A Wolf at the Door

finger through the gray dust in my hand again. “I am having a thought about this.”

“Oh?”

“Mm. When I was to being a small boy, many years ago, I lived in a little town, very far from any city. In those days, the old ways were to be existing beside the new. Magic and science all at once. Superstition alongside diagnosis.

“As always in those times, there was to being a powerful man who wanted more.”

“More what?” I was fascinated. Ivan had never spoken of his past before. At least not to me.

“Everything. Power, supplies, land. Fear. And he would send the soldiers. We had little. Barely enough to live, not enough to spare. The elders of the town, they were to be knowing when the soldiers would come again. They went to the priest, and asked him to pray for protection.”

With one thick, gnarled finger, Ivan drew a symbol in the sand between us. It wasn’t one I recognized.

“He found this in an old book. No one knew where the book was to be coming from, it was just always to being there in the church. Following it, they shaped a man from the very dirt of the fields. A great man, taller than I am to being now, twice as wide. The legs were like tree trunks. And with this sigil, they said to him ‘live.’ And he did.”

“Wait, I know this legend. You’re talking like a golem, right? Isn’t that a Jewish myth?” Right there, I’d exhausted my golem knowledge. I had a vague memory of one being connected to Prague, somehow, but that was it.

Ivan smiled faintly. “Many peoples of the world have shared stories. And magics.”

“So did it work? This golem, did it protect your town?”

“Mm. To start. The powerful man eventually lost power, and another took his place. And another, and another. Always they came, the soldiers, just wearing different colors. Always, the clay man would kill them. But something dark was to be happening. With every death, the clay man gained more will of his own, as if the blood fed him life.

“There was to being a day when he would no longer obey, when he turned on his creator. It was decided then to be destroying him, and to never build such a man again.”

“So did they? Destroy it, I mean?” And please oh please tell me it was easy to do.

“Tak. They erased the sigil, and he fell to dust.”

Erase the sigil. Oh sure, lemme just strip the thing naked while it was pounding on me and look to see where someone had carved on it.

“This thing, could it change shapes? Look like real people?”

Ivan shrugged. “I am not to be knowing. It did not, in my memory.”

“Could it speak?”

The old man frowned a bit in thought. “It did not, at first. When they came to destroy it, it did then.”

“What did it say?”

“It said only ‘Please, do not.’”

Specific details notwithstanding, Ivan’s golem legend sounded like my best bet. A biddable minion, strong, almost indestructible. That’s the kind of errand boy I’d send, if I were a demon. A moldable clay man, capable of impersonating anyone.

“If it could look like someone else, how would I tell? Is there some kind of test?” Not-Alec had been human enough to fool my eyes, and my danger sense.

“A real man will bleed, Dawson. A clay man will not.” Ivan looked disappointed that I hadn’t figured that out myself. “And he will bear something belonging to the one who created him. A token, binding his will to his master.”

Well, hell, that could be anything. I rubbed my forehead, trying to ease the slight ache there. “So even if I kill this thing, I gotta worry about who’s pulling the strings behind it.”

“It would to be seeming so.” Ivan erased the sigil from the sand with a swipe of his hand. “You should have been informing me of this before. This is not to being a defensible position.” He gestured around the nearly empty beach.

“Do we really want to get into who did and didn’t tell each other what? “I raised a brow, challenging, but it was aimed at the frothy waves a few yards away. Still couldn’t quite bring myself to stare the old man down.

He sighed. “Perhaps it is something to be ‘getting into.’ It is impossible to be knowing when we may have another chance, ni?”

“Okay. You go first.” I brushed the golem dust off my hands and leaned back on my arms, prepared to listen at least. I mean, how long could I really hold a grudge anyway? “You lied to me about how many champions there are. Why?”

“Because information that you do not have cannot be taken from you. I have long feared that the forces we fight would rise up against us, organized. If each of you believed that there were but few, perhaps our enemies would believe it also.” He shook his head a bit. “It is only now, when we are to being under attack, that I worry I have made the wrong decision. When they come for me—and I am to be believing that they will—much knowledge will be lost. Things I cannot enter into Grapevine, memories and skills that cannot be put into words.”

A samurai welcomes his death, if it is a good and honorable one. Still, Ivan’s fatalistic tone made me squirm uncomfortably. I didn’t like to think about it. “You’re talking like you’d lose.”

He smirked a little. “I am to being old, Dawson. Sometimes I wonder if I have not outlived my purpose.”

“So how many of us are there, really?”