The Wizard of Seattle (14 page)

Since Serena was in the process of copying her own set of spellbooks (only those in which she had completed her training), she could recognize all of Merlin’s, and all the reference books in his library, as well; the book on his desk was something else. It looked very, very old, and she had the feeling that despite all her training and learning, she wouldn’t have been able to read the enigmatic script.

“No,” Merlin said, replying to her comment. “It was given to me, recently, by my own Master.”

She hesitated, but since the topic didn’t seem to be taboo, she said, “I never thought, but of course you would have had to be apprenticed to a Master when you were a child.”

“In my case, the Master was my father.” With a slight smile he added, “A difficult undertaking for both of us. Wizard or powerless, fathers and sons always seem to be at odds.”

“He was a difficult taskmaster?”

“Not so much that as a … difference in personalities and temperament.”

“You must take after your mother then,” Serena ventured.

Merlin’s face closed down instantly, as if a curtain had dropped. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

He shook his head abruptly to cut off her apology. “Never mind. We wandered from the point. This account of the destruction of Atlantis is very detailed, obviously from an eyewitness who was at sea. So there must have been at least one survivor.”

Serena realized she had touched a nerve in her comment about his mother, but she had no idea why. Nor could she probe for an answer; his shuttered eyes made that clear. All she could do was follow his lead.

She was relieved to find a humorous angle in her own thoughts, and that relief was audible in her voice. “It just occurred to me that since the nonwizard world has no idea about some of this stuff, any powerless historian would just love to get his hands on your books.”

Merlin smiled slightly. “They wouldn’t be able to read a word.”

“True.” Serena thought for a moment, and found a genuine worry to distract her from everything else. “Something else occurs to me. Since we’ll be in Atlantis just when everything’s about to hit the fan—you will be able to get us out of there in a hurry, won’t you?”

“If we’re near the gate, certainly.”

She stared at him. “If we’re near it? You mean it’s a fixed gate?”

Returning her stare, Merlin said, “Well, I don’t propose to carry it around in my pocket.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. If we happen to get stuck away from the gate just when we need it, wouldn’t you be able to make another? A spur-of-the-moment escape hatch, so to speak?”

“No. One gate causes a small rip in the space-time continuum, which is dangerous enough; a second gate could create a crosscurrent and make it impossible for
either doorway to be closed. We don’t want that to happen.”

“I guess not.” Serena frowned. “So there really
is
a space-time continuum?”

“Of course.”

“Oh. I thought the science fiction writers made that up.”

“So do they.”

Serena laughed, and realized only then that in the surprise of Merlin’s announcement about their forthcoming trip, she had completely forgotten the tension between them. It felt more like old times, talking to him like this without difficulty, as if no trouble had sprung up between them.

Remembering, of course, brought all the emotions and stress back to mind, and even as Serena heard her laugh trail off, she saw Merlin’s smile fade, as well. The tension hadn’t vanished, it had merely been ignored for a while.

Would she really have all her questions answered by the time they returned from Atlantis? Even the painful ones—like the identity of his blond bedmate? Would this trip be a panacea for their strained relationship, or would it only make matters worse between them?”

“Serena …”

She looked at him, at the awareness in his eyes, and wondered despairingly if she had forever lost her ability to keep her feelings hidden from him. It seemed so.

Carefully neutral, she said, “So you want to get started first thing tomorrow?”

He nodded slowly in reply, but said, “Serena, what we have to do is going to be difficult enough without—”

She couldn’t let him finish that, and got up even as she spoke briskly. “I know. Look, neither of us has eaten supper, so why don’t I go and see what Rachel left for us?”

“Fine.”

When he was alone again in the study, Merlin gazed broodingly down at the open book on his desk, trying to forget the naked moment with Serena. He was able
to push it aside, if only because there were so many other things to think about.

Odd the twists and turns fate pursued. If his father had not given him this book, the “reference material” that contained the procedure to take Serena’s powers, he would never have found what he had searched for all these months. It wasn’t an answer, but it was definitely a beginning.

The book seemed to have been written long after Atlantis’s destruction and long after the law forbidding women to become wizards had been created. But in the section of the book detailing the extended and elaborate procedure used to render a female powerless (Merlin refused even to read the actual procedure), there were numerous vague references to “the dark times” and allusions to some dreadful cataclysm.

As the judge had said, there was nothing specific in this book about the reasons for the law, but the use of the word
cataclysm
had struck Merlin forcibly. How many true cataclysms had there been in all of history? Not many, really, given the span of time. And in the history of
wizards
, none was claimed to have had any meaningful effect on their society.

Yet in this same book, in another section dealing with the historical accuracy of certain events, was an old account of the destruction of Atlantis, clearly written by an eyewitness who had been, of course, a wizard. (The doings of powerless beings were detailed by their own books.) Though the account was concise and detailed, it was not dispassionate; there was anger and bitterness and pain in every word. And after the bald details of what a continent looked like as it wrenched itself apart and sank into the ocean, there was one line that had made Merlin’s heart suddenly beat faster.

A great deal of meaning could be inferred from that brief statement. “It” had to be the destruction of the continent; and “us” had to be the other wizards, the ones who had lived, then, primarily in Europe. The implication
was that the eyewitness had been a visitor to Atlantis. And the statement was a strong indication that the wizards of Atlantis had somehow caused their own destruction.

Speculation, certainly, but possible.

It had taken hours of searching through his library for Merlin to find any other information about Atlantis, and what he did find was sketchy. The society there had seemed to be one of great promise, its people strong and healthy, their land fertile, and their community vigorous. There were definitely wizards among the powerless; Merlin couldn’t find out how many because whole passages in several of his books and scrolls were completely illegible, and nothing he tried had any effect.

As if the information had been deliberately destroyed.

Still, there was enough to convince Merlin he was on the right track. Common sense told him that the taboos against women must have resulted from some immense traumatic event (a good definition of a cataclysm, he thought, would be the destruction of an entire continent), and it was surely no coincidence that much of the information regarding Atlantis was as elusive as that regarding female wizards.

From that deduction it was only natural to consider going back in time to find out what had happened.

It wouldn’t be the first instance of time travel for Merlin, so the actual journey didn’t disturb him—even without the permission of the Council. He wasn’t even unduly alarmed at the prospect of landing on a continent about which he knew next to nothing except that it was about to vanish under the sea. His worries were more complicated.

What tormented him the most was Serena, and what he would have to do to her if the past held nothing to help him. He would have to destroy her. To see the astonishing trust in her eyes turn to horror and fear … and pain.

Merlin tried to shake off the thoughts; there was no use worrying until he knew whether or not the past offered anything helpful. But he couldn’t stop thinking
about Serena; he’d never been able to do that. Not since she’d grown up.

Was he being reckless as well as irrational in taking her with him into the past? There was no real reason for that course of action, after all. He had certainly never needed help, and given the tension between them, her presence was likely to cause more strain than he wanted or needed to deal with. There was no reason at all for her to accompany him.

Was there?

He’d been sitting here at the desk for hours with that question in his mind, and had come to a decision only when Serena walked into the study. It might have been because he was a fair man and this certainly concerned her; it might have been because he had a hunch that this time he
would
need help—her help—to attempt to understand what had gone wrong in the society of wizards.

Might have been, but wasn’t.

Ever since he had talked with his father, Merlin had been struggling to cope with the painful knowledge that the older wizard had not trusted his wife of twenty years, despite her fidelity, trust, and devotion, and that she might have killed herself because of it. That, more than anything else, revealed to Merlin just how tragic and unnatural was the wizards’ reflexive wariness and mistrust of women.

When Serena had walked into the study, he had looked at her and had felt the disturbing jumble of emotions that had become painfully familiar these days—and his father’s words had echoed inside his head.
There is no place in your life for a woman of power…. It’s not in me to trust a woman, just like it isn’t in you…. You
feel
it’s true even if you don’t
think
it is, and that kind of conflict will tear you apart
.

His deepest instincts were at war with his intellect, and Serena, innocent and unsuspecting, was in the middle of that battle. If there was something in Atlantis that would help resolve his conflict, Merlin intended to find it, and he wanted Serena to be with him when he
did. In the end his decision to take her with him was just that simple.

As it turned out, both Serena and Merlin had to go to their offices early on Monday to arrange to take the remainder of the week off, so they decided at breakfast to begin getting ready for their forthcoming trip in the early afternoon.

Serena met Jane for lunch, mostly because she knew her friend was sincerely worried about her. Their broken shopping date on Saturday, as well as Serena’s recent preoccupation, had convinced the lively brunet that Kane’s column had caused all kinds of problems, and it required Serena’s best efforts to convince her otherwise.

After soothing her friend, she returned home to find the house deserted. Rachel had gone, and Merlin apparently hadn’t gotten home yet. Serena changed into jeans and then, on impulse, went downstairs to his study. The door wasn’t barred, which was something of a relief for more reasons than one.

What she wanted were a few answers. She didn’t know if she could find anything Merlin wanted to keep from her, but she had to try because she had the uneasy feeling that what he was doing—his apparent dispute with the Council of Elders and his flouting of their authority in his decision to travel through time without permission—was somehow her fault.

Besides that, there was simply too much curiosity in her nature to allow a puzzle to continue unchallenged.

For the first time, Serena entered Merlin’s study with her mind and senses deliberately wide open—and as soon as she crossed the threshold, she felt breathless. She realized that her own strong mental shields had always blocked whatever energies were contained in the ancient writings—but she felt them now.

Not a negative force, the sense she had was of sheer power, muted and dormant. She leaned back against the doorjamb and half closed her eyes, cautiously probing. And at the extreme edge of her awareness, she almost heard soft whisperings of a hundred, a thousand voices.
The languages were varied, but all were obscure and contained Latin phrases and strange words that belonged to no language mankind had ever known. Or had ever heard, even when it had been spoken.

Her veiled gaze traveled slowly around the room, sliding over books and scrolls, then stopped. She pushed herself away from the door and walked to the shelves between two windows. A particular book, oversize and so old that the leather had been worn almost to nothing, seemed to pull at her. She had never noticed this book before. It wasn’t the one that had lain open on his desk; that book was not in the room.

Damn him—he knew her too well.

She got the other book down, the one that seemed to tug at her senses. Handling it carefully, she carried it to Merlin’s desk; then holding it balanced on its spine, she allowed the book to open where it would.

A glance showed Serena that the language was totally alien to her, and she wasted no time in trying to decipher the unfamiliar symbols. But there was a full-page illustration on the righthand side, a stark, black-and-white drawing. It was faded by time so that little of it was even identifiable to her. She thought it represented a terrible conflict; bright jagged lines like lightning bolts seemed to be emanating from some kind of structure, and framed by what looked like a lighted window, two human figures struggled.

Serena touched the drawing and almost instantly drew her fingers back. She felt unsettled, strangely anxious and almost afraid. It was a primitive fear, like something rustling in a dark corner of her mind.

Bad
. The simple word of a child, yet it encompassed what Serena felt about the drawing.

Unwilling to look through the rest of the book, she closed it and returned it to the shelf. That was when she saw the box. It lay on a higher shelf and was built of some glossy dark wood, every inch of which was carved with strange symbols. She’d never seen it before, even though she had been in this room often over the years.