addle my wits so that I could not oppose him, he had done so in the name of God and I had not dared to call upon that same God, the God of my father, the Lord God of Hosts, the God above and before all Gods.
No, in that moment of weakness, Azriel, man and ghost, had called upon his pagan god of old, from a human time, a god whom he had loved.
As the Rebbe cursed me, I deliberately called on Marduk in Chaldean. I wanted the Rebbe to hear the pagan tongue. Anger burnt me up as it has so often done. I knew my god wouldn't help me. Some parting of the ways had occurred with me and my god. Must I now recall everything? Must I know the story from the start?
Well, if I sought to put it together, to understand it, to know who
I had been and how I'd been made the Servant of the Bones, there should be but one reason: so that I might die.
Really, really die.
Not just retreat into blackness again, to be called forth into anodier lurid drama, and surely not to be trapped, earthbound, with the lost souls who murmured and stammered and screeched as they clung to mortality. But to die. To be given at last what had somehow been denied me years ago by a trick I couldn't recall.
"Azriel, I warn you." Who had spoken those words then, thousands of years ago? A phantom? Who was the man I saw dimly at the richly carved table who cried and cried? Who was the King? There had been a great king. . . .
But my anger and my rage had weakened me so that I was shocked and dispersed by the Rebbe. My mind was blown apart as surely as my form. My capacity to reason was shattered, and I rose into the night formless, aimless, drifting once more among the electric voices, tumbling as it were above the magnet that holds us all-the spinning world.
But I never let go. I never really let go.
As I came to myself, as I gathered strength again, as I set my eyes upon a destination, I thought of all these various aspects of my situation-that I very well might be utterly Masterless, that I wouldn't fail Esther, that I was stronger than I'd ever been-and I was determined to fight harder this time to be free of either of these two men-the Rebbe or his grandson Gregory-I was determined that if I could not die, I would gain life apart from them.
Who knows what nourishes a spirit, in the flesh or out of it?
Men and women in this time, who would have laughed at our old customs, believed in absolutely preposterous explanations of things- take, for example, how a hailstone comes to form, from a speck of dust in the upper atmosphere, falling, then rising, gathering ice to itself, falling again, then rising again, and becoming larger and larger, till some perfect moment is reached at which the hailstone breaks the circuit and falls to earth and then, after all of that, all of that wondrous process, melts to nothing. Dust to dust.
Someday these people-these clever minds of today-will know all about spirits. They will know as they knew about genes and neutrinos and other things they cannot see. Doctors at the bedside will see the spirit rise, the tzelem, as I saw it rise from Esther. It will not take a sorcerer to drive a spirit heavenward. There will be men clever enough to exterminate or extinguish even something like me.
Note this, Jonathan.
Scientists of your time have isolated the gene for a fruit fly that is eyeless. And when they take his genes and inject them into other fruit flies-God have mercy on his tiny creatures-do you know that these fruit flies produce eyes all over their bodies? Eyes on their elbows? And on their wings?
Doesn't that make you love scientists? Don't you feel tenderness towards them and respect for them?
Believe you me, coming back to myself the following night, taking form again, diaphanous but optimistic and hatefully calm, I did not think to seek the help of scientists any more than sorcerers to effect my final death. No. I was done with all practitioners of the unseen; I was done with everything except justice for a girl I'd never known. And I would find a way to die, even if it meant I had to remember everything, every painful moment