She nodded. "Yeah. Owen won't be happy if I suddenly take off this coming week without warning," she said, referring to her boss, "but everything's caught up, so he really doesn't have an argument. I gather that's the idea? That I should start my vacation beginning tomorrow?"

"The sooner we get started, the better. I can close the office for the week and give Rachel the time off so we won't be disturbed at all."

"What'll we tell people? When we leave, I mean."

Merlin shook his head. "We won't tell them anything, because no one will ever know we even left the house. I'll set the gate to return us within minutes, no matter how long we spend in Atlantis."

Serena had to think about that for a moment, but then nodded. "We'll be in the past, so time won't advance in the present-right?"

"Right."

"So how much time will we spend in Atlantis? Relative time, I mean?"

Once again Merlin glanced down at the opened book on his desk before he replied. "If we're to be successful, I believe we have to be there at the end-or as close as possible. A month before the destruction, I think. That should give us enough time to observe and understand the society."

"You know exactly when it happened?"

He nodded. "Yes-another reason why I suspect there was at least one witness. The account of Atlantis's final hours is extremely detailed and seems to have been written from a ship at sea."

She looked curiously at the book lying open before him, but since it was upside down from her viewpoint, she was unable to see much. "That account?"

"This account," he confirmed with a slight nod.

"That isn't one of your books," she noted. From ancient times Apprentice wizards had been required, as part of their training, to hand-copy (with exquisite penmanship, no less) a complete set of spellbooks from their Master's library. This was required not only for the discipline gained in the long process of carefully copying the books, but also because spellbooks were never translated or printed.

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 fete 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.