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.