All the Pomp of Earthly Majesty

by Michael G. Williams

  A deep thrum of magic reverberated down his fingers, across the bridge of his wrist, and up his arm. Norton wasn’t sure what, or exactly how, but the moment he held the hatchet he felt something happen: something within him, and something in the city itself, and he could sense that it ran like ripples across the surface of the water, into and over and through the streets and buildings around him, and even across the fog crowding in around them. What could be more San Francisco, after all, than a foggy night in Chinatown? And Norton was His Imperial Majesty, restored. He was this place’s monarch. This was his town.

  “Did you feel that, ma’am?” Eva Marie spoke quietly.

  The missionary’s eyes grew even narrower. “Tell me more of this plan, Theodora.” Donaldina’s eyes never left Norton and the axe. “Let us hear it, and quickly. We must strike while the iron is hot.”

  Norton and Theodora’s eyes met, and they each nodded once. “I have my—” Norton searched for the right description. “The object of my mission, yes. But perhaps I am not leaving just yet.”

  Madge’s Alternate San Francisco, Tonight

  Madge lifted her hands and tensed all the muscles in her arms, her fingers twitching up and out like a peacock asserting its dominance. “Stay the hell back, demon.”

  Mammon’s eyebrows shot up with annoying amusement. He lifted both hands, palms out, and stepped back. “Woah now. Let’s relax. Let’s get to know each other before the fighting starts. I’m not an unreasonable being, madam.”

  Madge shook her head at him, stepping backward herself, starting to put some distance between them. “Oh, please. Like I’m going to help you get a foothold here doing what you’ve already done in my timeline?”

  Mammon spread his hands. “Well, yes, exactly that.” He grinned at her, shameless to the core, unfazed by her threat. He was a supernatural creature, able to recognize her as a witch—and as an alien to this slice of space-time—on sight. Madge knew he must also have felt her gathering up magic like a battery getting a rapid charge. “It sounds like you’re not from around here—and that you are. My guess…” He squinted one eye at her and peered around her rather than at her. Madge wondered if he were reading her aura or something else. The word metadata floated to the front of her mind as he did so. Mammon nodded again and resumed speaking, interrupting her thoughts. “Yes, my guess is that you do magic with time. There’s a lot of that sort of residue around you. I do some of that myself, so I know what I’m talking about here.” He nodded again, satisfied with himself. Now he shifted into what she recognized as salesmanship. He was about to try and peddle an idea, just as if it were a used car he could personally guarantee had only ever been driven to church on Sundays. “Unless I’m mistaken, miss, I’d say you did something to make something—or someone—go away. You meant to make that happen in space, but what you did was slot yourself into a different time: one where the object of your ire was farther away in some fashion. You probably did a quickie spell without a lot of preparation. But you’re good, so you achieved the intention you set. Just not the way you expected.” Mammon waved a hand and smiled more broadly. “Happens all the time.” He paused. “Well, not to me. But you take my meaning.”

  Madge thought back on the events she had so recently experienced. She had, in fact, had exactly one intention: make Mammon go away. But Madge realized she didn’t have the power to banish Mammon permanently. If she did, she would have done that a long time ago. So, yes, just as Mammon described, she had set an intention of making Mammon go away for now. And this—an alternate timeline—was what had happened. Rather than rewrite the facts as they related to Mammon, such as his location in space, the magic had chosen a much easier path to the same effective result. Magic is a force, after all, and like any other force, it can produce an effect only so large. Empty a bucket into a creek bed, and nothing but pebbles will move. Melt a glacier, and boulders will be shoved aside. In the grand scheme of things—their magical weight at any given moment, and across all of time and space—Madge stood well aware she was the pebble and Mammon was the boulder. The effect she and Iria worked was the emptied bucket. They, the pebbles, were the objects it moved. Mammon, on the other hand, would always be there in some form or fashion.

  “You’re working it out in your head.” Mammon shrugged smugly at her and took hold of the lapels of his green jacket with gold and silver trim. His posture was that of a country town’s only banker about to foreclose on a family farm. He grinned, his teeth gleaming and square. “And you know I’m right.” Mammon cocked his head back a few degrees. “And now I have a proposal for you. An idea I’d like to pitch.”

  Madge did agree with him, yes, and the idea that she had shoved herself sideways in time, rather than shoving Mammon backward or forward in it, and that she might now be stuck in an alternate timeline, terrified her. She felt something hot and acrid in the back of her throat. Panic rose along with the bile. So she shoved it down and gave herself something to distract her. “Okay.” Madge lowered her hands and nodded at Mammon. “Okay. Sure. Tell me your idea.”

  “We need each other’s help.” Mammon took one very tentative step closer. “I can help you get back to where you belong. And you can help me figure out when I should have gotten here to make things work out for me like they have in your timeline. Because you were ready to fight—ready to throw down with everything you had, and terrified to do it—and that tells me where you come from, I’m the big dog. So I need to know a little about the history of the San Francisco you call home, so I can go back there in my San Francisco and find the right point in time to hang out my shingle.”

  “You want me…to help you…become you—or, at least, the you I thought you would be.” Madge blinked slowly at him.

  “Yes. I think that sums it up nicely.” Mammon held out a hand to shake. “Do we have a deal?”

  Madge was going to need power to get back to her timeline: magical energy, something precious and meaningful and big. And in any timeline—this one or her own—Mammon was almost certainly one of the most knowledgeable sources regarding where to find something like that and how to tap into it.

  Madge lifted her hand and began to extend it.

  Iria’s Alternate San Francisco, Tonight

  Listen—” Mammon spoke to Iria as he stepped out of an alleyway they sped past. Iria was running as hard as their long legs could carry them, and Mammon did not try to keep up. Instead, he ducked out of the doorway of a convenience store that was, again, ahead of them. “I know this is frightening.”

  Iria didn’t let themself look back as the demon’s voice faded. They simply kept running. That was the only response that made any sense in the moment. It was what every cell of Iria’s body told them to do, so they did it.

  “I don’t know where you came from, but—” Mammon leaned out of a car window as Iria turned a corner onto a street with lanes for automobiles and kept running, now toward the familiarity of the Tenderloin. They wanted to be back on their own turf, at least: in a place where they knew all the nooks and crannies, all the places to hide.

  Mammon’s voice emerged from a window above them. They had no idea which. “I want you to tell me—”

  Iria turned another corner, expecting to dash across Union Square, through the crowds of tourists and of locals at their leisure, past the statue of Nike atop the column of the Dewey Monument, around the sprawling art sale they usually found there. Instead, Union Square was a concrete and AstroTurf conglomeration of outdoor activity spaces: a climbing wall, a skate park, and a nine-hole course for miniature golf. Its greens were adorned with true-to-scale versions of landmarks from elsewhere in America. Iria recognized the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, and so on, jutting out of the course’s sweeping curves.

  “What in the actual hell?” Iria stopped short and stared.

  A random woman in rock climbing gear standing beside Iria suddenly made a sound like a balloon being inflated, and then like meat being torn, as she got taller and wider and morphed violently int
o Mammon. The demon unclasped a climbing helmet as he turned to face Iria. He looked ridiculous, dressed in his usual green and gold and silver suit but with the rock climber’s harness strapped around his waist and groin, chalk all over his hands. “Finally.” He sounded more annoyed than relieved. “Thank you for stopping.”

  “Stay away from me.” Iria shoved their finger in Mammon’s face. “Or I swear I will mess you up, big time, even if you can make magic go away.”

  Mammon—this Mammon—was all business. He snapped his fingers, and the other accouterments of the rock climber he currently inhabited all disappeared in a blink. “No.” It wasn’t an offer, it wasn’t a debate. It was a statement of the facts. “You’re going to tell me where you came from. Now.”

  Iria recoiled as something happened: magical fingers sifting through their mind, sorting and cataloging the past. Iria watched as scenes flashed before their mind’s eye: meeting Madge, running away to San Francisco three years before that, the first time they watched Madge do magic, the first time they did magic themself. Few minds perfectly organized their memories, just as few produced only orderly thoughts. Iria’s mind was no different in that regard, but it didn’t seem to slow Mammon down. He reached into their memory and saw what he wanted to see. Iria imagined this was what it felt like to walk into a room and find a stranger reading one’s old yearbooks.

  “You expected to see something else here,” Mammon spoke as his magic probed Iria’s mind. “I want to know what it was, and why.” A long silence ensued, in which Iria found that countless moments of their life flew past on the viewscreen of their mind. Mammon was tossing the place like a burglar who didn’t know where the jewels were but was determined to find them. Then the memories stopped flying around the room in a tornado of searching. “Ah.” Mammon paused. Iria found themself recalling the chase, the herbalist in Chinatown, the keys to the city, Norton, Madge, all of it. Mammon had found the file he was seeking, and he was giving it a very thorough read.

  “Fascinating.” Mammon stepped back and regarded Iria again, assessing them, appraising them. “Too bad I can’t ask a few questions.”

  “What’s to ask?” Iria’s voice sounded foggy. “You just watched it happen yourself.”

  Mammon waved that away. “Sure, sure. But I have a higher priority than satisfying my curiosity about the means and methods of your magic, and why you give a damn about me in the first place. You’re dangerous. Can’t have you running around.” Mammon lifted his hand again, and Iria felt magic twist in the surrounding air. The demon spoke more to himself than to Iria. “Can’t have you running around at all.”

  Chinatown, 1912

  Norton rounded a corner onto one of the city’s main streets. The directions Theodora had given him were clear enough, but in many ways, he did not need them. This was Chinatown, after all, and he remembered it well. Norton descended California one block at a time, working his way toward Grant. He reached his turn just as the bell tolled one o’clock in the tower of Old St. Mary’s. Norton had read about the church. He found he had a strange fascination with it—stranger even than one might expect given his awareness he died there. The place held his attention, fixed, for a heartbeat, then two, then a third—and then he turned the corner and shuffled off down Grant in a hurry. He had precious little time to waste, and the others depended on him.

  Norton covered another block or two toward Portsmouth Square and what would eventually become the public park where San Franciscans of Chinese origin gathered en masse at all hours to socialize and organize and continue the act of celebrating their shared identity by constantly recreating and renewing it. That communal act of preserving a culture by continuously remaking it had been the way in his native time and in the one to which he had been summoned—and very likely in every other. A culture was only as alive as the number of people who showed up to make it happen, and in both eras, Portsmouth Square was the place they did so.

  Head down, badger hat concealing his face from the prying eyes of night watchmen and other prowlers in the dark, Norton waddled double-time across the darkened landscape of Chinatown for a block, and another, and then to an alleyway he would never have sought of his own volition, for it was notorious in almost every era: Ross Alley, though known at times as Stout’s Alley. It was a narrow strip of cobblestones between two blocks of buildings, thick with shadow, as though the structures hunched together on either side somehow compressed, the darkness trapped between them. Across decades—across centuries—brothels, opium dens, and dealers in every other vice imaginable made Ross Alley their place of business.

  And now Norton found himself standing a foot or two from its entrance considering whether he could bring himself to enter it.

  Norton heard an engine approaching and very nearly sprinted as he jogged into the alleyway to avoid the nearing car. At this late hour, in Chinatown, the only audible engine would be the police. He had no desire to draw their attention.

  At the midway point, the alley opened into a tiny courtyard with a single jade plant sprouting from a central planter.

  Norton pressed himself against the wall and checked the hatchet concealed under his oversized military jacket.

  Madge’s Alternate San Francisco, Tonight

  I know, I know. Deal with the devil, and all that.” Mammon fluttered the fingers on his other hand as though waving something away. “But the important part of that is deal. If I make a deal with you, I will keep it. To the letter. That’s kind of my defining feature, actually.”

  Madge considered. She lifted her hand, and Mammon extended his toward her another inch or two. “What are the exact terms of this deal?”

  Mammon’s face spread in a slow, wide smile. “Ah. A smart one. Let’s negotiate it, then. What do you want me to do?”

  Madge eyed him. “I want you to enable me to return to my own timeline, unharmed and unscathed, without sacrificing anything I need in that life.” She waggled her other finger at him. “No O’Henry-style ironic prices: no you can go back but you forget I exist and that’s the price of passage nonsense. I want a clean, unhindered egress from this timeline to my native one.” Mammon opened his mouth, but Madge interrupted him to keep speaking. “And…you can’t follow me. No stepping over to have a peek at my timeline so you can pick up some tips for your own.”

  Mammon cocked his head back and regarded Madge coolly. “And what do you offer me for that?”

  Madge shrugged. “You get to ask me one question about my timeline. That’s it.”

  Mammon clapped his hands together and yipped once with laughter. “One? You jest!”

  Madge smiled. “I do not.”

  “Five questions.” Mammon fiddled with his lapel before meeting her gaze. “Five.”

  Madge raised one eyebrow at him. “Really?”

  “And now we split the difference.” Mammon half-bowed, enjoying himself. “Three?”

  Madge stepped backward herself and crossed her arms over her chest. “Two.”

  “Two!” Mammon clapped his hands and chuckled. “My, my, my. And yet I can tell you mean it. And I can tell that if I argue further, you’ll go back to one and tell me to take a long walk off Pier 39. So fine, it’s agreed. Two questions.”

  Madge nodded. “Ask your questions.”

  “No,” Mammon replied. He put his hand back out. “First, we shake.”

  Madge hesitated, but then they took each other’s hands and sealed the deal. Madge jumped a little when lightning split the sky. It wasn’t thunderstorm season in San Francisco, and there wasn’t a cloud visible, but something crashed and rattled, both in the night air above them and deep in Madge’s bones.

  Mammon grinned, all but licking his chops. “Two questions.” He mused to himself, rather than speaking aloud. He let go of Madge’s hand and began to walk in a slow circle around her. “Twooooo questionsssssss.” Madge thought she heard a hiss in that musing, but she shook it off. She had to stay focused if this was going to work.

  “Question one.” Mam
mon cleared his throat. “What’s my big venture in your timeline? Tell me the name of the business I’ll be running that pisses you off so badly.”

  “It’s called Cuckoo.” Madge spoke the three words and then…nothing. She met Mammon’s gaze coolly, evenly, unintimidated and unafraid. It was clear he wanted more than that, was in fact waiting for her to elaborate, so she just barely smiled. “Second question?”

  Iria’s Alternate San Francisco, Tonight

  Iria knew the sound of someone who meant to do them harm in order to teach others a lesson and didn’t hesitate. They threw themself to the left, rolling, and half-tumbled, half-tangled themself up in themself until they were more or less on their feet again and running.

  A person at the ninth hole of the mini-golf attraction in this corporatized, profiteering version of Union Square spoke with Mammon’s voice as they ran past. “You can’t always just run away,” he said to them.

  Iria kept running. They needed to think. They needed to find a window out of this world, something anchored to both Iria’s native timeline and this altered one. And what altered this one, exactly? Iria found themself wondering it as they ran. Tonight was certainly a night for running. Good thing I’ve been doing some cardio.

  But what had altered this timeline? The answer seemed obvious, of course: this was a timeline with Iria but not Madge. That meant they had never met, never summoned Norton, never begun the process of trying to oppose Mammon. No background research. No theorizing. No identifying the changes he was making to the city’s people—to the city itself.