Kay Hooper - The Wizard Of Seattle

"She's asleep again. It seemed to hit her all at once."

Merlin nodded. "Delayed shock. The next time she wakes, I doubt she'll seem so calm."

"I wondered about that. She seemed… almost detached about what had happened to her."

"Waking to find herself uninjured and with her memory of what had happened to her somewhat distant, she wasn't forced to deal with the trauma immediately. Since we were here, strangers, she was able to concentrate on us. Explaining some of the traits of this place kept her mind off herself. It was a healthy enough response."

"But temporary?"

"She'll have to deal with what happened to her sooner or later."

Serena was silent for a moment, then said, "Is that coffee you're drinking? Do they have coffee here?"

"Yes, it is coffee, and no, they don't have it here. I'm cheating." Merlin gazed broodingly into his mug. "Would you like some?"

"Please."

He conjured a mug of coffee for Serena-fixed with cream and sugar, the way she always drank it-directly into her grasp without even looking at her.

"I'm always impressed when you do that," she murmured.

Merlin felt too unsettled to respond to her light tone. Instead he said, "At least now we know why Roxanne was unable to defend herself against her attackers."

"I suppose it's useless to hope we won't be affected the way they are," Serena ventured.

"Probably. If this Curtain does indeed reflect energy at the wizard who tries to use it, we're vulnerable to it as well."

Serena spoke slowly. "She said it also drains them. That it depletes more than their excess energy. If that's so, men like those three we met could overpower even the strongest wizard during the night. So why haven't they? I mean, if the powerless men resent wizards as strongly as you felt with those three, then why don't they get together one night and-"

Merlin shook his head. "It isn't that simple, I think. The male wizards live high in the mountains, remember? I very much doubt that many of them venture down here often, if at all, and never once the sun sets. Judging by what we saw this morning, the Curtain blankets only the valley. In the mountains the wizards are above it, and probably beyond its effects."

"Then why don't the women move up there?" Serena's voice was a bit tense. "The female wizards, like Roxanne. It doesn't seem to have occurred to her-and the answer is so simple. Why do they remain down here, where their powers are drained night after night? Where they're vulnerable?"

Merlin turned his head slowly and looked at her strained features. He had hoped they could avoid talking about this until there was more information, until he found some painless way of dealing with it, but Roxanne's matter-of-fact words were undoubtedly echoing in Serena's mind just the way they were resounding in his.

… no male wizard would dare attempt to take his pleasure with a woman of power… she would kill him …

That was what Serena wanted to talk about, he knew. Roxanne had drawn an ugly picture of the battle going on between male and female wizards with a few brief but stark sentences, and that was so alien to what Serena knew of wizards that it was deeply troubling to her.

How much time did he have before she figured out why they were here? Not much, Merlin thought. She was a highly intelligent woman, and even now her mind must be filled with a jumble of impressions and speculations.

But he still didn't want to cope with this right now. Roxanne's intense hatred of the male wizards had shaken him very much, because it told him just how ominous the situation was. And his own reaction to the knowledge of a city filled with women of power was just as troubling. Even now he was struggling against the negative feelings.

"Richard?"

Returning his gaze to the mug in his hands, Merlin said unemotionally, "You heard Roxanne. The males are more powerful. The mountains must be their strongholds; so far they've apparently been able to keep the women down here in the valley."

"But why?"

Because female wizards are capable of destroying males - if only when they are taken against their will? Did this hate and mistrust come about because too many females were raped and too many males paid for the crime with their lives?

"I don't know why," he said evenly. "Any answer I could offer would be sheer speculation."

"Then speculate." Serena nearly snapped out the words.

"On the basis of what?" His tone was a bit snappy as well. "We've encountered three village men and one traumatized female wizard-hardly a representative sampling of the population. Roxanne's hatred for the male wizards may be more unique than she's led us to believe; those three men could have been mutant individuals rather than the norm; and the male wizards may have taken to the mountains simply to escape the Curtain or combative females. I-we-just don't know enough yet even to speculate, Serena."

She drew an audible breath. "You asked me to trust you, to accept this little trip of ours without posing too many questions, and I agreed to that. But I didn't agree to stop thinking, Richard."

Merlin heard something in her voice he'd never heard before, not hostility but something very close, and he found it both disturbing and painful. For all her occasional arguments and minor defiances through the years, Serena had never been in any way antagonistic toward him. Was it only because of Roxanne's bitter words, or did the very atmosphere of Atlantis kindle suspicion in everyone exposed to it?

He turned his head slowly and looked at her. She was clearly as tense as she sounded, as tense as he felt himself, and he knew he had to tread carefully. "I never asked you to stop thinking," he said quietly.

"Then don't ask me not to think about all this."

"Think what you like, Serena. But be careful in drawing conclusions. Remember your own analogy? This place is like a jigsaw puzzle; we won't know what the picture is until we have all the pieces assembled."

After a long moment she looked away from his steady gaze. Her features were still a bit strained, but her eyes were not so much wary now as uneasy. "The sun's going down. We… aren't going to transport up into the mountains to get away from the Curtain, are we?"

"To understand this place, we should experience as much as possible. Even the Curtain. And until we see one of the wizards here transport, it's one ability we won't be using. They may not believe they can fly any more than the powerless people of this time believe they can."

"Then I have a suggestion," she said. "Before the sun goes down, maybe you should conjure up a couple of guns."

Merlin shook his head reluctantly. "Cheating with coffee or blankets is one thing; we can't bring devices from our time into this world, even to protect ourselves. The risk of changing the future is too great."

She didn't argue with him; she didn't even seem surprised by what he said. She simply looked at him and said, "In that case I think I'll go and find myself a couple of really big, heavy sticks."

"That might be a very good idea," he conceded.

She felt hideously uncomfortable, Serena decided. The sense of being in an alien place seemed multiplied at night, with the unfamiliar night sounds and the queer faint shudders of the earth beneath her body. She noticed the latter only when she lay down to sleep, those almost imperceptible pulses in the ground that were even more frightening than the earlier earthquake because they were continuous reminders of instability. And the Curtain.

When she had sat near the fire with Merlin just after dark, both of them gazing up at the luminescent mist thickening in the air above the air above the valley and nearly hiding the full moon just on the wane, Serena had managed to feel a bit detached, marveling as the visible spillover of wizards' energies took on a life of its own. But with every passing hour, as the sky darkened to a peculiar blood red and seemed to pulse with energy, she felt more uncomfortable, lethargic and weak, until finally she bade Merlin a quiet good night and went to join the sleeping Roxanne in the larger of the two lean-to's.