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 only 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.