—
ALMOST AN HOUR EARLIER, WHEN I’D REACHED FOR Adam, hoping that somehow our link would function as it should, that somehow I could find him, let him know that I needed him, that I loved him, that I was scared and alone . . . I’d felt something touch my bond with Adam and slide away, unable to penetrate, to get inside of me or my bond. Instead, whoever it was used our bond to slide through the witch’s spells and into the basement where I was held.
It was different than it had been before. Its presence was even bigger. I could feel its magic, unfamiliar and familiar at the same time, and it flowed through me like an electric current as all around us, ghosts stirred. There were a lot of ghosts.
The vampire on the wall had drawn a breath to scream again, but instead he fell silent, as if he could sense the golem’s presence. He flattened against the wall and turned his face away from us.
The biggest difference between the first time I met the golem and this time was that it spoke to me.
Mercy, said the golem in my head. It didn’t really use my name, not as such, but an identifier that was more who I was than my own name could convey.
Its magic felt like . . . I swallowed when I figured out why some of it felt familiar. It felt like Guayota, the volcano god who had almost killed me not so long ago. My ankle still ached before storms.
I’d lived with magic my whole life—and not in a happy Harry Potter sort of way, either. Sure, magic worked by rules, but those rules were flexible, and different kinds of magic worked differently, and there were lots of different kinds of people and creatures who could access certain aspects of it. So there was pack magic, vampire magic. Witch magic. Wizard magic. Fae magic. Sorcerer magic.
Me? I had a bare thread of magic. I could shift into a coyote. I was a walker, descendant of the avatars who represented the animals to the native peoples of the American continents. Among other things, our jobs—back before the European invasion and their attendant diseases nearly wiped the native peoples off the planet—had been to attend the spirits of the dead. For that reason, as best as I could piece it together, the magic of the dead did not affect me, and the influence worked the other way around.
But the dead golem’s presence had amped my attraction for ghosts up to maximum, until I’d been swimming in ghosts. If there was any question that it had been my encounter with the spirit of the golem that had been responsible, the effect of its presence here answered that.
With it in the cellar, ghosts were flooding in despite the presence of vampires. Ghosts didn’t like vampires. I’d once thought it was because the vampires had killed them. But then I learned that there are some vampire gifts that allow vampires to command ghosts and other gifts that allow a vampire to consume them and use their substance for power.
Or it might be something as simple as the instinctive revulsion that cats (my own cat is an exception) feel for vampires.
The dead gathered around the golem and me like we were a campfire in a Montana winter. The air grew thick with that not-substance that seems to make up their immaterial bodies, and the feel of it vibrated my bones.
We are like, the golem said. We guard against evil. You found what magic has hidden from me, a canker, a cancer, a rot at the heart of my territory and lit me the path here also. Can you destroy these demons?
If we were going to have a conversation, I needed to be human. I supposed that we could converse without sound, as the golem was not really making sound. But I preferred to use real words, something I could shape with more sureness than the unruly babble that was my usual thought process.
The golem’s presence initially stirred up some hope that I might make it out of this alive. But by the time I was back in my human skin, the hope had drifted away with the warmth of my vanished fur. The basement was a lot colder when I was kneeling naked in the cage, and the golem was a ghost.
At the very least it was a spirit without form—that it passed through the witch’s wards was proof that it could not affect the material world any more than it could be affected by it.
I took a deep breath and felt the golem with other senses. It didn’t feel quite like a ghost, not quite, which is why I kept trying to identify it as a spirit instead. A different word for the same thing, but not quite. What was left of Rabbi Loew’s golem was very close kin to a ghost. I couldn’t figure out if it was the rabbi’s magic that made him feel so different, or if it was the magic that felt like Guayota’s magic.
He—unlike the first time I’d encountered the golem, it felt like a him, so I went with that feeling—had no power because it had been taken from him by Rabbi Loew all those centuries ago when the rabbi had stolen back the life he had bestowed.
When I had thought of golems, which wasn’t often because they are not common back in the Tri-Cities, I had conceived of them as magical robots, an animated bit of stone, obedient to the will of the man who had called them into being.
Our earlier meeting in the streets of the old Jewish Quarter had shaken that conviction. There had been an element of . . . self-determination and thought that had not belonged to a robot. And no robot ever had a spirit that traveled the streets long after the body was gone to dust.
Part of me had been working on the puzzle of the golem ever since I’d first met him.
I am no kind of skilled magic user. I didn’t know anything at all about the kabbalistic magic the old rabbi had used to create the Golem of Prague. But I’ve been exposed to lots of other kinds of magic.
Whatever it was now, based on the feel of the magic that surrounded him, I was pretty sure that the golem had started out as a manitou.
Manitou, according to Coyote (yes, that Coyote), are the bits of the spirit of the earth. The whole earth has an enormous manitou, it can stir as one spirit, but it is too large to be concerned with minor things. Mostly the earth’s manitou sleeps, and all of us should thank our lucky stars that is true.
Each dandelion or pebble has a bit of that manitou, a bit that is fully independent of the whole. But the manitou of a dandelion is very small and does not have much power to affect things around it. The mountains and lakes also have manitou; theirs are powerful and tend, like Mother Earth’s greater manitou, to be dangerous when roused. Mostly, that doesn’t happen a lot.
As he explained it, Coyote and his fellow avatars are very closely related to manitou—like a horse and a jackass. He’d flashed me a wicked grin as I lay in a hospital bed—put there by Guayota, who was, again according to Coyote, the manitou of a great volcano.
I might not be an expert on kabbalistic magic, but I was pretty sure that Rabbi Loew, who had created the golem, had found a manitou from something in between a mountain and a pebble. It had been strong enough to become the golem but small enough to be controlled by a man who worked kabbalistic magic. It had probably not been the manitou of the Vltava, which would be huge and powerful. Maybe it was from some long-buried stream or hill or something native to the earth of Josefov.
To me, such an act would have been evil. He had enslaved a living spirit. I doubted that a man European-born and -bred would have thought of the spirit as living. He would have considered it magical energy, maybe. That a manitou spirit was naturally territorial would only have helped the rabbi’s magic along.
The rabbi was a good man in all the stories I ever heard. If he’d known what he’d done, I was sure he’d have been appalled. But most Judeo-Christian churches do not believe in manitou. He had, as I had previously, thought of the golem as a robot, an object without feelings or true life.
When the rabbi had, to go with the robot analogy, turned the golem off, he’d locked the manitou in an artificial and uncomfortable existence. Dead but not dead. Partially, I thought, by the way the off switch had worked.
Depending upon the story—probably because there were several ways to power a golem—Rabbi Loew had carved into the golem’s forehead the word “emet,” which is t
he Hebrew word for truth. When the rabbi deactivated the golem, he removed a letter and left the word “met,” which is dead.
The problem with this, as I saw it, was that a manitou cannot die. It just is, like the sun and the rain. It can be changed or hidden, but it cannot be killed. But the rabbi’s magic imbued the death command too strongly for the golem to ignore, so it could not live, either.
In my head and without real words, the golem had been following my thought process. I couldn’t tell if he agreed with my assessment or not, or even if he understood it, but something made him speak.
Neither spirit nor golem nor ghost, he told me, but at the same time all of them together, I kept watch over the streets of Prague. I was helpless to do anything against human evil or things like the vampires, those who could neither see nor sense me.
But I was driven to do this thing that I could not. Rabbi Loew gave me the task of keeping Josefov safe. So I drifted through the night streets of Prague, able neither to forsake my task nor accomplish it. And then I encountered you. Afterward, I frightened a thief away—I, who no one could perceive before. You did something to me, made me more real, real enough to rip a door off its hinges.
His interaction with me had lit up my magic until I’d been swamped (almost literally) by ghosts anywhere near me. That was another reason I thought the golem had been created from a manitou. If we weren’t as closely related as “a horse and a jackass,” then he probably wouldn’t have affected me that way. I hadn’t considered what it had done to him.
The golem returned to his original question. Can you destroy these demons?
I gave a disbelieving laugh. “Does it look like I am in a position to do anything to the vampires?”
The cage was coated with silver, which mattered not a whit to me, but the metal-welded mesh was strong. The holes were too fine to allow me to stick more than a pair of fingers through it. If someone handed me the key to the padlock, I couldn’t have unlocked it from inside.
I patted the cage door. “But even if I were out and free, I’d be no match for them. I’m not a power, golem.”
The golem made a rumbling sound that made the vampire on the wall flinch. You are one who walks the path of the dead, he told me. The dead must hear you and obey. These demons, these vampires, have swallowed death to stay on this earth. They are not exempt from your power.
In one brief statement, the golem had clarified something that I’d been working through my whole life: that my kind had a purpose, a reason, for existence.
I stared at the golem and sucked in a breath of air. I reminded myself that my kind originated on another continent. The golem could not have encountered someone like me.
I know what you are, the golem said. Mercy. Again it wasn’t my name; it was bigger than that. It fit better.
To him I said carefully, “My experience is that I might be able to make one vampire obey me, and only for a very short time. But there are a lot of vampires in this place.” I could feel the weight of them.
The vampire on the wall screamed at me again, as he been doing off and on since the vampires who’d caught me had stuck me in the cage. This time it made me jump, because he’d been quiet awhile and I’d been paying attention to the golem.
I turned to him and, pulling on the authority I’d been learning use in the pack, said, “Quiet.”
He screamed louder and with more feeling.
I said it again. As I did, the golem reached through the cage and touched my chest. Power flooded me, and the vampire shut his mouth.
“Quit looking at me,” I whispered, pushed by the golem’s wishes rather than my own, and the vampire turned his head away.
I clamped my mouth shut. It was wrong to do that, to have that kind of power over someone, even a vampire, and to use it as if they weren’t a thinking being. To give them no choice but to listen to me.
A cold hand stroked my shoulder. One of the ghosts had crawled in beside me and touched me. I shivered, but I didn’t give it any orders. Cooperation is one thing; enslavement is another. I knew better than Rabbi Loew, so there was no excuse for me when I did it.
Not that I had never forced a ghost to obey me. Ghosts weren’t the humans whose death had birthed them. But I was increasingly uncomfortable with the assumption that that meant they weren’t alive anymore. And that meant that other than for my own defense or in defense of someone else, I could not bind them to my will again.
If my whisper could influence the vampire as strongly as it had, no ghost had a chance of resisting me.
The vampire, not looking at me, began to jerk on his chains. Clank, clank, clank. He kept going with the steady reliability of a drum major. Clank. Clank. Clank.
“See?” I said to the golem. “He’s working his way out of it. Imagine if I were trying to control a dozen of them. And he’s crazy—I don’t think that helps him resist me.”
The golem looked back at me. He didn’t have eyes—I saw him more with my other senses than I saw him with my eyes. But I could feel his regard.
I have a counterproposal, he said. I have had a very long time to think about what I could manage. My master worked his magic in front of me and taught his students in front of me. I have knowledge but no power.
“I can’t help you there,” I said. “I have no power to give you.”
Do you not?
The golem turned his attention to the ghost beside me. She shrank away from him, huddled against my side as if she thought I might help her. I don’t know how long she’d been a ghost, maybe a day, maybe a century. She could have been a victim of the vampires or the Nazis or one of the pogroms that had inspired Rabbi Loew to protect the Jewish Quarter with a golem.
I could see twenty or thirty ghosts clearly enough to see their faces. Another dozen were wisps of whatever substance ghosts are made of. But beyond them I could feel them filling the room. I realized I was paying attention to them because the golem wanted me to.
Don’t you? asked the golem, again. Feed them to me, and I can go remake myself. I know how to do it. So I can protect my territory again.
“Feed them to you?” I asked.
Feed me the ghosts, he said, as if he thought I hadn’t understood him the first time.
“No,” I told him. “They don’t belong to me.” As if to disagree, the ghost who clung to my side put her face against my shoulder and wept silently. Her tears ran down my shoulder.
Feed them to me. I will clean this place of the vermin who prey upon my people. If you tell them, the ghosts, to let me eat them, they will give themselves to me. He paused. I cannot get them to do that, though I have tried since you and I met, and I conceived of this possibility.
I opened my mouth to answer, but at the top of the stairs, the doorknob turned. The ghosts left more quickly than they had come. I shifted to coyote and waited to meet Mary and discover just how bad a fix I was in.
—
I HAD BEEN VERY SURE OF MY ANSWER TO THE GOLEM before Mary’s visitation, but Kocourek’s information changed everything.
—
AS SOON AS MARY AND HER CADRE TOOK THEIR LEAVE, I changed back to human and looked at the golem, who’d observed the whole thing undetected.
I did not order the dead to give themselves up to the golem. Apparently he needed their consent, but he did not need their informed consent or even their willing consent.
But I did. Because unlike Rabbi Loew, I knew what I was doing. I knew the difference between good and evil, and I knew that the humans on this planet were not the only ones deserving of being treated under the “do unto others as you would have done unto you” clause of good behavior.
I called the ghosts to us, not just those who had come initially, drawn by the combination of our presence together. I called all the ghosts I could sense. When the golem touched me to reach farther, I accepted it. This was a horrible thing to do—and the on
ly thing more horrible would be to take everything from those who had only a little existence left and have it not be enough to get the job done. They came, filling the basement impossibly deep, until I breathed shallowly in an attempt not to breathe them in with the air I needed to live.
“Listen,” I told them. As with Libor’s ghosts and the golem, there was no language barrier between me and the dead here. They fell silent, and I could feel their attention, like the sun on the back of my neck in the summer.
“I have an offer for you,” I told them. “It will mean that you will cease to exist here. I do not know what that means, exactly, to you or for you.”
I explained what we needed and why, ignoring the golem’s impatience. I think about half of them understood me. The others were too fragmented to reason or communicate what they thought even if they could comprehend what I told them. Some of them were old, older than the apartment building. And they kept coming as I talked until the weight of their presence dropped the temperature in the basement, until I could see my breath and frost formed on the metal of the cage.
I explained everything twice. When I had finished, I waited. The weight of the dead was heavy on my chest.
Yes, they said as one. Those who could speak.
“Feed him,” I said, and the golem’s power gave my voice more authority somehow, both an order and a spellcrafting that was of the golem’s making.
They came to him. There were ghosts so lifelike, I could have mistaken them for the living. There were others who were reduced to an emotion or a single moment of time. Still more I could only sense and not see, even with the augmentation the golem provided.
The golem’s spirit surrounded them, sucked them into his darkness, until only one remained, the young woman who had stayed by my side through Mary’s visit. She hid her face from the golem.
That one, too, he said.
No, she whispered in my ear, sending a chill across my skin that raised goose bumps.
“No,” I told him. “Only those who were willing.”