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"Then perhaps the cauldron would have gone to Chattanooga. You'll drive yourself crazy if you start wondering
down those lines, Joanne. We can't know what might have been."
I thought of the alternate self whose life I'd seen glimpses of, and clamped my mouth shut on an I can. It hadn't,
after all, been my talent that let me see a dozen different timelines. "Okay. One more stupid question, and then I
promise to go& " Save the world seemed a little melodramatic, so I went with "stop the killer," and added,
"somehow," under my breath.
Out loud, I said, "Does every city have a group of shamans like Seattle did? People who try to protect the
place?"
"Many do. There are& " Sonata sighed and went back to the counter, brewing the tea that had been abandoned.
"There are both more and fewer shamans, or adepts of any kind, than there have ever been, Joanne. More,
because there are more people than ever before. Fewer, because& "
"Because there are more people than ever before." I mooshed a hand over my face. "Five hundred years ago
there'd have been a shaman in every tribe, maybe. One person for a few hundred, maybe a few thousand,
individuals. Now there're billions of people, and any given shaman has tens of thousands to tend to. Right?"
"In essence."
I blew a raspberry. "Why aren't there more& adepts?" I liked that word better than "magic users", probably
because people could be adept at lots of things and I could at least pretend I wasn't talking about the impossible
as if it were ordinary. The whole train of thought led me to snort at my own question before anyone had time to
answer. "Like Joanne the Unbeliever has to ask."
"It's partly an artifact of the era," Sonata agreed, then glanced at Billy, who looked uncomfortable. I sat up
straighter, ping-ponging my gaze between them, and Sonata sighed again. "The last twelve months have been
hard on the magic world, Joanne. More of us have died than usual. It's like a catalyst was set."
Oh, God. I said, "Was that catalyst me?" in a small voice, and to my undying relief, Sonata's frown turned into a
quick shake of her head.
"I don't think so. I could be wrong," she amended hastily, "but you strike me as the response, Joanne. When I
look at you I see the answer to, not the start of, the troubles."
The hollow place in my belly came back. My brain disengaged from my mouth and went distant, surprised to
hear the question I voiced: "Do you know an Irish woman called Sheila MacNamarra?"
Sonata's eyebrows went up. "Should I?"
"I don't know. She was an& adept. As far as I can tell, she spent her whole life fighting " I broke off, looking
for a less dramatic phrase than what leaped to mind, then shrugged and used it anyway. "Fighting the forces of
darkness. She went up against the Master, the one who created the cauldron. More than once, even. I think that
was sort of what she& did."
Recognition woke in Sonata's eyes. "The Irish mage. I know of her. I didn't know her name."
My heart leaped and a fist closed around it all at once, sending a painful jolt through my chest. "You've heard of
her? What do you know about her?"
Because what I knew about Sheila MacNamarra was embarrassingly limited. She liked Altoids; that was almost
the sum total of what I'd learned about her in four months of traveling at her side. It was only after she died that
I discovered she was an adept of no small talent, and that she'd spent her life fighting against to put it
extravagantly but accurately the forces of darkness.
It was only after she died that I learned how far she'd gone to protect me.
Sonata was nodding. "I know of her as a power, yes. We don't use names often, Joanne. You should know that
by now. And mages are by their nature reclusive. As far as I know, no one's seen the Irish mage outside of her
homeland in decades. I've never even heard of anyone going to study with her, which is a little unusual. I don't
know if she has any protégés."
"One," I said. "In a manner of speaking."
It would have taken a dolt to miss the implications, and while Sonata was a bit of a long-haired hippy freak, she
was by no means stupid. She sharpened her gaze on me, eyebrows shooting up again, this time making a
question all of their own.
"She was my mother," I said tiredly, "and she died a year ago tomorrow."
* * *
I didn't typically think of myself as an emotional lightweight. I didn't tear up at Hallmark commercials, although
extreme vehicle makeover shows could get me. I had a secret stash of romance novels that didn't fit my girl-
mechanic image, but even when they got angsty I didn't sniffle over them. I had not, in fact, cried when my
mother died. I'd barely known her, and I hadn't liked her very much. But for some reason my throat got
painfully tight and my nose stuffed up as I made my announcement.
Billy and Sonata were conspicuously silent, for which I was grateful. After a couple deep breaths I regained
enough equilibrium to say, "She gave me to my dad when I was just a baby, because she had to keep fighting
the Master." That was so inaccurate as to be an outright lie, but I didn't feel like getting into the complex time-
slip that had happened both nine months and almost thirty years ago in my personal timeline. "Would her death
be enough to start messing up the balance? Was she that big a gun?"
Sonata's eyes were dark. "What's your calling, Joanne? What are you, in adept terms? What are we?"
"Me? I'm a shaman. You two are mediums. Melinda's, I don't know, a witch or something. Why?"
"And what do you suppose a mage is?"
"I don't know. It's a wizard. A sorc& " Except sorcerer, in my experience, connotated bad guy, and I was pretty
damned sure Sheila MacNamarra hadn't been a bad guy. I fell silent, staring at Sonata and working through the
rankings I was aware of.
Mage didn't fit anywhere on the scale. It suggested major mojo, skills on a level that beggared the rest of us. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]