Excerpt

"The witching hour." Iria stage-whispered at Madge under the fading final peal from the tower. "The time when supernatural forces are at their strongest."

"Women found out of their houses at this hour in the Dark Ages were often executed on the spot," Madge said. "Did you know that?"

Iria busied themself setting out the candles and drawing a star on the ground. It wasn't the typical five-pointed pentacle of most modern neopagan traditions. This one had thirteen points, the lines connecting them drawn in careful bands of red, white, and blue chalk. A matching tricolor candle sat at each point. Iria took their time inscribing symbols around the base of each candle.

Madge initially downplayed her sense of feeling exposed by doing magic in public like this. If two witches drawing a magic circle was the oddest thing anyone saw in San Francisco on any given night, it must be a pretty slow evening. But then… Madge swallowed hard. What if it worked?

Iria finished laying out their supplies and sat back on their heels. Their voice dropped an octave as they called the watchtowers, and Madge felt a breeze pick up, a little gust of air, like standing by a door when someone opens it and the air conditioning escapes. Iria's voice turned from greeting familiar powers in English to calling on deities from a variety of traditions. Madge didn't recognize all of them, but she knew the sound of chanting when she heard it.

Iria finished each step of the ritual with careful, deliberate movements, and as each completed, Madge could feel the wind get stronger. Notably, Madge realized, the candle flames never so much as wavered.

Oh shit, Madge thought. It's really going to work.

Iria's chanting got louder, more insistent, and Madge heard the world grow quiet. Madge noticed sounds she wasn't even conscious of before: the cough of someone sleeping behind the bushes in the shadows of Old St. Mary's Church, the conversation of two runaways spending the night behind the locked gates of St. Mary's Square across the street, the quiet Cantonese murmur of a woman phoning the old country on a balcony above them. Those sounds all fell away, too, as Iria's chanting grew louder, and Madge could feel those people's eyes on her apprentice and herself.

Staring intently at the loosely stacked pages Iria had torn from a half dozen of their books about Emperor Norton, then piled in the center of the circle, they struck a final match, tossed it onto the paper, and threw back their head. Their voice sounded like a cannon in the stretching silence. "Joshua Norton I, your Imperial subjects beseech you. Attend our requests now as you sought to do then!"

"Requests?" Madge whispered, eyes wide. She repeated it, mouth hanging open after. "Requests?"

Thunder rattled the glass in the street lamps on the corner: red bases and red frames at the top, with gold-painted dragons carved around the length of the green post. The street lamps were one of Madge's favorite things about Chinatown. Her great-great-grandparents had been Chinese immigrants to the United States, brought here in conditions of near-slavery. Generally, those immigrants' hopes and health were fed slowly into the gnashing machinery of railroad construction, mining, farming, and all the other forms of commerce fueled as much by human bodies as anything else. Then they and their descendants were isolated and denigrated as a blight on the moral fabric of the white people who brought them here. Chinatown was one of the few places in the country where a captured culture had managed to block out its captors, turning those who were not natives into aliens within their own borders. To this day, many people in Chinatown never bothered to learn English. They didn't need it. Madge's family hadn't lived in exclusively Chinese environs or culture or language in enough generations that Madge herself felt no connection to those stalwart natives of a land some had never even seen, but she admired them all the same. They carved out a place for themselves in a world openly hostile to them. That was always worthy of respect.

The crown of the nearest streetlamp shattered as another massive peal of thunder rang out across the sky. The third boomed so close, the ground shook beneath her. For one breathless half-second, Madge thought an earthquake was starting.

The embers of the burning pages rose on the wind, twisting in a spiral, and Madge's teeth buzzed with the low moan that emanated out of them. She could feel the magic in the air, could feel Iria twisting the threads of fate and of time and space as they imposed their organizing will on the junk drawer of consensual reality. Whatever Iria was summoning up was fighting back, straining against the forces Iria cast like a net to entangle it - and gods damn all the hours they'd spent in ritual, Iria had used the word "request" when Madge had said time and again to use words of power, words of authority: words like require. The forces of the universe can be commanded, but they rarely cooperate with a request.

"Don't ask it." Madge had to shout over the growing roar. "Command it!"

Iria focused their will and leaned toward the column of glowing sparks and smoke and burning pages. "By the powers on whom I call, Emperor Norton, I command you to return to the world!"

There was one more long groan, but the column of smoke and fire grew wider, and shorter, and light burst out of it. With one final blast of frigid air - air that smelled of earth and wood and the half-mint aroma of eucalyptus - the column exploded, spraying Iria and Madge with ashes and soot and cold and wretched rain. Wind snuffed out the candles. The street lamps died. Storefront windows audibly rattled up and down Grant. The person behind the bushes of the parish church scrambled to their feet and beat an invisible retreat through the shadows, shoes slapping the pavement as they ran. The gates of St. Mary's Square crashed against one another as the runaways behind them tried to dive for cover.

High above, beyond the fog blanketing the city, lightning flashed and thunder exploded so loudly half a dozen car alarms abruptly bleated and blared.

The woman on the phone above them fell silent. Her phone clattered to the street from her third-story perch.

The corner of California and Grant was completely dark. Madge could hear her own ragged breathing, and Iria's, and a foghorn on a ship far out on the Bay.

There was a cough from nearby.

Madge stopped breathing and held her breath instead.

The street lamps at the corner flickered back on.

Neon signs blinked and returned to life.

A squat, round man in a hodgepodge of military regalia from a variety of orders and services stood before them. His beard was a scraggly mess, his face was lined, his hair plastered to his head under a tall hat. The hat bore a bent peacock feather and a ribbon like they put on the prize-winning pie at a county fair. The man looked slightly bewildered as he stared back at them, then around, then did a double-take at the street corner.

"Your Majesty," Iria said, rising to their feet and then taking a knee.

"Yes?" The man looked around again, then at Iria, doffed his hat, then went back to staring this way and that. "My heavens," he said to no one in particular. He looked up at the face of Old St. Mary's and that legend it has borne since the 1850's: Son, observe the time…

Madge held out a hand. "I'm Madge." His Imperial Majesty didn't respond - and didn't take her hand.

Iria stood again and smiled at the Emperor as they spoke. "I'm Iria," they said. "I'm the one who summoned you. I thank you for being willing to return. I hope we have a lot of opportunities to learn from each other. And, of course, might as well get this out of the way, I will require certain tasks of you from time to time." They shrugged down at Emperor Norton from their comparatively towering height of 5'11".

Emperor Norton blinked up at Iria, and when they said the last sentence, he stepped back. "I beg your pardon?"

"I… I summoned you," Iria said. "I command you now."

Emperor Norton took a deep breath and puffed his chest out. "I rather think not," he huffed. "I have a debate to attend." He turned from them, but turned right back and, lifting his cane to gesture at Iria with it, added, "And I remind you that though I seek naught but benevolence in the administration of my empire, it is generally ill-advised to seek to command a sovereign." He scoffed at her, a little pah of breath, adjusted his hat, and turned away again.

Stepping forward to cross the street, Norton glanced up at the street signs for Grant and California. He stopped, looked around at the surrounding storefronts, looked back at Old St. Mary's Cathedral, studied the other buildings again, and then turned back to Iria and Madge where they stood in silence fading to embarrassment.

"And furthermore," he bellowed, adjusting the hang of his coat where it draped over him, "I seem to have lost my bearings and require you provide direction to the Academy. It would not do to be late, and you have delayed me with this silliness. And atop that, now I find myself standing at the corner of California and Grant, the latter being a street I confess I did not know exists in this fair city. I require you give me directions lest I assess the taxes for which you are undoubtedly in arears."

"Oh, you're late alright," Madge muttered.

Iria folded their arms in what Madge recognized as extremely annoyed determination and said, "Okay, Norton." Their tone caused the Emperor's eyes to widen a hair's breadth and his nostrils to flare. "Let's go over this again from the top. You're dead. We summoned back your ghost. You work for me now. Capiche?"

"Also, they renamed DuPont to Grant, like, a hundred years ago." Madge waved her hand at the street sign. The glare that passed between Iria and Norton, Madge thought, could probably have frozen molten iron.

"Well, quite obviously I am dead," Norton replied, unflustered by any measure. "That hardly keeps me from the duties of the crown. Now good evening."