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.
“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.