'What are you doing?' asked Carnelian.

The boy's hands were moving over the reel's beadcord. 'Hush!' He saw Carnelian's frown. 'In a web, a single vibration can bring the spider.'

'You mean the Wise?' whispered Carnelian.

'Do not look so fearful. I would know if one of them was near.'

'I am not fearful,' protested Carnelian, glancing over the boy's shoulder to scan for any movement in the chamber.

'Haaa,' the boy muttered with satisfaction as he found the beadcord's end. He pulled at it and the reel turned smoothly, glittering.

'First, we must teach you the basics. This is the most elementary beadcord I could find.' His fingers slid along from the end until they reached a faceted ring of bronze. This bead is where the reel's text begins.'

Carnelian peered at it.

'No, close your eyes. It is your fingers that must see.'

Carnelian held it then closed his eyes.

'What do you feel?' whispered the boy.

'It is angular, regular.'

'And?'

Carnelian shrugged.

'Is it not also cold? That shape with coldness will always tell you that you are at the beginning.

This here is the title of the reel.'

Carnelian opened his eyes to see the boy running his finger from the bronze bead along the twenty or so beads to the cord's end. The reel rattled as the boy yanked a long length of it, hand over hand. He coiled it up in his left, felt along it with his right.

'Here.' He offered Carnelian another bead to feel. This bead marks the beginning of a section and can be used to move accurately and rapidly backwards and forwards along the cord.' The boy pointed down to Carnelian's feet. 'You can respool the cord with that treadle.' Carnelian could see nothing, so he felt around with his toes until he found a plate. As he pushed, it gave way and the reel beside him turned a little, sighing some beads through the boy's hands.

'Here, take it.' The boy gave the loops of beadcord to Carnelian who pushed down with his heel then with his toe, and as he did so felt the cord spitting out of his grasp as it wound onto the reel.

'It is like a spinning wheel,' Carnelian whispered, smiling.

The boy nodded, all the time watching the reel. Reaching forward, he closed his hand over Carnelian's, lifting and dropping it in a smooth rhythm. 'Move it up and down so that it winds back evenly.' He examined the reel. 'If it is done untidily, a Sapient would know that someone unauthorized had been reading it.'

The soft warmth of the boy's hand contrasted with a hardness at its edge. As the boy took his hand away, Carnelian saw the blood-ring. He had thought him too young to have one.

The bones of the beadcord,' the boy whispered, once the cord was again taut and Carnelian had hold of nothing but its end, 'are the syllable beads.' He found some examples. Carnelian tried to memorize their shapes as the boy sounded them for him. 'Any text could be coded just with these, but perhaps to speed up reading – though I suspect more for secrecy – many words are represented by a single, special bead.'

'Like glyphs,' whispered Carnelian.

'Very much like glyphs. I have chosen this reel because it is composed mostly of syllabic beads. You must learn these before you progress on to the more esoteric ones.'

'Were you taught the beadcord by the Wise?'

The boy smiled enigmatically. 'You think that likely?'

Carnelian shrugged.

'Well, I taught myself.'

They allow this?'

The boy looked up at him with raptor eyes. They cannot forbid what they do not know. It is one of the arts the Wise keep jealously to themselves.' He rotated his hand to take in the surrounding gloom. 'I have counted more than six twenties of these chambers. Each has an average of twenty benches. Each bench can hold two dozen reels on its spindles. There is enough beadcord here to weave a garment that would clothe Osrakum's crater.'

Carnelian touched the reel. 'Each of these is a book?'

The boy wavered his hand. Three or four together can form a book. In contrast, a single reel can contain a dozen reports.'

Carnelian tried to imagine it all. 'A vast accumulation,' he sighed.

The exquisite distillation of millennia of dreaming and analysis.'

'And you can read all of it?'

The boy shook his head. 'If only I could. Much is hidden from me. This blind reading is a deep art. Some of the beadcord is as smooth as a snake.' He displayed his finger ends. These ten are like the eyes of fish in a muddy pool. The eight of the Wise see further than eagles. I have read a reel claiming that only the blind can see past the bright, false and shifting mirages of our mortal world into the immortal and immutable truth of the divine. It is said that the Wise do not only see what has been but what is yet to be. As in the glyph that represents them, they look over their left shoulder into prophecy.'

'Are they born blind?'

'No. At first they are like you and me, though of imperfect blood. They rise up from the flesh tithe that the Wise themselves impose upon the impure, marumaga children of the Great. After gelding, the candidates begin their studies in the Labyrinth. Those with winged minds soar up into the rarefied regions of the Wisdom. At every height there are those who can climb no further. Failing, they fall. They become the quaestors, the higher ammonites, the eunuchs of the forbidden house.'

'Blinding seems a poor reward for such a struggle. I had thought it punishment.'

'You are not completely wrong. The mutilations were imposed long ago when one of the Wise betrayed his trust. The imperial Commonwealth has her foundation in their silence.'

They are mute?'

They have only a single sense. Touch.'

'Surely they can taste and smell.'

The boy shrugged. 'It is rumoured that they retain a faint capacity to taste bitterness. That aside, they are in our world only by their skin. When they have achieved the highest wisdom that is allowed to those with eyes and ears, they are locked away. Each eye is sliced out like a stone from a peach. The red spirals of their hearing are cored from their heads and the fleshy shells shorn off. Caustic inhalations burn away their smelling and afterwards the useless meat of their nose is discarded. Their tongues are drawn out and harvested like the saffrons of a crocus. Once his mutilations are complete, a Sapient is left only feet and hands as the primary organs of his perception. Remote from seductive sensation, they can be entrusted with the deeper secrets. In the caverns of their cool uncluttered minds they are made capable of measuring the currents of our vast world minutely.'

They have their homunculi,' whispered Carnelian, seeking some salve for his pity, his revulsion.

The boy nodded. 'For each Sapient, his own, unique homunculus is a bridge into the outer world that if once removed leaves him as isolated as a rock in the midst of the sea.'

Carnelian looked off, understanding. 'No treasure chamber could be made more secure.'

The boy gazed at him, then snapped his eyes away to look at the beads. 'I thought you wanted to learn touch reading.'

Carnelian flinched at the harshness in the boy's voice. He took the beads and, slowly, they continued to work through the bead shapes. Concentrate as hard as he could, he still had to go back many times. His fingers became as raw as his mind, but the boy was relentless and Carnelian swallowed his complaints.

At last, the boy moved to the lantern and closed its shutter. For a while Carnelian could still see him standing there, but with each blink, his ghost image dimmed until Carnelian was in perfect darkness.

'Why…?' he whispered.

'Here in the library, darkness is the beginning of true seeing.'

Carnelian fumbled on through his lesson, coaxing words from the beads till he began to hear them speaking in his mind as if the beads were calling up through his hollow fingers.