'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.
The lesson is at an end,' said the darkness.
Carnelian was in a dream. As his fingers lost hold of the beads their voices went silent in his mind. 'But I have learnt so little,' he whispered.
'You can learn more, tomorrow. Wind the cord.'
When he pushed the treadle it gave an alarming rattle. Carnelian stopped.
'Why have you stopped?' whispered the dark.
The noise…'
'Our voices and not the treadle are alien here.'
Carnelian worked the treadle until he felt the end of the beadcord in his hand. Something brushed his finger and the cord was gone. He heard the reel being replaced on its spindle and then the other two being slipped down over it.
Carnelian felt another's skin link its warmth to his.
Take my hand’ whispered the boy.
Carnelian closed his fingers over the hand as carefully as if it were a throat. The lantern…?'
'I have it,' whispered the boy, firming the grip.
Carnelian was pulled off the chair. He became a ship being towed through a starless night. At first his steps were tentative, anticipating collision, but after a while they grew confident in the boy's impossible ability to see in blackness. Their footfalls dulled as they passed each archway and swelled again towards the centre of each new chamber.
The boy loosed his grip. Carnelian felt adrift, frightened. The lantern flared to life. He hid his eyes until he could bear it. With his free hand, the boy opened the silver door. Carnelian followed him out into the round hall. The boy held out the lantern and Carnelian took it.
The same time tomorrow?' Carnelian said quickly, as the boy turned away.
The boy looked back, nodded.
'I am Suth Carnelian,' Carnelian said before the boy could turn away again.
The boy gazed into the distance. Carnelian could see his reluctance to give up his name. 'I am of the House of the Masks,' the boy said at last.
They looked at each other, Carnelian willing him to say his birth name. The boy lowered his eyes. What shame was there in coming from the God Emperor's own House? Unless…? It came to Carnelian then. He realized whence the resemblance that had been nagging him came. He looked at the boy's face and imagined another identical beside it, sybling-joined. The likeness to the Lords Hanus was unmistakable.
'You have a twin?' Carnelian asked, letting the boy know that he knew what he was and did not mind.
The boy looked up. He raised an eyebrow. 'I do.'
Carnelian pushed warmth out into a smile. Although the boy was an unjoined sybling, his blood-ring proved that he was Chosen. His behaviour suggested that he was ashamed of his low blood-rank. In spite of being fathered by the Cods, his concubine mother must have badly tainted his blood.
'Can you not guess what my name is, then?' the boy said, both his eyebrows rising.
Carnelian shook his head, frowned. 'Should I?'
A slow smile spread over the boy's face. 'I am Osidian.'
'I am honoured to know you, Osidian.' Carnelian was glad that he was free of the blood pride that might have made him keep his distance from the boy.
Tomorrow, then,' Osidian said.
Tomorrow… Osidian.'
The boy went back through the door, and as he closed it behind him he healed the cut in the moon's eye.
The next morning, Osidian was waiting for Carnelian as he had promised. The boy said nothing as he led Carnelian into the Library of the Wise. The lantern light revealed the rich jewel seams of the beadcord as they moved through the chamber. At last they stopped at a beadcord chair. Again, Osidian urged him to sit down and going off came back with a reel that, in the dark, with his help, Carnelian began to read.
First they revised the syllabic beads but quickly moved on to more complex ones. Fluted spheres like coriander seeds. Glossy shapes like beetles. Beads with the texture of cold skin that Carnelian guessed were amber, others he knew were metal by the way they drew warmth from his fingers. Pumice, rough but floatingfy light. Wood, waxed and unwaxed. Each was a word, an idea. Fumbling them, Carnelian was reminded of learning his glyphs. Haltingly he whispered each bead's meaning. Whenever he stopped, Osidian's fingers would take the bead from him, and read it. Sometimes, Osidian would run his fingers back along the beadcord to find one they had read earlier and, squeezing it into Carnelian's fingers, would point out the similarities in shape or texture that reflected a similarity in their meanings. Thus, Carnelian discovered that each bead that represented a creature had a pimple head. That smooth curving often implied liquid; lightness, air; corners, something made by craft. The same shape with different temperatures often determined a spectrum of emotion.
Bead by bead, a story began to unspool in Carnelian's mind. Obsidian-faced, a God Emperor issued forth from Osrakum, riding in some fabled chariot of iron so huge it was honeycombed with chambers. With towered huimur They had gone southwards across the Guarded Land. Every being They saw They slew, being the incarnation of the Black One, the Plague Breathing, the Lord of Death.
'This is a story?' he whispered.
'History,' hissed Osidian. 'Read on.'
The annal continued. Somewhere along the southern edge of the Ringwall, the Gods descended with Their host. Down to a vast plain teeming with life. Carnelian could see herds shoaling like fish. Through this crowding flesh the Chosen host cut a swathe till the earth had been stained as red as the Guarded Land. Barbarian cities, rude, enclosed with wooden walls. The Gods' black tide lapped their ditches, igniting the palisades like the dawning sun. Carnelian bit his lip anxious for the next bead, impatient with himself when he could not find its meaning. As each squeezed like a pip through his fingers, he felt the earth shake, he was as blinded by the huimur flame-pipes as the barbarians. The beads let him look down from the vantage point of a huimur tower and watch the barbarians flee before their fire. Remembering the ants Aurum had torched on the road, Carnelian shuddered. Huts and children trampled by thunder. Their world turned to ash. The Gods swept, unsated, seeking new victims beyond the smoke-clogged horizon.