Donaldina turned and glared down at Norton, one of his hands holding his hat in place, the other carrying his cane, his mismatched quilt of a uniform and other attire twisting stiffly this way and that as he half-jogged to keep up. “Sir.” She summoned her most commanding tone. “We will not assist you. I do not fancy the idea of anyone wishing to make some keepsake of such a grisly implement. Now move along before I have Theodora box you on the ears. Take me at my word when I say I’ve no hesitation to direct my forces to violence in service to a greater good. Do not stand in my way or otherwise hinder my mission. Do you understand?”
Norton blinked up at her like a surprised owl. “I am not without some sympathy, madam, but you see, I have my own mission. And for it, I require a hatchet man’s axe. I seek this not to satisfy some grotesque obsession but to save the city itself from dark forces. I am afraid you would not understand, but as a Christian woman I hope you will at least have the kindness necessary to—”
Norton didn’t get a chance to finish. The Chinese girl shot from the shadows and ran past them in the other direction, Theodora chasing after her. “Found ‘er, m’am!”
“After that girl!” Donaldina and Eva Marie fell in behind Theodora. “She’s heading back to the brothel!”
“Do you think they might have hatchets there?” Norton called at them, jogging along behind.
A Chinatown, Tonight
What happened to the city?” Madge’s eyes were wide with concern and curiosity, and then they narrowed with anger. She took a step toward Mammon and raised her index finger to point at him. With every step, she felt forces start to spark and gather around her.
“To be honest,” Mammon said to her with a big grin, “I’m not sure. I have the sense something happened, but…” The demon shook his head, looking around. “I’m not sure what. I’m afraid I’ve just arrived myself.”
“Just arrived?” Madge finished closing the gap between them and put the tip of her index finger in the very center of Mammon’s chest, poking him. “Quit bullshitting me and give me back my partner. And my city.”
Mammon’s head twisted on his neck, nodding first to one side and then the other, considering her as though from a great distance. “You’re quite sincere, aren’t you?” He reached up and pushed her finger aside. “And quite aggressive. You know, it’s possible I might have a job for someone with your, ah, insight.”
Madge stepped back. “You really don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”
Mammon smiled again. She could tell that was his default reaction: smile, see if that wins people over. She knew what happened if he didn’t. And she knew that meant this Mammon had no idea who she was. “I’m afraid I don’t. But I do know a witch when I see one, believe me.”
Madge took another step backward. “So what are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to San Francisco to see what riches it might hold.” Mammon spread his hands wide, gesturing at the city in general. “It’s always struggled to find its place in the larger scheme. But there also seems to be endless potential for exploitation. I’ve come to see if I can kickstart that. Goose the throttle and make some magic happen.” When he said “magic,” he rubbed his thumb against the tips of his index and middle fingers, the common gesture for money. “Thought I might start with some real estate speculation, see where that takes things. Make enough people think they want to be in a place badly enough and someone will figure out a reason to stay.” The demon clapped his hands together. “Now, as I was saying, I could always use the help of a cooperative magician. You know, the usual: charms, spells, potions, whatever ability you might have to tip the hand of fate and influence people to take a more favorable mindset toward my ambitions. Are you interested? I promise to make it quite worth your while.”
“Oh my fucking gods.” Madge closed her eyes and turned halfway away from him. “This is the San Francisco where you never showed up before now.” She opened her eyes again and blinked at him. “No real estate boom. No Silicon Valley.” She looked back at the skyline, shorter in stature than the one she expected. “I have to get back home.”
Mammon lifted a finger as though to delay her for a moment. “I’m sorry, but did you say ‘real estate boom’?”
Another Chinatown, Tonight
Iria took a step back and raised both their fists. “Where the hell is Madge?”
Mammon arched one eyebrow at them. “Excuse me, but you are the new arrival in my city, and my city has some rules when it comes to magic. Rule number one? I ask the questions here.” Mammon took a step closer and waved a hand. The forces Iria had been gathering seemed to dissipate like candle smoke in a gust of wind: there one second, gone the next. “Start with your name, and where you came from, and let’s see where that takes us. And no dithering.” Mammon examined Iria, squinting slightly, like an appraiser studying a jewel. “And tell me what you are, exactly, while you’re at it.”
Iria jutted their chin at him. “A witch, and a damned good one. I don’t know what kind of trick you’ve pulled just now, making the city different, but you won’t fool me. You can’t. We’re going to stop you, Mammon. Now put things back the way they were or else.” Iria felt forces gather around them again, but they were more careful this time. Before, when they raised their fists, they were doing the equivalent of setting off a firework to light a photo or breaking the glass to pull an alarm: sudden and big and very noticeable. Now they were cautious, speaking more softly and letting their words mask the true focus of their attention: drawing together the energies they needed one string at a time, one strand, very slowly.
“Or else?” Mammon lacked any of the salesmanship, the joviality, the unwelcome familiarity of before, outside the herbalist’s shop. He didn’t smile, he didn’t laugh it off, he didn’t try to play the buddy-up card. He scoffed. His expression stayed very set, his eyes exceptionally cruel. He wasn’t trying to find the crevice in anyone’s social armor to worm his way in. Mammon held the posture and wore the face of absolute authority finding itself questioned for the first time. “What exactly do you think you’re going to do for the else?”
Iria again took in their surroundings. The street was solid. They didn’t sense the presence of a glamour or other illusion.
The cyclists zipping past glanced quizzically at Iria, too. They couldn’t see Mammon, apparently, but they could see Iria speaking to empty air and they found that off-putting. San Francisco was, if anything, a city well accustomed to people who might at any time have a conversation with what seemed to others to be empty air. That reaction sent a shiver down their back.
This wasn’t Iria’s San Francisco.
“How long have you been here? Oh, shit. This is some alternate timeline stuff, isn’t it?” They squinted at Mammon and peered more closely. “This is a timeline where you’ve always had this city entirely in your grasp. No one opposed you. No one ever tried to slow the spread of…” They waved a hand. “You.” They turned their squinting eye on a pedestrian, and there it was: the little demon on their shoulder, like they had shown Norton in the bar of the Palace Hotel. There was one on the next person, too, and the one behind them, and the person who glided past on a rented scooter, and everywhere else they might turn with the scrunched up second sight of a witch. They felt those threads of magic they had worked to gather fall away from one another and extinguish. They couldn’t stay focused and take this in.
Now Mammon snorted, a snuffling, derisive sound, dismissing Iria altogether. “So you’re mad? I don’t mean angry, of course, I mean, you know.” There was almost a levity there, but it never quite made it to the surface of Mammon’s face or the timbre of his voice as he spun his index finger in a circle beside his own head. Iria was surprised to find themself missing their Mammon. “Well, we don’t tolerate that around here. This is a nice neighborhood, and I intend to keep it that way.” He lifted his hand, fingers and thumb bent as though to grab at something and crumple it up. Iria had no trouble imagining what would happen to them when he
completed the gesture.
They turned and ran, dashing around a corner and then into a stream of pedestrians.
Time to run again.
“That won’t work here.” Mammon stepped out of the crowd immediately ahead of Iria, despite them running a block away. “This is my city. I’m everywhere.”
Iria swerved and sped away again. They heard Mammon produce a heavy sigh.
Chinatown, 1912
Donaldina Cameron and her two assistants strode between the crowding buildings of Chinatown. They didn’t call out to the girl, but they kept their eyes on the corners and shadows in case they could spot her. Norton had taken to trailing behind them but no longer addressed questions to them. They had chosen to ignore him, yes, and he was well accustomed to people choosing to overlook him when they found him inconvenient. He found it was the burden of his office, on occasion, that people must look elsewhere lest they be distracted by the magnitude of his presence as their monarch.
Eva Marie cast a glance over her shoulder at Norton, then whispered to Donaldina. She didn’t mean to stage whisper, but Norton could hear everything she said. “Ma’am, if you’ll pardon me saying, but I think I recognize that man behind us.”
Donaldina ignored the girl, instead gazing down another narrow passage between two buildings. A child might have fit through it, but no adult ever could. “Point the torch in there, Theodora.”
The stout girl did as ordered, and the crevasse—which went back only a few feet before turning into a corner in the exterior wall—was revealed to be empty of all but the detritus of any outdoor space.
“Only, it’s a tad unusual, ma’am.” Eva Marie gave Norton another glance. “Seeing as the man I think he is, well, is dead.”
Donaldina’s mouth crinkled at the corners, not quite a frown but certainly not a smile. “Eva Marie, I’ve no time for imaginings. Turn your mind to finding this girl. It’s all that matters.”
“But I’m serious, ma’am.” Eva Marie blushed hard, turning the pink of a fresh sunburn and twice as hot. She gave Norton another glance and spoke up as though he hadn’t heard them all along. “I believe him to be, well, Emperor Norton.”
Norton put one hand to the brim of his beaver hat and lifted it, holding it there while he bowed. The emperor might kneel to no other authority, but he would certainly remain polite. “And I am, young lady. It is always my great pleasure to make the acquaintance of a loyal subject.”
The girl scampered out of another alleyway and dashed away at a full run.
“Eva Marie!” Donaldina’s voice snapped like the crack of a whip. “To work!”
The three of them began jogging after the girl, whose feet slapped the ground as though offering enthusiastic applause for the fog bank now creeping across Chinatown.
“Theodora,” Donaldina panted, “be ready to wrestle her when I jump.”
Norton ran behind them again but couldn’t keep up. They were faster and more agile than he—and he was surprisingly nimble. He realized with frustration and alarm that he fell behind with every stride, not by much but by enough to know he would never catch up. The silhouette of the girl disappeared into the fog as it inched up the street toward her. The three missionaries charged at the fog in a line, closing the distance.
Norton slowed to a trot, and then to a walk. They would all be out of sight soon, and he could never navigate the maze of Chinatown in the fog and find them.
A Chinese man in a tidy suit and tie stepped out of an alleyway a moment after Donaldina and her assistants ran past it, raising a gun and firing at them in a smooth, practiced motion. The bullet shattered a brick over Eva Marie’s head so that the girl cried out and ducked down, hands over her face. Donaldina Cameron pulled her aside and turned to face their attacker. “You’re simply drawing the police.” Her voice was even and full, without a hint of the tremors of fear.
The man started to say something, a sneer on his lips, but Norton crashed into him from behind and they both bowled over in a heap.
“The dead man saved us, ma’am!” Eva Marie jogged two steps forward and walloped the would-be assassin with her bare knuckles.
Donaldina turned to resume her pursuit but stopped after just a few strides. The fog was thick, gray, a living thing putting out tendrils and feelers to find every corner, every crack. The girl had disappeared into it only twenty seconds before, if that, but they could hear no footsteps. They would never be able to see her or find her.
“Ma’am,” Theodora spoke quietly, “we have no way to know which way she went. Even if she returned to the brothel, I’m not sure it would be a good idea to go back there. They’ll be waitin’ for us.”
Donaldina glared at her charge. Frustration dragged her voice down from the pulpit and back to some drawl she must have learned earlier in her life. “We’ve merely to listen for the clang of a paddy wagon’s doors being slammed, young lady. Y’can’t give up so easy if you want to save souls for a livin’.”
Norton struggled up onto his knees and staggered backward as Eva Marie proceeded to make sure the gunman was unconscious on the ground by delivering another two sharp and rapid blows.
“Ma’am, if I may?” Theodora spoke tentatively. The tone of her voice suggested she already knew she may not. “We’ve been shot at twice, done some quite vigorous running and climbing, and now the weather has conspired to turn even the open street into a place this girl can hide. We can rescue her another night.”
Donaldina’s eyes lit with ferocity. “There mightn’t be another night, you realize?”
Theodora visibly shrank.
Donaldina pressed closer, bearing down on her musclebound charge as she regained the sharp edge of her more professional enunciation. “That girl will die in that place, sooner or later. A man will kill her, or they’ll starve her to death, or she’ll expire of a disease, or they’ll slit her throat like a pig at the stockyard when she gets too old to line their pockets with her pleasures. I ask again, do you realize that? They marked her for murder when they brought her here—murder of some sort, in some way. I do not know in what way, but her death is guaranteed. We do not give up and go home because it’s uncomfortable for us, Theodora. We stay with it. Do you understand?”
Theodora nodded—a little meekly, Norton thought. This was not the first time the woman had used shame to motivate her charges. Norton had done it himself at times—the very time he mounted the bench and shamed the Workingmen’s Party into dispersing that meeting.
Norton cleared his throat. “Madam,” he murmured, deferring to Donaldina, then addressing Theodora. “Your mistress is right. The young girl will ever be in danger.”
Theodora didn’t meet her superior’s eyes when she responded. “Ma’am, they laid this as a trap. The girl was meant to lead us a merry chase while the police did their work and left. The cops’ll be long gone from the brothel—and sure, so will the boo how doy they arrest tonight, but you know there’ll be one or two they held back to be the teeth in the trap. And in the meantime, the girl is still out here, keeping you from returning to the safety of the mission house. She’ll let us get close enough to hear her again, or she’ll run past, or otherwise let us catch her scent, and then she’ll lead us to another assassin, and another, and another, or all the way back to the brothel and the ones waiting there. If we go running headlong right up to their front door, well, pardon me saying, but you’re playing into their plan.”
Donaldina regarded her assistant with a set jaw and jeweled eyes. “Do you have some alternative to suggest?”
Eva Marie stood beside the unconscious attacker and wiped blood from her knuckles—blood that was not her own.
Norton blinked at the small girl’s casualness about her own violence.
Eva Marie made a small oh sound as she blinked at Norton. “This one has a hatchet, sir.” She nudged the attacker’s abdomen with the toe of her boot. “Your majesty, if you like.” She curtsied, just barely. Norton noticed she didn’t glance at Donaldina to make sure the woman didn
’t see her do it, but that she flinched like she wanted to.
Norton flipped the man’s coat back, revealing a hatchet in a leather loop stitched to the edge of the holster for his gun. Apparently, he was proficient with both.
Eva Marie winked at Norton. “Thank you kindly, sir, for knocking him over.”
“I do have a plan, yes, ma’am.” Theodora stood a little straighter. “We have a tactical advantage now.” She nodded in Norton’s direction. “We’ve one more than we did before. They don’t know that. We can use him to create a distraction, or to lead them a merry chase. We can make them believe we’re in two places at once, perhaps. We can lure them out to pursue him and slip in while they’re hunting us elsewhere.”
Donaldina Cameron turned narrowed eyes on Norton. “This madman?” She nodded. “No offense, sir. But I do not think us that desperate just yet.”
“I may hold unconventional beliefs, madam,” Norton replied, “but I am certainly no madman.” His mustache twitched in defiance.
“But now you have your grotesque souvenir.” She frowned at the hatchet on the attacker’s belt. “I assume you shall have it and be gone, yes?”
Norton frowned. He hated abandoning Donaldina while she pursued a mission. He hated the idea of abandoning the girl. And he hated the idea of leaving Eva Marie and Theodora and Donaldina when Theodora was right: they could use him somehow. He was no tactician, no strategist. Norton had neither commanded armies nor served in one. But he believed without question in Theodora’s awareness of tactics and strategy. She was a born fighter, kept sharp by Donaldina’s rigor and discipline, and her mind ticked like a clockwork behind the stoic facade of her demeanor.
And yet, he, too, had a mission: get a hatchet and get back to the twenty-first century.
Norton bent low enough to grasp the hatchet by the thick end of its metal head and slid it from the holster at the man’s waist. Tossing it lightly upward once, as though testing its weight, he caught it by the handle in his left hand.
All the Pomp of Earthly Majesty Page 6