a whisper.

  Uzziel snapped his attention to me, and I saw the fury in him, the tears standing unshed in his eyes. “He is my brother. I followed him to Earth, when the world was young. I lived to regret it, regret him. And I have sworn to kill him the next time I see him.”

  I gulped. Asmodel and I had our share of bad encounters, always ending in bitterness and bloodshed. What had it been like for Uzziel to live alongside him, follow him down and down until he refused to follow him farther?

  “No man can vanquish that demon,” I whispered, trembling now but refusing to back down. “And now you are not an angel, but a man.”

  “I am not a man,” Uzziel all but growled. I sneaked a peek with my witch’s sight and saw sparks of fury showering out from his head in a fiery nimbus. “I am an angel fallen, one who left Heaven in order to walk this earth. Your Raziel is a man. I am not a man.”

  I blinked hard in the face of his fury and shifted my attention to Raziel. “I am sorry, but I don’t understand. Forgive me for being so stupid.”

  Raziel shook his head wearily at my words. “You are not stupid, just a mortal who does not know the ways of angels. I asked permission to return, Uzziel chose to fall of his own accord. I returned as a man, Uzziel remains an angel, one lost from Heaven. He has embraced the fire. Asmodel started like Uzziel, but fell further and further down, became more and more a slave to his own will. But we all started the same. Uzziel, Asmodel, me—brothers. Brothers who have traveled far away from each other, far from home.”

  Once again I regretted the fact that Raziel had descended for my sake. Much as I adored him, I would have spared him our current misery. But Raziel had made his own choices, the way his brothers had done, the way I had done, and I would not deprive Raziel of his choices, not even if I had been able to.

  The carpets undulated under our feet, little wavelets that responded to the angry words spoken above them. “Peace,” Uzziel said, sounding so much like Raziel that I couldn’t help smile. The carpets settled, but the patterns moved around, faster and faster, as if they could only contain themselves by shifting.

  “What is the magic of these carpets?” I asked. I felt like a child here, so ignorant of the ways of the Caucasus, the magic that rose up strangely from every tree and rock, that seemed to permeate the air.

  “The people who weave them,” Uzziel replied. “They are my children, and their magic comes from me, not their mothers. They weave holy sparks into the silk.”

  He watched the carpets and their beautiful, ever-changing patterns under our feet as if, like me, he were seeing them for the first time. “I don’t think the gem should be released. Not after seeing what happened the last time it was known to the world.”

  “You are wrong, my brother,” Raziel said. “The gem is coming back to the world, no matter how much you and I might seek to keep it hidden. Asmodel will make sure of it.”

  “Asmodel isn’t stupid,” Uzziel replied. “He knows how dangerous it is. He already wields so much power—why does he seek to risk losing all of it?”

  “He is seduced by the power of the gem,” Raziel said, his voice genuinely sad. “The lust for it is driving Asmodel crazy, just like he in turn has driven Hitler to take stupid risks, driven by lust and ambition.”

  “Hitler could banish him with a single word,” Uzziel said.

  “Of course, but he wants Asmodel’s power to augment his own, the same way the ancient one wants the gem. To rule the world.”

  Uzziel laughed again, and the carpets pressed flat against the floor. “Asmodel’s an idiot, then.”

  “No, just terrified of losing.”

  Together we watched the carpets’ hypnotizing patterns in silence. “We are hunting the gem, whether you help us or not,” Raziel said.

  “We can stop you any time,” Uzziel replied.

  “Yes. We are strangers here, in your country.”

  Uzziel crossed his arms and sighed.

  “None of us want war, not after what happened here during the Civil War and after, when the Soviets came. We have enough trouble resisting the anti-magic of the Institute.”

  “I know. But war is here, no matter what any of us want.”

  “I cannot make this decision for everyone. Come, let us talk to my daughters. They will tell me what to do. They are the ones who will pay the price for unleashing the gem. Let them decide it.”

  I marveled at the mention of daughters, the children of angels, my cousins, really. What price would these magic weavers have to pay? Before I could ask, Uzziel rose to his full height, much taller than I had first thought. He rose up like a Greek god, swung his arms as if he were getting ready to throw a discus. I looked again with my second sight and his light all but blinded me.

  I turned away, let my true sight pull back. Sometimes illusions make the truth easier to take.

  * * *

  I expected us to climb into the mountains overnight, fighting Azerbaijani monsters, demons, and bears the entire way. But instead Uzziel took us on foot through the forest to the town of Quba once again. Th
e stars sparkled overhead, like chips of broken glass against black velvet.

  We walked through silent, deserted streets. Even the dogs had gone to sleep, or they were smart enough to stay out of Uzziel’s way. We came to a stop in front of a small wooden building exactly like the other ones on the block.

  The lights shone from inside. I was afraid to cast my sight into that light, of what I would find. “Is this some kind of temple?” I asked, my voice small.

  “No,” Uzziel said, a laugh hidden in his voice. “Carpet factory. But the carpets they make … perhaps this is a temple, of sorts. I never thought about it that way before.”

  The door was unlocked and the threshold unwarded. Uzziel opened the door, and we three stepped out of the dark, damp night into a warm room that smelled of lemons. A samovar stood in the corner, polished to a high shine.

  Before Uzziel could say anything else, a woman appeared in the back of the room. She was dressed all in black, like a witch or a widow. Her salt-and-pepper hair, pulled back into a bun, revealed a high forehead and a widow’s peak. Her eyes, still fine, took in the sight of us with a single, sharp glance.

  “Hello, Helena,” Uzziel said. “I have brought you two strangers from the West.”

  Helena took a sudden sharp intake of breath, then she forced herself to exhale slowly and she smiled at us, a tight, tentative smile. “Welcome,” she said in Azeri—Uzziel translated from the local tongue into the angelic one, which all of us could understand.

  Raziel said nothing, and Uzziel looked at me, so I stepped forward and made an awkward little bow. “Thank you,” I said in Hungarian, a catch in my voice. Uzziel, who understood me as the angels did, translated into Azeri for Helena. “We come from very far away.”

  “I know,” she replied, her manner formal but polite. “Many come to see this place, because there is nothing like it in the world. I take it you have come to see the carpets?”

  I glanced at Uzziel, unsure how to reply. “She has come to meet you,” Uzziel said, in angelic so that I, too, could understand. “This is Magdalena Lazarus, and Raziel, my brother. They have come in a desperate cause.”

  “Very well,” she said, as if Uzziel had confirmed we only wanted to see the carpets. “Please step this way. I will show you the factory floor. Keep your voices low … the girls work very hard, and must maintain their concentration.”

  As we walked, Helena kept glancing over at me, and blinking hard. I wasn’t sure if she knew what I was, or if any visitor would have caused such disquiet. I wanted to apologize for our unannounced midnight visit, but decided not to try.

  We followed her through a maze of tight hallways, as if we walked a labyrinth. My heart started pounding, although no magic of any kind threatened us here.

  The hallway opened up into a large room, one that looked larger than the entire building did from the outside. Over fifty girls hunched over clacking looms, filled with carpets of all sizes, from tiny doormats to enormous tapestries that stretched from floor to ceiling.

  I could not suppress a gasp. Helena smiled, a fleeting smile filled with tension. “A sight, isn’t it.”

  The only sound in the room came from the shuttlecocks sliding back and forth, knocking against the wooden frames as they shot underneath the silken threads. And the creak of the wood as they shifted the warp and woof to weave again.

  A group of smaller girls, who looked no older than twelve, were gathered in a corner, holding frames in their laps. “These are the trainees,” Helena said. “They are hooking rugs. When they are ready, we train them on the looms.”

  I looked at those half a dozen girls, and my blood ran cold. They could have been me or Gisele or Eva at that age. They sparkled, not with magic but with their innocence and youth. All of them were very serious, more serious than Eva for certain, pulling at woolen bits of carpet with hooks, trimming the finished rugs with scissors to thicken the pile.

  “My God,” I whispered. “They are so young.”

  “Yes,” Helena said. “We teach them young. Before they forget.”

  These girls, innocent and tender, wove carpets of fire under their willing, nimble fingertips. I saw the fire rising up from the carpets they wove, saw the patterns dancing even trapped on the warp and woof of the carpet frames rising over our heads.

  My heart pounded harder. They reminded me too much of Gisele, and the thought of her at twelve, the day my father died, suddenly rose up huge in my mind, blocking out everything I saw.

  “Are they magicals?” I whispered.

  “No, not the way you mean,” Helena said. I tore my gaze away to look at the older woman, who looked more like a witch than did the famed witch of Amsterdam, Lucretia de Merode.

  And yet, this Helena was not a witch, either. Before I could ask, Helena answered my questions. “You are a witch, yes? You work the spells, you change the fabric of the world with your words. We are carpet weavers, we bring together the threads. And the threads speak to one another. We make no spells here. We cannot.”

  Every word Helena spoke was true, and yet I could not reconcile what she said with the reality of what transpired in the factory.

  And the hooked rugs. They all had faces on them, faces that moved, eyes that looked at us more openly than did the eyes of the girls who had woven them. The carpets, somehow, lived.

  “Tikkun olam,” I said.

  Raziel drew closer and put his arm around me. “They do not repair the greater world, but weave little worlds out of wool and silk. You threw sparks in the second Heaven, these girls weave sparks into the thread.”

  Their collective magic was greater than mine. But they did not use it to fight armies, or to master primordial gems with infernal powers. Instead they wove worlds, quietly and without a fuss. And then they went home, swept up for their mamas, washed the laundry, and baked the bread.

  A room full of Giseles. I couldn’t say a word, but wished with all my heart I could have been more like them. And I knew my presence put their worlds in danger. The Institute, or the Gestapo for that matter, would tear apart their carpets for any reason or none.

  “This factory is over four hundred years old,” Uzziel said. “And the women run it for themselves, they take the girls who never marry and give them homes, and have dowries for the girls who do marry.”

  “Is this an orphanage?”

  “Sometimes, when it needs to be.”

  I watched the weaving continue, and grew faint. Raziel held me tighter.

  “The poor lady needs tea,” Helena said, though her eyes looked knowingly at me. “Come, to the front room. Let us sit, I will bring some refreshment.”

  I sighed—the last thing I could conceive of doing was drinking more tea and having more walnut jam. But I had to let this room go … something about the sight of these girls, weaving their lives into the carpets, broke my heart.

  Back we went through the labyrinth of hallways to the front room. The carpets here looked tame compared to the living works still being born in the back.

  We sat down. The tea was brought, I made polite noises and drank it, though I didn’t even taste it as I swallowed. Raziel did all the talking, I nodded at the appropriate moments, and together we negotiated for the Heaven Sapphire.

  A terrible mistake, I wanted to say. But by now it was an inevitable mistake. The mistakes I had made all my life had brought me to this place. The only thing I could do now was make all of the mistakes come out right, somehow. Some way.

  Perhaps I didn’t have the magic to do that. I suspected that none of us did.

  15

  By the time we had finished our conference, the sun had risen high into the sky. Helena offered us breakfast, and I begged her no. Uzziel used the telephone in the corner, a sign of Helena’s status and her connections in this town high in the mountains, and we left for a summit of angels at the Empress Café, on the Jewish side of town.

  “What do you call the Jewish side of the town?” I asked Uzziel as we set off on foot through Quba to the bridge that
spanned the river separating the two.

  “They call it Red Town now,” Uzziel said, his face growing dangerously dark and angry. “When the Soviets came, they murdered many people. Rabbis, village elders from the mountains, Tats, Urdeks, and Mountain Jews alike. They wanted to show us who was boss, that none of our many different deities could protect us from them. The river ran red in 1937.”

  I gasped, and the pictures I had once seen playing out in Ziyad’s mind now projected themselves over my sight once again. So that was what had sent Ziyad abroad, in search of a superweapon that could stop the Soviets. The One Above wasn’t enough.

  “Why didn’t you use the gem then?” I asked him.

  Uzziel stared through me, and the morning sunlight made the dark highlights in his hair gleam copper. “You assume,” he said.

  I had to laugh—Raziel had said something almost the same to me, the day I’d met him. “I do,” I replied. “And I’m wrong most of the time. But it’s better than giving up.”

  “You never did give up, did you?”

  I thought he was joking at first, but then I saw the tension in his face. “I have the choice to give up, I suppose. But I am young, and foolish, and I have my youth and my health to spur me forward. And I have my little sister, too. Even if I wanted to just give up and die for good, I couldn’t just leave her to fend for herself.”

  Uzziel smiled again, but it was a reflex, and something much darker lurked in it. “In a way, giving you access to the gem is a form of giving up. Once the gem is unleashed, the world we knew is ended. A world we knew since time out of mind.”

  “But you heard Raziel. We don’t really have a choice, not any longer. The war is coming here, faster than we can stop it.”

  Uzziel looked at Raziel. Raziel said, “She’s right. You were able to hide the thing from Stalin, from the Institute even, but now Asmodel himself is coming. You won’t be able to hide it from him. More’s the pity.”

  Uzziel sighed with resignation. “My brothers are gathered at the Empress Café, next to the Kabalists Temple. You will convince them we have lost the secret, I am sure. You’ve managed to convince me, no matter how much I want to believe otherwise. You’ll have the gem, witch. But you won’t have it long.”