by Kay Hooper
What else could she do? Three times now she had gotten closer to him than anyone ever had, twice inside his very consciousness and now this.
The urge to protect himself was almost overwhelming, and his struggle to master that instinctive alarm was a fierce inner battle. In the end all he could do was reach a truce with the primitive emotions Serena had awakened inside him—a momentary peace, but no resolution.
It was enough, he thought as he heard Serena’s light step on the stairs. It would have to be enough.
“It doesn’t look like a gate,” Serena said, contemplating one corner of Merlin’s study.
The corner did indeed look quite innocent on this Friday morning, with nothing to mark its importance except for a very slight shimmer in the air—like heat radiating off pavement on a summer’s day—which seemed to hold the shape of an arch.
“Why that corner?” she asked. “I mean, why not one of the other corners?”
Merlin leaned back against his desk, one hand resting lightly on the box containing his staff, and shook his head. “We’re about to journey back in time to a lost continent—a lost world—and you’re worried about why I chose a particular corner among four of them in which to build the gate?”
Serena sighed. “Okay, so I’m nervous. I’ve never traveled through time before. What do I expect?”
“It won’t be like stepping through a doorway,” he told her. “There will be a period of … unusual sensation. Darkness probably, and sounds.”
She didn’t have the nerve to question him for more specifics. “Oh.”
Merlin smiled slightly, but went on in the same matter-of-fact tone. “I’ve set the gate to help us blend into our surroundings once we reach Atlantis. We’ll hear the people there speak in English, and they’ll hear us respond to them in their own language; that way, if the language is completely unfamiliar to us, we won’t be at a disadvantage. And our clothing will be whatever is suitable.”
Serena looked down at her sweater and jeans. “Suitable? What if they’re nudists?”
“Then we’ll be naked.”
She wasn’t particularly shy, but found that idea appalling. “I hope you aren’t serious.”
Still smiling faintly, Merlin said, “Serena, communal nudity isn’t at all likely. In fact, you’ll no doubt think they wear far too many clothes—especially since you’ll presumably be in some kind of skirt.”
She winced. “Great. Something guaranteed to get in my way for sure. Can’t I keep my jeans and call it a new style?”
“No.”
She watched him pick up the box containing his staff and tuck it underneath one arm, and felt a wave of panic. They were going. They were really going, right now. “Um … are you sure I’m ready for this?”
“Certain. Your mask of powerlessness is perfect, Serena. No wizard we encounter will be able to sense anything else.”
“Maybe, but I could always use another lesson. For instance, I’m not quite sure—”
“Serena.”
She looked at him, then drew a breath.
“All right. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”
He held out his free hand to her, and when she took it, twined their fingers together securely. “Hold on,” he instructed.
That was something Serena didn’t need to be told. She wasn’t about to let go of him. The reality of what they were about to do had hit her only last night when she was supposed to be resting for the trip, and now only her trust in Merlin enabled her to walk to the gate beside him.
They paused for an instant, their glances meeting briefly, green eyes and black both holding glimmers of wariness and uncertainty—and then stepped through the gate together.
She knew the village men had finally left her even though there was no respite from the pain they had inflicted. It washed over her in glittering white-hot waves, causing her muscles to jerk feebly in a response far beyond her control. But her mind was clear and calm, her thoughts almost peaceful and detached from the pain of her poor, tortured body.
She was dying. Roxanne knew that, but it didn’t seem to matter very much to her. She wished idly that they hadn’t left her naked, but the coldness of the ground beneath her no longer disturbed her, and she fancied she could feel the first warmth of the rising sun and sense its light.
She heard a faint sound and, untroubled and vaguely curious, considered what it might be. Footsteps? Perhaps. Coming toward her, she thought. It was morning now, and the village men wouldn’t hurt her anymore. Couldn’t hurt her anymore.
No one in Atlantia could hurt her now.
PART TWO
Atlantia
SIX
It was like stepping into total darkness with no idea if you would find solid ground beneath your feet or only miles of air. Serena could feel Merlin’s hand gripping hers, but nothing else. There was a whistling sound like wind rushing by, yet she felt no sensation of its passing, and there were colors she couldn’t see. It seemed to last a long time, or maybe it was only seconds. Then, with jarring abruptness, her foot touched something hard, night sounds flooded her ears, and there was light.
She realized that she was breathing in a jerky rhythm, that her heart was pounding. “You didn’t warn me,” she muttered, blinking because her eyes were tearing.
“I’ve never gone this far before,” Merlin replied, his own voice a little breathless.
Neither of them moved for several moments, both concentrating on catching breath and balance, adjusting to an atmosphere that felt thickened, humid, and chilly and held a faint smell like sulfur. Their body weight seemed greater, and they had the skin-prickling perception of energy in the very air around them.
“God, it’s like an alien planet,” Serena murmured as her senses began coping. “Are you sure it isn’t?”
“I’m sure,” Merlin replied. “We’re in Atlantis.”
They were standing on a rocky slope above an enormous valley. Mountains, like the one they stood upon, encircled the valley completely, their high peaks jagged and inhospitable in the gray light just after dawn. The trees Serena could see nearby were peculiar, usually tall and spindly with sparse growth; in the valley below, the distant trees appeared to be squat and gnarled, with scant but very large leaves that seemed to glow dully.
There were two visible lakes, the larger one toward the northeast part of the valley and the smaller one at the west end, and half a dozen streams. There were numerous ravines and gullies cutting jagged rips in the valley floor, and there were ridges of raw earth like the hideous scars of lethal wounds twisting among the forests and fields.
An odd, mistlike haze hung over the valley, but the fog was unlike any she had ever seen in her life. It was dynamic, shifting and swirling with threads of luminescence like something pulsing with life. It was alive; she could feel the energy of it.
Even as she stared, enthralled and intuitively wary of it, the first rays of the sun found their way between the peaks to the east, and the mist seemed to thin and begin dispersing as soon as the light hit it. Even its energy appeared to diminish, as if stolen by the sun.
“What is that?” she asked Merlin nervously.
“I don’t know. It is—or was—made up of energy, but I’ve never seen or felt anything like it.”
“Me, neither.” Serena realized she was still clinging to his hand, and hastily released it. That was when she noticed that they were in clothing quite different from what they normally wore in their time.
Merlin’s outfit suited him rather well, she thought. Black trousers tucked into knee-high black boots and a black shirt with a laced and open neckline made him look even taller and more powerful than he was, as well as explicitly masculine. The long, robelike coat with its standup collar and full sleeves was a light brown, almost gold color, worn open and unbelted, and gave him a regal air.
Serena’s outfit, on the other hand, made her feel rather like a medieval peasant girl. She was also in a long, robelike garment with a square neckline and full
sleeves, but except for the white sleeves, hers was dark green, loosely belted at the waist, and worn over a white shift. There were flimsy brown slippers on her feet, and her long hair hung down her back in a single neat braid—which was how she often wore it.
“Oh, brother,” she muttered.
“I did warn you it would probably be a skirt,” Merlin pointed out dryly.
“Yeah, but I hoped you were wrong.” She moved just a bit, trying to adjust to the heavy and rough-textured material of the clothing, and felt suddenly self-conscious when she realized that the shift was her sole undergarment. No bra and panties for the women of Atlantis, obviously. Of course, that also meant there’d be no panty hose, which was a merciful thing, and at least she wasn’t burdened with a corset or some other instrument of fashionable torture that had been inflicted upon women at various points in history.
She looked at Merlin just in time to see the box he carried vanish, and realized he had sent it into limbo until he needed it or else found a safe place to leave it. He’d had to carry it with him through the gate, naturally.
“What if all the Master wizards here carry their staffs?” she asked him, wondering for the first time how many Master wizards there would be here.
“Then I’ll carry mine,” he replied calmly. “When we know for sure.” He looked around slowly, taking note of their surroundings rather than searching for a particular thing, and Serena decided she’d better do the same.
Behind them a rocky face jutted out from the slope, and a smooth expanse of granite shimmered very faintly to indicate the presence of the gate. Serena noted at least three landmarks in the area—a twisted tree, a rock formation bearing the distinct shape of an elephant, and the orientation of the peak above them in relation to the rising sun—and fixed the location carefully in her mind. They were at the south end of the valley and nearly halfway up this mountain; it was something to remember. If there was a need to return to the gate quickly, she wanted to be able to find it.
Having done that, she looked back over the valley, not even sure what she was looking for until she heard her own question. “Where are the people?”
Merlin was looking down into the valley. Much of it was forested, but here and there were clearings and meadows, as well as patches of cultivated land, their boundaries too neat to be natural, and at the base of the mountain they stood upon was the faint trace of a dirt road that seemed to encircle the valley. Throughout as much of the valley as they could see clearly, there were no other visible roads, merely indistinct paths.
“There are some people in a village in that direction,” he replied, pointing to the west. “But not many for a valley this size. Maybe a hundred men and women. Almost no children. All powerless, I think.” He frowned as he continued to stare toward the west.
“What?” Serena could have opened her senses, but she was a bit wary of doing so until she felt more secure behind her innocent mask of powerlessness. Besides, Merlin could absorb twice the information she could glean for herself.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. There’s something wrong there. I can’t quite bring it into focus.”
“Maybe when we get closer,” she offered.
“You’re probably right.” He turned his gaze away from the west, scanning the remainder of the valley. Far to the east, barely visible now as the sunlight streamed into the valley, something at the base of another mountain caught his attention. “A city,” he said.
Serena looked, as well, and felt a jolt of excitement mixed with uneasiness. The city was too far away for her to be able to see clearly, but one fact was evident. “It’s a walled city, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I think so. And the gates appear to be closed.”
“Then they’re afraid of something … out here?”
“A reasonable assumption.” Merlin scanned the valley again, frowning. “But it isn’t clear what that might be. I’m not sensing any dangerous animals. In fact, except for birds, insects, a few small rabbits, and the like, I don’t sense any animals, not even livestock.”
That didn’t strike Serena as particularly strange, mostly because she was simply worried about why anyone would build a walled city. “Could the people in the city be afraid of wizards, do you think?”
Merlin gazed toward the city, obviously probing. After a moment a muscle tightened in his jaw and he looked down at her. “I think more than half the people in the city are wizards. A few hundred people, certainly not more. Maybe some children, though not many. And there’s something else. As near as I can tell, it’s a city populated almost entirely by women, with very few men—and the men are all powerless.”
Bewildered, Serena said, “Where are the male wizards?”
His dark gaze swept the valley again, then turned upward to probe the mountains. “In the mountains, high up on the peaks. They’re all around us, Serena, encircling the valley. I can feel them. More of them than the women. Some of them are quite powerful. I can’t tell if there are women or children; the energies of the males is acting like a screen.”
“Wait a minute. The male wizards are up here in the mountains, the female wizards are in that walled city with some powerless women and men, and the rest of the powerless people, as far as we can tell, are in the village? What kind of segregated society is this?”
“One we have to understand,” Merlin told her. “And we don’t have a lot of time. Just a month, thirty days.”
The reminder made Serena more uneasy. “That sounded like a lot of time back in Seattle, but it doesn’t now.”
“I know.” Merlin looked thoughtful for a moment, then gestured slightly, and packs appeared on their backs. “We’d better get started. We’re travelers, Serena, visitors here in Atlantis. Our customs are a bit different, so we’re curious about the society here—remember that when you ask questions of anyone.”
“Works for me.” She adjusted the light pack and added, “What’s in this, anyway?”
“A change of clothing, the minimum any traveler should have. Anything else we need along the way, we can create—or I can. You shouldn’t use your powers unless absolutely necessary, at least until we figure out what’s going on here.”
“All right. So where do we start? Up here with the male wizards, or down there with the rest?”
“Down in the valley, I think. We’ll head toward the city, but not by the road; I’d rather not be that visible until we know something about this place and its people.”
Serena nodded and followed Merlin as he began picking his way down the rocky slope. She kept close to him, but studied her surroundings warily as she tried to get a sense of the place. The air still felt heavy to her, even though the sunlight was chasing away the chill, and she was grateful that the mist that had hung over the valley was almost gone, because it had made her feel uneasy.
It took nearly an hour for them to reach the valley floor, and by then Serena was fascinated. Along the way they had seen weird flowers growing from odd places—at least three different ones from solid rock—and the strangest trees, bushes, and other plants growing in assorted shapes and sizes and colors, a few of them also in odd places.
In the valley the vast majority of the trees were squat and gnarled, just as Serena had thought, with meager broad leaves gleaming dully. Most of them were green, but no fewer than half a dozen trees she saw had leaves of odd shades, such as red and blue; the effect was more grotesque and unsettling than attractive. There were bushes, pathetically stunted, twisted things, and an incredible number of uprooted or simply broken trees, some dead and others dying.
Down here it really did look like an alien planet. And for all its bizarre, fascinating strangeness, it was an ugly place, as ghastly as an open wound.
When they paused, Serena looked down at a four-inch-wide crack in the hard-packed dirt that zigzagged across the road and on into the forest as far as she could see, and she murmured, “So much for the popular lovely image of Atlantis as paradise; this place is beginning to look more like someb
ody’s idea of hell.”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the ground beneath them shuddered and heaved. Serena would have fallen if Merlin hadn’t caught her arms. For what seemed like minutes, she held on to him and tried to keep her balance, hearing the crash of trees and boulders and the indescribable sound of the very earth writhing in torment.
Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the quake ended. Silence was absolute for a full minute, and then a few birds cheeped and sang tentatively.
“It’s over,” Merlin said. “For now, at least. Are you all right?”
“That’s a loaded question.” Serena adjusted her pack when he released her arms, and tried to conjure a smile as she looked up at him. “My first earthquake. To be honest, I didn’t like it much. There’ll be more, won’t there?”
He nodded. “And probably worse as we get closer to the end. We should always be on guard, and try to stay away from the more dangerous areas, where there could be rock slides, for instance, or falling trees.”
“Yeah.” She was staring down at the crack in the road, which was now a couple of inches wider. She swallowed hard. “I’d rather not become a permanent part of the lost continent.”
Merlin took her hand in his. “Come on. We’ll move off the road but keep it in sight for a while.”
Serena was more than willing to move; that crack in the earth unnerved her. And she was grateful for his reassuring grasp, though she dared not say anything about it. Not so much because she didn’t want Merlin to know she was jittery, but because she didn’t want to call undue attention to the contact between them. As he had said, what they had to do here would be difficult enough without … that.
The sun was well up now, so they had no trouble seeing when they moved into the forest. But even without darkness the forest evoked a creepy feeling, Serena decided, eyeing the distorted, stunted trees and listening to bird sounds—she thought they were bird sounds, anyway—that were alien to her ears. It was impossible to adjust completely to the strangeness of the surroundings, she decided, because everything that was odd affected the senses in an overwhelmingly primitive way.