Read Threshold for Free Online Page B

was warming by a small brazier in the centre of the room. I took careful hold of it and walked over.
    “Good,” Isphet muttered, not looking at me, then began to wash Raguel down. As she did so she talked in a soft, gentle voice, surprising me. “You are not to blame for this disaster, Tirzah. Ta’uz would have dealt this babe death at some point, even had we managed to hide the fact of the birth from him. Perhaps it was kinder this way, before Raguel had a chance to form too close a bond with her.”
    Before she bonded with her? Did not carrying a babe in your womb for nine months form a bond? Without thinking I glanced at the stain on the wall.
    Isphet thrust a wet cloth into my hands. “Wash it away, Tirzah, and then help me turn Raguel over and change her bed linen.”
    I did as she asked, and when Raguel was washed and lay on clean sheets, Isphet took my hand in hers. “A rough welcome for you, Tirzah.” She gazed steadily at me. “You are not of our race, girl. Where do you come from?”
    “Far to the north. A place called Viland.”
    Isphet shook her head dismissively. “I’ve not heard of it. But you speak our tongue well, if with a heavy accent. How is that?”
    “My father and I travelled for many weeks with guards from this land, Isphet. I learned from them.”
    “And your name? You bear the name of a princess of our realm. Why is that?”
    My hand jerked in hers. The Magus had named me after a princess? I told her something of my encounter with the Magi Gayomar and Boaz.
    Isphet’s eyes widened. Gayomar she’d only ever seen briefly about Gesholme and Boaz she did not know at all, and dismissed them as quickly as she had the land of my birth. She even forgot the mystery of my naming in her intrigue with my story of the caging of the glass. Her hands tightened about mine. They were very warm.
    “You are a very interesting girl, Tirzah. You seem to become one with the glass.” She smiled as if she had made a bitter joke to herself. “We shall talk some more of it, you and I, but not now. I have asked enough questions. You must have some of your own.”
    I glanced at Raguel. She had turned her head to the wall. “I don’t understand,” I said inadequately, and then wished I’d not used those exact words.
    But Isphet did not mind, and knew what I meant. “Come,” she said, leaving Raguel alone to cope with her misery as best she could. She led me to a pallet on the other side of the plainly furnished room and pulled me down beside her. “How much do you know of the Magi?”
    “Nothing, save their cruelty.”
    “And of Threshold?”
    “Even less.”
    “Save its cruelty, you should have said,” Isphet remarked, but then patted my hand. “Well now, how shall I begin? With the Magi, I think, for you already have some understanding of them. The Magi are…”
    “Sorcerers, my father called them. But priests, perhaps?’
    “Sorcerers of a nature, certainly, but not priests, as perhaps you understand the word. The Magi are mathematicians, and once that was all they were. But they found power, cruel power, in the understanding of the properties of, and the relationships between, numbers and forms. They control the power of number and form.”
    I was beginning to understand. “I saw the regular forms of field and garden.”
    “Yes. If the Magi had their way, everything in Ashdod would be laid out according to the pure principles of mathematics and geometry. To some extent they have succeeded with the shape of fields and gardens, as streets and many buildings. They have a powerful influence over the monarch, Chad-Nezzar, and much of what they desire is enacted in royal edict.” She sighed. “But Ashdod is large, and it cannot all be arranged according to the dictates of mathematics. The Magi have only succeeded completely here…with Threshold.”
    “I saw Threshold, although not well. It…it ate at the sky.”
    Again Isphet glanced at me sharply. “Threshold is – or will be – the