by Michele Lang
After so much effort, so many battles, so much blood and death, I had finally succeeded in my quest. I had found and claimed the fabled Heaven Sapphire.
It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. There wasn’t a thing I could do to use it. Any attempt would prove fatal—or worse.
I had never felt more grateful for my fallen husband, who had left Heaven behind to help me somehow bear the burden of this gem. Raziel was the only one standing between me and the road to Hell through the eye of the sapphire.
“Does it speak?” I asked.
Raziel shrugged yet again, not even a whisper of a smile on his face this time. “Raziel” means “Secrets of God,” and well is my soul mate named. Raziel, too, had his ‘no,’ and he, too, wielded his silence like a profound magic. There was more magic in what he didn’t say than there was in all the Caucasus surrounding us.
And in that moment I finally understood why my beloved husband faithfully kept those holy secrets. Because once they got loose, the truths hidden in Raziel’s silence would tear the world apart.
The girl in the corner sang into the silence, wordless little nonsense that set my skin to crawling. The chills attacked me again with a vengeance.
I closed my eyes again, this time to shut out the sound of the little girl as best I could. “Ugh, terrible. That song is poisonous. Like absinthe for breakfast.”
Raziel laughed then. “Don’t tell me how you know that.”
His voice, utterly calm and ordinary, banished my fear and set the world to rights once again. “I sometimes think you are the antidote to this magic’s poison.”
“There is no antidote.”
This time I laughed, and struggled to my feet, the cigar box balanced in my hands. The gem was the size of a croissant. It seemed to weigh as much as a Mercedes.
“This isn’t a sapphire.”
“It’s not only a sapphire. Here, give it to me.”
I gratefully handed the thing over, and enjoyed watching the muscles in Raziel’s arms bulging as he took on the weight of the gem.
“So what do we do with this thing? Throw it in the Caspian Sea?”
“No, that wouldn’t work. Noah himself tried that, not all that far from here. And here it is … My own brother Gabriel fished it out and saved it. He was afraid of Leviathan getting it, I have my own worries.”
Asmodel. Raziel didn’t have to say it—for once I understood exactly what he meant.
“I thought finding the gem would prove my greatest triumph,” I said under my breath. But instead of triumph or even relief, a cold gray dread sank into me like a winter’s soaking rain.
The best I could do with this terrible relic of ancient history was keep it inert if I could. But the Heaven Sapphire was alive. It had a mind, and had lived in solitary obscurity for thousands of years.
It was hungry. Very, very hungry, for life.
18
“What if we just hid the gem again?” I said, knowing even as I uttered the words that the time for hidden obscurity for the Heaven Sapphire was finished, forever.
Just then I heard the screeching of tires outside. The little girl screamed.
I almost jumped out of my skin.
“No,” Raziel said, his voice still calm, even as he leaped into action. He ran for the window at the back of the hut facing away from the path leading to the front door.
I heard a car door slam, the sound almost masked by the poor little girl’s shrieks. Raziel perched on the window ledge, cradling the cigar box in the crook of his arm.
“Quickly, Magduska!”
We both guessed who our sudden visitors were: members of the secret police from the dreaded Institute. It was impossible to pass through Quba unnoticed, and we hadn’t even tried. But I was surprised they had traced our flight into the mountains so quickly.
Raziel slipped his legs through the window and dangled over the ledge, balancing the cigar box on the sill. I whipped the carpet/curtain in front of us to hide us, slipped over the ledge, too …
And found that our feet dangled over a sheer cliff that stretched far, far below us, into the mists and out of sight. The fall could be a few meters or hundreds. We could not tell by sight.
“Magda,” Raziel whispered. “Climb down my body and feel for a rock shelf. We have only a few moments.”
The hut’s walls vibrated with the bang of the front door as somebody slammed it open. Loud voices inside yelled something in Russian, even as the girl kept screaming.
I shimmied down the back of Raziel’s body, swinging and feeling frantically with my toes for any place we could hide. It was nearly sheer, going straight down.
“No ledge,” I whispered back up, my cheek resting against the small of Raziel’s back. I transferred my weight off of Raziel and onto the base of the stone hut instead. My feet balanced on a little spur of rock sticking out from the edge of the cliff.
Raziel climbed down one-handed, hanging on to the cigar box with his right hand. His whole body trembled with the effort of holding on to the rocky cliffside, and I was sure he was going to fall to his death.
The voices of the men, both speaking Russian, got louder and louder. The girl’s screams abruptly were cut off.
Raziel and I looked into each other’s eyes, willing ourselves silent, and stuck to the ledge. The stone spur beneath my feet began to crumble, and I started sliding down.
“Oh no,” I whispered. It was an absurd thing to say, but nothing more brilliant came to mind.
My magic was useless here. I can bind souls, remove them from bodies, repel them. I can throw witchfire summoned up out of my life force, and I can work certain curses and spells. But a cliffside has no soul, and I could not summon my own body out of the sky.
And Raziel had no magic of his own. He started slipping, too.
A terrible vision flashed in my mind, placed there by the gem or not I do not know. Raziel and I, dead at the bottom of the ridge, the men in the stone hut taking the gem away, me wanting to return from the dead but trapped, trapped, instead hovering over my abandoned bones for the rest of time, and the battle raged on forever.
New power surged into my quivering muscles, and I held on tenaciously, refusing to fall. I whispered strength into Raziel’s arms—I could do that much at least—and we clung there, shaking and grunting with the effort, as the men inside the hut slammed their way out again, back into their auto.
I saw the beetle black vehicle, a big gangster car, shoot past the stone hut and back down the side of the pass.
“Up,” Raziel gasped, and with a terrible effort we pulled ourselves up, up … and back onto solid ground.
We lay there, lungs heaving, for too long. “We’ve got to chase them,” Raziel said between gasps.
My mind wavered over his words. “Shouldn’t we just let them go away?”
“They are going back down the mountain to Quba, and the Red Town.”
In a flash I understood. “They are going back to the people in town.”
“Yes. To punish the magical folk for cheating them yet again, while we got safely away.”
I lurched to a sitting position. My arms still twitched and ached. “How will we ever get there in time? To warn them, at least?”
I looked at the cigar box, still balanced in Raziel’s hands. And could feel the intensity of the gem’s stare from inside.
Even through the opaque wood, the thing was watching me, gauging my thinking, my thoughts.
“We’ll have to bring the sapphire with us.”
“Yes. It’s safer with you than anyone else in the world, Magda.”
He was wrong. The gem was safest with Raziel, its giver. Long ago, he had mastered the gem enough to bequeath it to a mortal woman.
“I don’t have magic,” he said, reading my expression and responding to my fears. “Solomon had no magic, either,” he continued, “and look what happened to him.”
I gulped. The great king, he of the thousand wives and Holy Temple, the blessings of the Almighty
Himself. Solomon had held this very stone in his hands. And even he, with the gem to command and the best of intentions, had faltered and succumbed to its power, overwhelmed by Asmodel. And the Temple had crumbled into dust.
What had I done, unearthing this thing? “We have to warn our friends in Quba about these agents from Baku, from the Institute. Maybe the gem could stop them some way.”
Raziel’s smile was bleak. “Maybe. But that’s how a lot of trouble started, a long time ago.”
19
Raziel and I stood on the pinnacle of a mountain pass, far above the valley where Quba and the Red Town straddled the river.
How could we possibly make it down the mountain in time? Could we fly somehow? Raziel and I found the answer in the same moment.
“Magic carpets,” Raziel said. “The only way.”
Madness. Uzziel had taken Helena’s flying carpet back to Quba. We were carpetless. I would not have known the way on foot, did not know how to drive a carpet in any case. And what if its magic flagged for even an instant? We would be dumped into the cliffs far below.
We had only a moment to decide. Raziel nodded at me—he was ready to take the risk, and only waited for me.
“But aren’t flying carpets different from your ordinary magic carpet?” I asked.
Raziel shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’ll bet that you can figure it out.” Perhaps, but we had no time to lose.
I wondered how fast an auto could make it down the pass. And then I forced my mind away from the thought, and instead turned my thoughts to the task of mastering a strange new magic.
Raziel and I looked around inside the hut, then dragged a nice, big carpet outside to the street. I paused to consider the blind girl, now sleeping peacefully in her bed.
“She’s much safer here alone than with us,” Raziel said.
I swallowed hard. He was right. If our plan succeeded, we were heading straight into mortal danger.
I looked at the dusty old thing lying inert on the path and I sighed. “I cannot move inanimate objects with my magic,” I said, tamping down my rising frustration as best I could.
“Uzziel has no spellcraft. Think, Magda. Quickly!”
I racked my brain for some spell, some trick that would liberate us from the ground. I sat in the center of the carpet, cross-legged, hoping that the physical contact could give me purchase for a spell.
“How did your brother do it?”
Raziel sat down next to me. “I don’t have any idea.” He cradled the cigar box in his hands.
I replayed our journey up the mountain in my mind. Uzziel worked no spell, I was sure of it.
A tail feather from the lone rooster we’d seen before fluttered past in the unceasing mountain breeze. I snatched it and held it furled in my left fist. And had my inspiration.
“Helena, home, the women’s factory of Quba,” I sang.
The carpet knew its origin. It knew its true home. And, like in a dream, it gravitated to its beginning.
The carpet shot into the air, almost tossing me off right away. “Raziel…,” I said, sounding for once like the scared girl I actually was, not the fell witch of Budapest.
“Never mind. Hold on!”
And I could no longer say a word, we flew so fast and hard, the hills and twiggy trees whipping quickly past us.
I crouched over the carpet, entangled my fingers in the thick fringe woven along the front. The wool carpet under me whipped like a flag in gale.
There was no way I was going to manage to hold on.…
No sooner had I had that thought than the carpet banked sharply to the right and shot through a mountain pass. I couldn’t hold back a little shriek, a gobbled-up scream that never quite made it out of my throat.
The carpet righted itself again, and I lowered my head to shield my face from the wind, and to take a gulp of air.
When I looked up again at Raziel, I could not believe my eyes.
He was laughing. Not at me, not at the way I awkwardly clung to the carpet edges for dear life, but for joy. For the first time since Raziel had surrendered his wings, he was totally free.
The thought stung. My love wasn’t enough to give my beloved such untrammeled, uncomplicated joy. Because the shadow of fear hung over both of us, trapped in the ordeal of the war.
I realized that Raziel would die happy if he lost his seating and plunged to his death on the rocks below us.
He glanced at me then, and if anything his fierce joy flared up even higher. “I love you!” he yelled, his face glowing as brightly as on the day I first met him, when he was a celestial agent of vengeance, unfurling his wings on a train platform in Vienna.
I could not even whisper in reply, I could not bear to break the spell of his joy and freedom. All I could manage was a smile. Death stalked us, close as our own shadows. Yet Raziel, heedless of death itself, made every moment so immeasurably precious.
* * *
The hills and spindly trees soon gave way to the valley, town, and river below. The carpet glided to the street and landed at the front door of the women’s carpet factory, on an utterly ordinary street in the shabby part of Quba.
I rose to my feet and standing on the carpet, trembling, I looked again at Raziel. He stood at his full height, and again flashed me that fearless, defiant smile.
And right in the street, in the midst of our danger, I, too, for a moment was free of our pursuers, had eyes only for my husband.
His brothers, the Yazata, only saw Raziel’s missing wings when they looked at him. But when I looked at him, tousled and exhilarated from our wild ride down the mountain, I saw what he had gained, becoming a man.
Courage, will, action.
Passion.
His very mortality was a gift to Raziel, gave him something dangerous, precious. He could die. Would die. And he was ready to die, in service to something greater.
“Told you we’d make it,” he said.
“Right again,” I whispered. “But how do we know the men from the Institute aren’t already inside, with the girls in this factory?”
Raziel didn’t answer that, and with a start I understood why. Those solemn, silent, humble girls in that factory would never betray us, no matter what was happening inside. They were the ones betrayed.
Those weavers invested their strength in silence. None of them were inclined to talk, most of them didn’t speak Russian at all, and the secret police wouldn’t bother with these “insignificant” girls.
My heart turned to stone when I finally realized where my thoughts led. “We’ve come to the wrong place,” I whispered. “Don’t you see? The girls aren’t in any immediate danger. We don’t need to warn them. It’s the men, the fellows at the café, the ones who trusted us—they are the ones of interest to the Institute.”
Raziel whirled around, but the dusty street was deserted. When he looked back at me, his eyes were wild, and the freedom in them was gone. “Too late, then.”
“Not too late to try.”
My sense of geography wasn’t all that good, so I closed my eyes to cast. When I cast, I looked for souls, with my witch’s sight.
And I found them, quickly, too—the men who spent their afternoons drinking apple tea at the Empress Café.
Now outnumbered by the thugs from the Institute.
With my eyes still closed, I pointed in their direction like a compass needle. When I opened my eyes to look, I saw that I was pointing over the bridge to the Jewish side of town.
“Café this way,” I said. And I broke into a run.
Raziel overtook me, even with the unnaturally heavy gem inside the cigar box, still tucked inside his left elbow like a parcel. I chased him, my thoughts moving faster than my feet.
What did those agents want? Raziel and I for certain, but they wanted the gem more. Worlds more.
I stopped running. “Raziel,” I said, my shoulders knotting with the tension. “You’ve got to get away. This whole thing’s a trap. Take the gem to Churchill.”
Razi
el stopped, too, out of breath. He looked again to make sure we stood alone on the street. The river moved sluggishly under our feet—we stood together in the middle of the footbridge.
“You go, Magda. Take the gem—you have the magic, can guard it. You were made for it.”
I smiled at him. The world around us seemed to stop, too, poised on this moment. “No, there’s got to be more of a point to me than that. You are strong, and better yet, nobody is looking for you. I am the witch of Budapest. That’s Somebody. You will make it to England, maybe with your brothers’ help, and Churchill will remember you well.”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek, considering my words. And then he nodded, making up his mind just like that. “If you were as wicked and weak as you think, I would never leave you behind, Magduska. But you are stronger than me. Go, stop the secret police if you can. Distract them. And I will get away to England.”
He nodded once more, lifted his hat to me as if we were mere acquaintances meeting by chance, and then he sauntered away, cigar box tucked under his arm like an actual box of cigars and not the doomsday weapon and fabled gem the Heaven Sapphire.
I watched him go, but only for a minute. When I was sure Raziel was safely away, I turned to face the Jewish side of the city, cast again to see the men we knew surrounded, and broke into a run.
I would stop the Institute. I believed my magic itself would be enough.
But I didn’t know about the horrifying weapons they wielded. Had no way to know. Against them, alas, my magic was about to meet its match.
* * *
I ran up the stairs to the Empress as quietly as I could, on my toes so my heels wouldn’t bang against the metal steps.
I drew close to the half-open door that led to the terrace, and held my breath.
The men who had met us so recently now stood with their hands up, a small stack of knives on the big, round table where Helena had served us tea and cookies.
The Soviet agents from the Institute pointed guns at their faces. But the men were calm.
Poor Helena, however, clutched at her temples and screamed. A small, toadlike man with round spectacles pushed her against a huge, greasy-looking metal contraption set up against the far wall.