Threshold by Sara Douglass Page A

infiltrate one of the most important workshops of its existence.
    Outside it was hot and humid, but I ignored the discomfort as I stepped onto the wooden planking and stared northwards.
    It was over one hundred and fifty paces away, but it reared so far into the sky I had to crick my neck back to take it all in. Its shadow cut neatly across the outside wall of the workshop.
    Yaqob stood comfortingly close, his hand warm on my shoulder. “Threshold.”
    It was a massive stone pyramid, yet unlike any I’d heard tales of as a child. I frowned, then pointed.
    “Yaqob, what are those? Why have they not been filled in? Is that what remains to be done?”
    All over the two faces of the pyramid that I could see, gaps had been left in the stone. Several score on each face, placed at regular intervals, and I guessed the two faces I could not see had similar gaps. Men swarmed over the structure, and I saw that near the base of one wall was a yawning entrance. As I watched three Magi emerged, their heads bent over a large scroll.
    Yaqob stared at Threshold a long time before he replied.
    “What you see now is the stone core, which has eaten more years and lives than anyone cares to remember. Now the Magi are increasing the glassworkers on the site, for our work is vital.”
    He paused, and shifted his hand. “Eventually the Magi want to plate Threshold entirely with blue-green glass.”
    I gasped, and stared at him, then back at Threshold. It would be beautiful!
    “The capstone fits on the very peak, Tirzah, and that will be in the same caged gold glass you saw Orteas and Zeldon working on. And the gaps in the stonework? They will be filled, but not with stone. These are the openings of shafts that eventually lead into the Infinity Chamber; the capstone will sit atop the great central shaft. All save the central shaft will be covered with the blue-green plate glass. Along their lengths are gates that can control the amount of light allowed to flood into the Infinity Chamber; theMagi command the devices which control the lighting of the chamber. It will be possible, I suppose, to open every shaft and allow Infinity to be flooded with light.”
    We stood there a long time in silence, staring at Threshold, staring at the beast that still lay silent, waiting.
    Waiting. Watching.
    The shadow deepened.

5
    A FTER two weeks, the guards disappeared, and the workshop relaxed, but not entirely. I think it was because of the strangers present – my father and myself. And while all were friendly towards us, they showed a reserve that hid a watching. A careful considering.
    I wondered at their secrets, but for the first few weeks I was just relieved to be working in an environment that I understood, and with people I liked. Orteas and Zeldon were far more skilled than I, and they showed me many new techniques and tools useful to the art of caging.
    We worked from the plans the Magi sent us, carefully drawn and measured. None of their designs made sense to me, not only because I could not read or write, but because each piece we caged was only a small fraction of a whole panel, and it contained only fragments of the numbers, words or symbols it would eventually help to form. That cheered me, because I did not think fragments could harm me.
    Orteas and Zeldon taught me, but they watched me, too, almost as closely as Isphet did. Once the guards left she spent long periods of each day in the high workroom where we caged. Sometimes she chatted, sometimes shequestioned, sometimes she told me of the history of Gesholme and more of the Magi, but always she watched.
    “You work well with the glass,” she said abruptly one day in the fifth week after my arrival, interrupting her tale of the day the Lhyl flooded and threatened to broach the walls surrounding Gesholme. “Almost as if you can communicate with it.”
    I kept my head bowed, feeling the thrill of the glass beneath my fingers. Isphet made beautiful glass – extraordinary, in fact. I had