Threshold

  And then into the Place Beyond.

  It was the Soulenai, with us now, comforting, pleading.

  Destroy it. Tear it apart. Boaz, help us, help us, help us, for the stone now laps at our borderlands. Listen to the frogs, learn what they have to tell you, listen, listen, listen…

  HOW? Boaz screamed. Tell me HOW!

  Before they could answer, there was another voice.

  I see you.

  The Soulenai fled, and we four milled in confusion, still somewhere within that nothingness, somewhere close to, but not quite within, the Vale.

  I see you.

  The waters screamed, and churned about the chamber.

  I see you.

  Turn your backs to him. That was Boaz, steady, calm now, bolstering Isphet’s control. Turn your backs. He sees, but he cannot –

  Wrong, stupid man. Wrong. I can touch, too. Feel?

  Dread trailed through our souls. Icy, malevolent, toying with us.

  To me, concentrate on me. Do not listen to him. He cannot harm us.

  Wrong! I can –

  Something seized my mind. Boaz. Grabbing, dragging, saving. He literally dragged us back from the nothingness, back from Nzame’s touch, back into the chamber.

  And yet…I could feel something racing after us…racing…

  “Break it, Isphet!” Boaz screamed aloud as we blinked and reeled, our senses confused, our vision blurring, our hearts pounding.

  I can tou –

  “Break it!”

  Isphet brought her hand down in a quick chopping motion, and the waters stilled.

  All of us, even the Graces who had been watching in increasing horror, sank down to the crusty floor of the chamber.

  “Thank you, Boaz,” Yaqob said. “Thank you for bringing us back.”

  I put my hands to my face. I could not imagine the power – or the presence of mind – that Boaz had just demonstrated. If he hadn’t acted when he did, Nzame would surely have followed us into this chamber, stepped into this chamber with us.

  “That is the Vale,” Solvadale eventually said, his colour returning to normal. “And that is Nzame. He is one of the many entities that exists within the Vale. The one who seized the opportunity that Threshold was offering. Others, as you have seen, may yet follow once Nzame clears the path for them.”

  “Did you know,” Boaz asked, raising his head, “that Nzame was going to see us…touch us?”

  “We suspected it,” Xhosm replied. “And we dreaded it, but this was a test for you. If you could survive this encounter, then you would have the potential to survive the ultimate battle with Nzame.”

  “Do you mean,” I asked, “that you risked not only us, but everyone in this chamber and ultimately within the Abyss?”

  “If you had failed,” Solvadale said quietly, “and we had been killed, then it would only have been a death that was coming for us anyway. But,” he shrugged, “you have done well. As well as we had hoped. Now, is everyone going to continue to sit on this floor?”

  We returned to the Water Hall.

  “Boaz,” Caerfom asked, “what were the Magi thinking of to so tap into the Vale?”

  Boaz sighed and rubbed his face. “Threshold is a bridge of sorts. At one end it was supposed to touch Infinity, but the Magi believed it needed added power to do that. So the other end of the bridge was designed to touch the Vale. We did not know what the Vale truly was. We thought it a well of power, the power of Creation.”

  “It is what was set aside during Creation,” Solvadale said. “It is what those supreme beings who directed Creation saw was miserable and bleak and so dammed up into the place that is the Vale. Now, the Magi have opened a door into it.”

  “We just thought it a well,” Boaz repeated quietly. “A repository. Unfeeling, insensitive power. We did not realise that it thought. Or that it hungered for escape.”

  38

  WE sat, he and I, on a cool stone shelf beneath an overhang of rock. At our feet lapped the waters of the river. Above us the walls of the Abyss soared into the evening sky. The people of the Abyss were relaxing from their day’s chores, sharing meals with friends, neighbours, lovers. I wondered if they shared laughter or not.

  Not, I thought, or very little, for the mood of the Abyss was subdued. Stone crept inexorably towards us. Scouts and sentries reported that much of the Lagamaal Plains between the Lhyl and the Abyss Hills was now swallowed by Nzame’s stone. If not this week, then the next, or perhaps six weeks from now, Nzame would snatch at this idyllic life. Here lay food.

  Here we lay.

  “Every time we touch the power as a group, Nzame knows,” Boaz said quietly. “Lake Juit, now here.”

  “What do we do, Boaz?”

  “Do? Do? Oh, Tirzah, don’t you know? I am supposed to combine the power of the One with the cursed Song of the Frogs and save us all.”

  “Boaz, shush now, you will understand eventually –” I began.

  “‘Eventually’ is what neither you nor I nor any one of those stumbling stone-men have. Oh gods, Tirzah. Did you see him? Memmon? Shuffling up and down that path? Was he looking for me to save –”

  “Stop it, Boaz! It is enough to have Zabrze wander corridors day and night fretting about his inactivity without you doing it as well!”

  Zabrze had heard very little for weeks. Stone everywhere, expanding east and west, north and south, and stone-men, shuffling, shuffling, shuffling, but as yet nothing from those men he’d sent to neighbouring realms. Had they got through? Or were they even now shuffling, shuffling…moaning?

  I regretted the sharpness of my tone, and I slipped my arms about Boaz and held him tight.

  We sat in silence, watching as a frog crawled from the river. Fetizza’s frogs now numbered in their thousands, and populated the river the entire length of the Abyss. They had grown slightly in size, but they retained their beautiful amber hue. As if, almost, they were the frogs from the goblet come to life.

  Three days had gone by since our experience in the Chamber of Dreaming. The four of us had met on several occasions to discuss what to do, but Isphet and Yaqob had as few answers as Boaz and I.

  The key was the Song of the Frogs. But where was the key to use the key?

  Fetizza appeared as if out of nowhere, making us jump, and bounded to the edge of the water. She was massive now, the size of a small dog, and uglier than imaginable. Warts wobbled over her mud-brown skin, splotches rusted apace by the day, yet her mouth grew wider and grinned more happily than ever.

  And her eyes remained beautiful, and she blinked them slowly at us as she settled her bulk comfortably on a rock close by the river.

  She yawned, and I expected to see yet another amber frog crawl to her lip and drop to freedom, but none appeared, and Fetizza closed her mouth with a snap.

  Up and down the Abyss amber frogs crawled out of the river. As one they cleared their throats.

  With a huge sound that was half belch, half croak, Fetizza began the chorus. She almost toppled from her rock with the force of it, and had to grip tight with her toes, but she recovered, and as her much tinier companions began their glorious peal she opened her mouth and croaked away happily.

  “Are you sure,” Boaz whispered in my ear, “that with your aptitude for languages you never learned frog croak at some point?”

  “We had very few frogs in Viland, beloved, and those we did have were too cold to croak. Now whale song, that I can teach you.”

  We listened to the frogs’ evening chorus for some time. It had a beauty all its own. The croaking and muttering of a single frog was often an unlovely sound, but when frogs gathered into their hundreds and thousands, and sang to the moon or the sun, then their croaking attained something…magical.

  But what?

  I relaxed, half dreaming in Boaz’s arms.

  The frogs’ chorus altered slightly, but I didn’t pay it much attention until I felt Boaz tense.

  “Boaz?”

  “Shush, Tirzah. Listen.”

&nbs
p; There was excitement in his voice, and I sat up; carefully, not wanting to make a sound.

  He was staring at the river, but his eyes were unfocused, and I realised he was concentrating intensely.

  The frogs were still choralling, but there was a difference. They sang slower than normal, and they sang in distinct parts. A group of some thirty, five paces south from us, sang a throaty bass, while more, closer to Fetizza, sang in a faster tempo, and with sweeter voices. And so on, up and down the Abyss. Taken together it still sounded very much like the usual frogs’ chorus…but if one listened closely…

  Boaz reached out for my hand, and I took it. He was trembling with anticipation.

  “Tirzah…Tirzah…”

  He stopped, and though I wanted to take his shoulders and shake it out of him, I knew he was still concentrating, still trying to grasp the final meaning.

  “Oh gods,” he whispered, and he paled and then shuddered. “Oh gods.”

  “Boaz? Boaz?”

  There was a movement to my right. Yaqob and Isphet. They would have heard the difference in the frogs’ chorus, and they may even have felt a little of Boaz’s excitement. Since that day in the Chamber of Dreaming we had found ourselves sharing thoughts and touches of emotion from time to time.

  I shook my head at them, warning them to remain silent, and they sank down on the rock, their eyes on Boaz.

  He had let my hand go now, and was leaning forward. His eyes darted up and down the Abyss, seeking out individual groups of frogs. Every so often he would mutter, “Yes…yes…”

  And then, stunningly, in one single instant the frogs stopped. Every one of them in that Abyss shut its throat…and stared back at Boaz.

  “Yes, yes,” he breathed. “I think I understand. One more time. Please, one more time.”

  The frogs, again as one, opened their mouths in chorus.

  Yaqob shifted irritably, and Isphet laid a hand on his arm. “Wait,” she mouthed, then locked eyes with me.

  Do you understand it, Tirzah?

  I shook my head. I can hear the difference, as can you and Yaqob. But I do not understand.

  It is slower, that is the difference.

  Yes, and far more deliberate. Listen, they speed up now, and it sounds like normal.

  Yes. Yes, I hear it.

  We sat it through, alternatively watching the frogs and Boaz, and when it was finished, and the frogs had slipped beneath the waters and Fetizza had gone to sleep, I leaned forward. “Well?”

  Boaz hesitated. “You are not going to like this,” he said, “but…”

  “But?” Yaqob asked. “But what?”

  “But the Song of the Frogs is a mathematical formula.”

  “What?” the three of us cried as one.

  “The Song of the Frogs is a mathematical formula. No, wait, it makes sense. Music has ever been closely allied with mathematics. All musical harmonies can be expressed as mathematical formulae. Shetzah! Why didn’t I understand earlier that the reverse is true as well?”

  Boaz took a deep breath, then forged on, impatient in his excitement. “Listen to me. You have heard Tirzah tell the Tale of the Song of the Frogs from the Book of the Soulenai.”

  Yaqob and Isphet nodded, curbing their own impatience.

  “Well, as thanks for weeping the tears that created the Lhyl River, the frogs gave the Soulenai a gift. A song. A path. A path to the Place Beyond. The Soulenai understood it, used it, and they were transported there.”

  “Yes, but…” I began, but Boaz waved me into silence.

  “And isn’t that exactly what the Magi have been doing at Threshold, except they built a building, a formula within itself, as a path to Infinity? Threshold is a mathematical formula expressed in physical form to provide a path into Infinity. The Song of the Frogs is a mathematical formula expressed in music to provide a path into the Place Beyond.”

  “That’s…wonderful!” I cried. “Do you mean that if we learn the formula, then we can travel to and fro between this world and the Place Beyond?”

  “Is that true, Boaz?” Yaqob said. “Can we?”

  “No.”

  “But you said –”

  “What I said,” and his voice was tight with strain, “was that the Song of the Frogs is a mathematical formula that will provide a pathway to the Place Beyond. Create an opening between two dimensions, if you will. But there is a catch, as there was always a catch with the Threshold formula – although none of the Magi minded about that.”

  “And the catch is…?” Isphet asked quietly.

  “It’s a one-way trip,” Boaz said. “You use it once, and once only, and you are transported into Infinity, or the Place Beyond, depending on which formula you use. But once there, you stay there. That is why the Soulenai have never come back.”

  We were silent, contemplating this.

  “Can you teach us this Song?” Yaqob asked. “Can you show us how it works?”

  “I can’t see why not. Listen…” and Boaz expounded the mathematical properties of the Song of the Frogs in exquisite detail.

  None of us understood a word he said.

  “Boaz, can you explain it in simple terms? None of us have had any training in the mathematics. And what you say…”

  Boaz frowned. “That was the simple explanation. But I will try to put it a different way.”

  All we learned was that only someone with a mathematical background could understand this cursed Song.

  Boaz finished, and looked inquiringly at us.

  We all shook our heads.

  “It is impossible,” I ventured, and Boaz snapped in frustration.

  “It is simple! Have you no grasp of even the –”

  “No, Boaz, we have not,” Isphet said with the utmost dignity. Then she smiled, trying to relax us all. “No wonder Avaldamon wanted you Magus-trained. There was no other way to train a Necromancer in the way of the Song of the Frogs, and if the Song is as critical to the destruction of Nzame as is intimated by the Soulenai, well…”

  “Boaz,” I eventually asked, my voice very quiet. “Do you have any idea how to use the Song of the Frogs to destroy Nzame?”

  He hesitated, and that hesitation gave the lie to his answer. “No. No, I have no idea at all.”

  We were married, he and I, together with Isphet and Zabrze, two nights later.

  Eldonor had been arranging a ceremony for weeks. He had wanted the best for the four of us, and the best is what he gave us.

  All the people of the Abyss attended, and that created no problems of space, as we were married at the water’s edge, with people lining the balconies of the Steps and frogs leaping and splashing in the shallows at our feet.

  Among those watching were the five thousand who had followed Isphet across the barren Lagamaal, trusting her to lead them to a better life than they’d enjoyed thus far. I had been worried how they’d be assimilated into the Abyss, but there had been no problems at all. Most were skilled craftworkers or willing labourers, others experienced soldiers, and no community resents having such an infusion into its ranks. There was food enough for all, for the river was bountiful and the grain fields above accommodating, and there was no lack of space to put the extra people.

  And most, if not all, of the five thousand had slipped back into the ancient ways with ease. There had been only one official and allowable religion in Ashdod, that of the One, and none from Gesholme with intimate acquaintance with Threshold could wait to discard it.

  New marriages were rife among the five thousand, but Eldonor and the people of the Abyss wanted that of Zabrze and Isphet, and Boaz and me, celebrated with a little more aplomb than many others had been.

  Lamps glinted up and down the steps, and scented candles floated in the river, making Boaz and me exchange secret smiles. It was a shame, I thought, that the river was not quite as private as that vaulted pool had been.

  Yaqob stood quietly to one side. I thought he might not come, for surely this would be painful for him. But he did, and Boaz and I tha
nked him silently for that.

  Our marriage was celebrated by Eldonor. The Graces played no part in such ceremonies, although they had come to witness. Traditionally, it was the father who conducted a marriage ceremony, and Eldonor was the only father available to all four of us. He led the vows that we repeated, and he took our hands and joined them, and we were married, and that felt very right.

  There was music and song from the masses above, and a large congratulatory croak from Fetizza. As I watched Boaz observing the frog, I wondered at the sense of loss that once again swamped me.

  Who would I lose Boaz to? Nzame? Or the Place Beyond?

  We had barely managed to consummate our marriage, barely managed to catch our breath, when Zabrze – again! – burst into our chamber.

  “Stone-men,” he gasped. “Approaching the Abyss Hills.”

  And then he was gone.

  39

  I SCRAMBLED out of bed only a breath behind Boaz.

  “Shetzah!” he cried as he saw me fumbling for my robe.

  “Stay here, Tirzah!”

  “No. I did not study the arts of necromancy to lie in bed and worry about my husband. No. I am coming.”

  “Then you will stay behind the soldiers, where it is safest.”

  “I will be where I am most needed, Boaz. Gods! Is it dawn already?”

  Boaz managed a grin as he slipped his sandals on. “You’ve kept me up all night, wife. I should be cross.”

  I returned his smile. “Come on. Zabrze is undoubtedly halfway to the top of the cliffs by now.”

  Not quite. Zabrze had paused to rally the units of his soldiers who’d fled Gesholme with him.

  We found them crowding the stairwells before us, swords in hands, faces creased in concentration. Boaz, just ahead of me, slowed down.

  “I wish you had stayed behind, Tirzah.”

  “None of us could, Boaz,” came a voice, and Yaqob appeared out of the gloom, joined a moment later by Isphet.

  “A poor way to spend your wedding night, Isphet,” he said, and she managed a wry grin.