by T. A. Pratt
“If he succeeds in calling up his god, and growing it to full size, he’ll be right,” the witch said. “His faith and his magic will make him be right, and the other gods he believes in will follow the Frog, appearing as quickly as he can spill blood to kindle and feed them. Just be glad you’re in a world where he’s trying to call up the Frog, and not in a world where he called up the Jaguar, and that over a year ago. I’m dead in most of those worlds, and glad of it, because there’s only so much ugliness I’m happy to look upon.” She flickered, going translucent for a moment, then solidified. “Now, you should go. I’m being called to talk to another iteration of you, who didn’t move fast enough, who failed. I’ve got to give those yous some bad news about your miserable, nearly nonexistent prospects.”
“Okay,” Marla said, and grabbed B’s arm. When a power like this said go, you did it quickly.
“But what about your payment?” B said. “Don’t we have to pay you something?”
“You’ll pay,” the Possible Witch said, flickering. “You’ll pay with time, which is something you can scarcely spare. But that’s the way it is, when you talk to a real oracle. The payment is a lot more dear than a box of books or a cup of coffee.”
“Let’s go,” Marla said, and pulled B toward the door, and down the stairs.
As they made their way back along the corridor, B said, “What did she mean, we’ll pay with time? Is it like Rip Van Winkle, we’ll come out and it’ll be a hundred years later?”
“I doubt it,” Marla said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get to Golden Gate Park by tomorrow, would we?”
“So what does it mean?”
“I’m sure we’ll find out,” Marla said. “No use worrying about it yet.” At the end of the corridor, they came to a black velvet curtain.
“The cell is through there,” B said. “Ladies first.”
“You lead us in, I lead us out,” she said agreeably, and pushed the curtain aside.
Beyond the curtain, back inside Alcatraz, there was a prison riot going on, inmates running through brightly lit cell-blocks, guards shouting, and fires made of mattresses and sheets burning in the corridors.
“Shit,” Marla said. “I guess that’s what the Possible Witch meant about lost time.”
She stepped out into a world that wasn’t her own, and B followed.
16
T he look-away Marla had cast earlier was still working, so they managed to avoid notice by the rioting prisoners or the guards. The patches on the guards’ shoulders read “Republica del Norte California,” and everyone around them was speaking Spanish. They slipped through the complex of gates by following close to guards, who were rushing in and out, trying to get the riot under control. She and B made their way outside, to the far side of a building, facing the Golden Gate Bridge. They sat together in the late-afternoon light, and watched sailboats ply the waters of the bay.
“Should we try to get off the island?” B said. “Get a boat, or something?”
“No,” Marla said. “The look-away I cast wouldn’t cover a whole boat anyway, so they’d probably shoot at us. Better to wait it out.”
“This is the time the Possible Witch was talking about,” B said. “Sitting here, in one of those other universes she mentioned, unable to do anything in our world. Right?”
“I assume so,” Marla said. “I hope so. Otherwise, we’re stranded in one of those other branch-universes, and I’d rather not face that possibility unless I have to.”
“Why would the witch demand such payment? What’s in it for her?”
“Eh. It’s more complicated than that. I know the smaller oracles you’re used to usually want things for personal gratification, but for bigger entities, it’s not always like that. There are just…rules. Chains of cause and effect. There’s always a price, but it’s not necessarily like paying somebody off. We spent some time at the center of the universes, seeing things people don’t normally get to see. And the cost is spending time stuck in another universe, seeing things we don’t necessarily want to see.”
The Golden Gate Bridge disappeared. Marla blinked, but it was no trick of the light, no flash of neurological discord. The bridge was gone. The noise of rioting was gone from behind them, too. “Let me revise that. The cost is spending time in a succession of other universes. I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t steal a boat. We’d be getting awfully wet right now, with the boat gone from underneath us. I bet this is a sort of, I don’t know, contagious reaction we picked up from being in such close proximity to the witch. This must be something of what it’s like for her, shuffling from world to world to world. Except she sees everything at once, and even remembers it all.”
“Look at that,” B said, pointing into the bay. “Is that a ferry?”
“It looks like a floating palace,” Marla said. A boat the size of a large building floated out there in the Golden Gate, making the passage from the Marin Headlands to San Francisco at a stately pace. It was a beautiful thing, studded with towers and rippling flags.
“I’ve read about this,” B said. “When they were first talking about building the Golden Gate Bridge, a lot of people opposed it, because they thought the Golden Gate was one of the most beautiful views in the world, and they didn’t want to see it spoiled with a big bridge. But people needed a way to get from Marin to the city, and one of the suggestions was for a palatial ferry, to make the journey in style and comfort without spoiling the view. I guess that’s the choice they made here.”
“It’s a shame Rondeau can’t be here,” Marla said. “He read a bunch of books about San Francisco history. He’d probably recognize lots of might-have-beens.”
A moment later the bridge was back, and they both fell backwards, since the wall they’d been leaning against had disappeared. They stood up and looked around, and there were no buildings here at all, just seabirds and guano-spattered rocks.
“What do we do if a building appears right where we’re standing?” B said.
“Die, probably,” Marla said. “So let’s move a little closer to the edge of the island, where that’s less likely, hmm?” They settled down on a relatively unstained stretch of rock, near the foaming edge of the island, the water slamming against the rocks a dozen feet below.
The bridge disappeared again, though the island didn’t change noticeably.
“The city is gone,” B said. Marla looked. He was right. There was nothing there but trees and sand dunes.
“Maybe there are no humans in this world,” Marla said.
“Or else they never found gold and silver in California,” B said.
Marla grunted. “Maybe they all blew themselves up in the ’50s.”
“Great. Now I have to worry about radiation.”
“Could be worse,” Marla said. “There could be giant atomic ants and preying mantises.”
They sat for hours, watching the world change around them. For a while they were on an Alcatraz still peacefully occupied by American Indian activists, with a bustling Indian Studies center where the prison had been. They took the opportunity to steal cold drinks of an unfamiliar brand from a cooler, and drank most of them before the bottles disappeared from their hands. They walked around the edge of the island, B pointing out the differences he recognized. Sometimes Treasure Island, deeper in the bay, disappeared entirely, and B told her that it was man-made—clearly there were some worlds where it was never made at all. For a while, the remains of a World’s Fair stood on Treasure Island, complete with a rusting Ferris wheel and faded towers. “They tore the fairgrounds down during one of the world wars,” B said, “to make the island into a naval base. Guess they skipped that war here.” Many of the changes were small, just variations in San Francisco’s skyline. Strange monuments appeared, while familiar landmarks vanished.
Sometimes it was so foggy they couldn’t see anything at all, and once, for a tense fifteen minutes, there was a raging naval battle in the bay, with warships flying unfamiliar colors blasting away at one anoth
er with big guns, while San Francisco burned. The smoke was almost as thick as the fog, and B and Marla sat huddled in the shelter of a fallen wall, knowing that a look-away spell wouldn’t prevent a shell from killing them and leaving their corpses in a world they could barely comprehend. That world passed, replaced by one where the peninsula that held San Francisco was gone entirely, just water in its place. “Guess the big earthquake hit here,” Marla said. “Glad it didn’t take out the island.”
B nodded. By then it was dark, and the nearly full moon and the stars in the sky were the only constants. City lights twinkled on, and off. The night went on, and they slept in shifts, through the changing of worlds. Once there were submarine periscopes rising from the waters in such profusion that it looked like a gray metal forest. Once there were sea-monsters, prehistoric creatures that still lived, their graceful necks rising from the waves, their football-shaped heads looking lazily about, mouths full of knife-blade teeth, opening and closing. Once passenger pigeons blackened the sky above. Once Marla could have sworn she saw the lights of a sprawling city on the moon, but B was asleep, so she couldn’t ask him, and she wasn’t sure, once that world slid into another. For a while a giant statue loomed on the Marin Headlands, depicting a smiling young man wearing a top hat and an early-20th-century-style suit with a watch chain. After a moment Marla recognized him from pictures in her inherited library of the secret history of magic—it was Sanford Cole, the presiding secret genius of early San Francisco, court magician to Emperor Norton, and, according to Finch, the one who’d made Golden Gate Park blossom. She recalled Finch’s story about how Cole would return in the hour of the city’s greatest need, and wondered where he was now, when his city most assuredly needed him. Apparently he’d done great things in this variation of the world, at least. If they were going to be here for more than five or ten minutes, she might have made the effort to track him down and ask for his advice.
Finally dawn came, in a world where great bonfires roared on every high hill within sight, and by the time the sun was visible in the eastern sky, they were shivering in the cold, and there was a glacier visible to the north. “When will this end?” B asked through chattering teeth.
“Soon,” Marla said, and it was half a prayer, because they only had hours now, before Mutex would be in the park. They had to meet Ch’ang Hao, assuming he’d made it back from Colombia with the snake, and Marla had to cast a spell, and then she had to actually deal with Mutex. None of which was possible while they flipped through this selection of alternate realities.
The cold vanished, and the sudden shift in temperature made Marla shiver even harder. B, who was looking toward the city, gasped, and then whimpered. “Marla,” he said.
Dreading what she would see, her intuition giving her some hint of what it would be, Marla turned her head.
The city was no different than the one they came from, with Coit Tower and the TransAmerica Pyramid the most obvious landmarks. But there was smoke rising, and something the rich green color of jungle leaves moving beyond the buildings, visible only in brief flashes. There was a smell in the air, too, of turned earth, and rotten vegetation, and warm blood. That green something was almost as high as the tallest skyscrapers, and with a shuddering crash an apartment building tumbled over in an avalanche of concrete and glass.
Tlaltecuhtli shouldered its way through the gap in the skyline. Marla’s eyes could scarcely comprehend its immensity. Nothing so large should be able to move on land. It was like a dark green mountain, its eyes yards across, perfectly black. It stood up on its rear legs, rising above the nearest skyscraper, and Marla’s mental sense of scale gave way; it was as if she were looking at a model of the city that some child had dropped his pet frog into. Then Tlaltecuhtli opened its vast mouth, revealing fangs the size of buildings, and in the endless darkness of its maw there were red flutterings. Tlaltecuhtli vomited forth a torrent of hummingbirds. A flock of them—no, a hover of them, a charm of them, a troubling. The hummingbirds settled over the buildings like a ruby-red mist of blood, and in the fluttering they transformed into men, warriors wearing bright feathers and golden jewels, armed with swords. The warriors poured down into the streets, on their way to harvest hearts for their gods.
“Her mouth opens on the Land of the Dead,” Marla whispered, and knew they were too late, that they’d come back home, to the world of the third possibility. Mutex had succeeded, and his monstrous god was risen. The world was lost. She’d be better off throwing herself into the sea now, probably, because the alternative was to give up her heart on an altar of Mutex’s devising, in the Palace of Fine Arts, perhaps, or on the steps of City Hall, or atop Strawberry Hill. Whatever place he’d chosen for his temple. But Marla wouldn’t throw herself into the sea. She’d fight, and gather the surviving sorcerers, even if they were only apprentices and alley wizards and cantrippers, and make them fight in unison, though that was easier to say than to do. It didn’t matter. Mutex wouldn’t beat her. Not without suffering some himself in the process.
B was weeping.
Tlaltecuhtli turned its vast head, and looked upon them, and saw them, though they were mere specks on a small island. The great monster of the Earth crouched low, and then leapt, up and out toward them, and Marla looked into the sky, where doom was falling toward them like a great green stone.
And then the world flickered, and the sky was only blue. She looked toward the city, and there was no smoke, no monsters. B stood up, shakily, and Marla did as well. “It…that wasn’t home,” he said.
“No,” Marla said. “I guess it wasn’t. But it’s what could happen. If we don’t move fast enough. If we fail.”
“Do you think this is it?” B said. “Are we back?”
“It looks like the world we left,” she said. “Let’s try to find a ferry.”
There were tourists on the island, and a boat preparing to leave. Marla and B slipped into the back of the ferry, and sat huddled together. It wasn’t as cold here as it had been in the glacial other world, but a San Francisco morning on the bay in January was still far from balmy. They were both miserable, cold, hungry, and shaken from their experience. They didn’t speak on the trip back across the bay. When they arrived at the pier, Marla actually asked B to get a cab. They rode to the hotel, and Marla’s hunger fought for space with her worry. They went into the hotel restaurant, where brunch was being served, and gorged themselves. When they were done eating, they took the elevator upstairs.
Rondeau wasn’t in the room. There was no note.
“Maybe he went out for breakfast,” B said doubtfully.
“He’s flaky, but he knows better than that,” she said. “Besides, his bed’s made, and it’s too early for the maids to have come in. Rondeau doesn’t make his own bed, so that means he didn’t sleep here.” Maybe he was flaking out—maybe he’d run into Zara and slept with her. But Marla had told him to come back to the room, told him and meant it, and she didn’t believe he would have disobeyed her if it had been in his power to comply.
She checked the voice mail on the cell phone, but there were no messages. The fact that she and the phone had been in other universes all night might have had something to do with that, she supposed. She noticed a light blinking on the phone beside the bed. “I guess there’s voice mail for the room,” she said, and pushed the button.
The first message had come in that morning, just a couple of hours before. It was the Chinese sorcerer, speaking in the sweet stolen voice of his apprentice. “Meet me at my shop, today, at three o’clock. Bring me Ch’ang Hao, properly restrained, and I will return your lickspittle Rondeau to you. And then we will discuss restitution for the damage you have caused my reputation and my shop.”
Marla swore. Then the next message began. It was her consiglieri, Hamil.
“Marla,” he said. “I’ve been trying to reach you for hours. I just got word from another one of my spies. Susan is going to cast the spell tonight. If you don’t find the Cornerstone now, soon, it’s going to be too
late.”
That was bad news, but it could have been worse. Marla was going to confront Mutex this afternoon, and one way or another, things were going to end. She would get the Cornerstone, or she would die. If she got the stone, Susan’s spell tonight wouldn’t be a problem. If she died, well, Susan’s spell still wouldn’t be a problem.
Then the automated voice of the machine told Marla the date and time of Hamil’s call. His message was older than the Chinese sorcerer’s. Hamil had called the day before, in the afternoon, while she was in another world with B.
Which meant Susan had cast her spell to take over Marla’s city the night before, while Marla was trapped in another universe.
Marla began to laugh.
17
S o what’s the news?” B said.
Marla didn’t hesitate. B had proven himself, as much as anyone could in two days. “The bad news is, the Chinese guy has Rondeau. I’m supposed to meet him at three o’clock today to negotiate his safe return, or, more likely, to walk into his ambush.”
“Three o’clock. The same time you’re supposed to lie in wait to ambush Mutex.”
“I see you’ve been taking notes.”
“So what’s the good news? Or is this a bad-news/ worse-news sort of situation?”
“Temporarily good news. I’ve been granted a stay of execution.” Marla was marginally cheered, just thinking about the kind of day Susan must be having, checking her spells, finding them sound, checking her components, finding them flawless; and then falling into a depressed contemplation of the great intangible quality that drove all magic, from the merest cantrip needed to light a cigarette to the great spells that could cause earthquakes and raise leviathans: the sorcerer’s will. Susan would have no choice but to assume her will was the weak point in her spell, that her attempt to destroy Marla had failed because Susan didn’t need, want, deserve it enough.
