(continued from installment 2.16. Emily, Healing Shrine, 8th rot., 5th day)

I was interrupted before I could explain further.

"Ssssssssemly?" Twee's head popped up next to me from out of nowhere. Chem walk on all fours so it was easy to miss Twee, whose head had been below the height of the Cosm-scaled lounge. He tilted his head to the side and looked me up and down.

I learned recently that the hissing in Chem speech was the sound of air in a secondary air passage. Once the airflow was established by an air bladder-like organ, a glottis-like membrane in the passage would then vibrate to create a voiced sound. It made no sense in terms of any kind of theory of biological evolution. I knew I had to ask Vassu about this since the Chem were her creation.

"Sssyou are little for a Coyn, Emly. You have new godmarks too and I see you have the cat god's eyes," He blinked. His big luminous eyes blinked. I could see myself reflected in them.

"Twee! You can see!" I sat up smiling. "That's wonderful!"

"Ssso young? How do you look ssso young with sssuch an old ssspirit?" His head tilted the other way. "Sssis it a prophet thing? Did the gods do that to you, old ssspirit?"

"You could say that," I was just happy to see him looking well. We had only talked twice but he was a partner in our escape from the Impotuan fort, which made him my colleague. Besides, Vassu asked me to be his friend and wanted me to go with him to the Shrouded Shrine.

"Ssssssyou brought back a rock? SssCosssm are wondering over it. Sssmay I sssee?"

"Of course you can, Twee. We're all friends here. I assume you've met Asgotl?" The large griffin-sized lump pretending to sleep in the middle of the room opened an eye and looked at us.

"Ssssssyesss, the griffin with the wind god'sss mark, a jokester hiding a noble heart behind foolery. He issss your friend ssssso he issss mine too." He made some clicks at me, which I didn't know how to interpret, and then his head dropped down. He scampered across the floor on all fours and then popped up to look at the rock full of crystals we brought back. All four limbs were off the ground and he balanced on his tail, which I found amazing. Asgotl watched without moving and then closed his eyes again. What a lazy lump.

"Ssssssssswater crystalssssss," he said, flicking his tongue out to touch one of the tourmalines. "Sssssif I had something to trade, I would want one for my tribe."

"What would your tribe do with it?" I asked from the lounge.

"Sssspeak with water. Sssssgive to the water and the water givesss back. Sssssswater, it is and it is not alive, but we can give to the water and the water will give back to usss. It is how we ssshape water, through this exchange. Sssscrystals sssssmooth the exchange."

"Would you trade services making waterworks for crystals, Twee?" I asked.

He turned his head to look at me, "Sssssyes."

"Some kind of a trade can be arranged."

"Sssssilly, you sssshould bargain hard for such treasuresss. People will take advantage of your sssoft heart," he chided me.

"That's why I try to keep her from doing her own bargaining," Lisaykos said to the Chem. "She doesn't haggle well at all. Most of the time, she forgets to even haggle."

"Emily?" Aylem looked at me with gem lust in her eyes.

"You want a gem for Opa," I remembered from last year. "Talk to my designated haggler before I get nagged again about being a soft touch." Aylem laughed at that. I could see she was in a good mood.

"Might I see what Emily brought back?" asked Senlyosart, sitting with her feet up in the lounge across from me. It was easy to forget she was there, she was so quiet and Twipdray was nowhere in sight. She had a pile of tablets and account books she was reviewing, so I guessed she was getting back up to speed on running her shrine.

"Merciful Mugash, I'm an idiot!" Lisaykos picked up the rock, walked over to Senlyosart, and sat down, handing it to convalescing High Priestess of Sassoo. "I beg your pardon, sister. I should have shown it to you first."

"Oh my, that's amazing," she held it in her hands and then gently put it in her lap. "I'm afraid I have little arm strength right now. It's too heavy to hold up," she frowned in frustration.

"I think you're doing better than I expected," Aylem sat down on Senlyosart's other side. "I didn't expect you to be able to walk before the end of the year, though I think the creation of the walker has accelerated your progress. Still, Holy One, your progress is nothing less than astounding, considering we almost lost you." Aylem held her hand over the rock, "you feel it too?"

"Yes, it's singing to me, whatever it is," a smile crossed her face. "I may need to haggle with Emily's haggling agent. We do need to replace all the lithophone crystals and slabs we lost."

Aylem held her hand over the rock again, "it's green, dark green, and it has the same rounded triangular cross-section as the two-color crystals, and it's about a finger-width thick and around two and a half finger-widths long, and perfectly formed.

"Given your daughter's talent, I'm not surprised you have affinity for singing crystals," Senlyosart gave Aylem an appraising look. "Have you ever considered spending some time studying singing crystals and lithophones at my shrine? I think you might enjoy it."

"Oh," Aylem was surprised. "No, I never thought I had much talent for that so I've never considered it."

"At the Crystal Shrine, you made a great singing crystal sing with both lights and multiple notes," Senlyosart gave Aylem a school marm glare. "There are no records of that happening before, young lady. You need to come to my shrine so we can study this."

Aylem began to flush with annoyance, caught herself, and let out a long breath. "You are correct, dear. I did not realize it was unique. I will add it to things to do list. It may have to wait until our problems with Impotu are over."

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"And I very much want to hear you and the Blessed Emily sing," Senlyosart was almost begging.

"Just so long as it doesn't turn into a concert, I'm fine with it," I said. It was hard to say no to Senlyosart with her broken body and the needy look on her face.

"Well, talking about singing crystals, there's one inside this ball of rock," Aylem looked up at me, "Emily, to whom do you take your rocks to free up the crystals?"

"No one. I do it myself with a hammer and a cold chisel. Huhoti is making me some steel ones," I replied. "Bronze is too soft for most silicates. Why are you giving me that look, Aylem? I've never had anyone besides myself to work on the rocks I've mined. You know that."

"There are specialists at the Building Shrine, Emily, who can do that for you," Aylem said in a helpful tone.

"Pfft!" Hessakos tried to swallow a laugh and failed. He looked at me with much amusement and then busted up laughing in earnest. Kayseo joined him.

"Is something funny that I missed?" one silvery eyebrow floated up Aylem's forehead.

"Bismuth!" Hessakos squawked between wheezes of hilarity. I knew he was remembering the bismuthinite he separated for me using magic last year.

"Sal Ammoniac!" Kayseo giggled uncontrollably, thinking of the top of the fumarole we brought home with us.

"I may need to convene a trial for sacrilege," I said with annoyance, still a little raw from two days of teasing at the hands of Hessakos and Kayseo, with no protection provided whatsoever by the fat lazy griffin who keeps promising to protect me. "I believe I am being mocked."

"I believe those three have some sort of in-joke going," Senlyosart observed, smiling with amusement.

It was time to change the subject. "When did you get back from Ud? How is she, by the way?" I asked Aylem.

"Ud is fine. We arrived today, about a bell before you did. We were also delayed by the storm," Aylem left her seat next to Senlyosart and sat down on the other end of my lounge. She was wearing her healer robes. I assumed she intended to do some work today as Wolkayrs' substitute. "I'm afraid the cold season weather pattern has started. Now, this might interest you. I couldn't puzzle out how to heal Twee's eyes, which is why I took him to Ud.

"Caustic lime burns in the eyes have been one of the things we can't fix with healing magic as we understand it. The lime reacts with the cells in the eyes and makes these fiber-like scar tissues that are opaque. These fibers are dispersed throughout the cornea so it's impossible to remove them without growing new eyes, which we can sometimes do if we can still regenerate the cornea but the damage in Twee's eyes was too extensive."

"Ud solved the problem. First, she tagged the scars inside the eyes. Next, she shunted the tagged scars to a perpendicular time path. Then she regressed the surviving cells through time and grew new cells to regenerate the cornea."

"She tagged the scars? What does that mean?" That confused me.

"If you can see on the cellular or atomic levels like Huhoti, Lisaykos, or me, you can leave a mark with magic. When you sense things magically, you'll see that mark when your return to the area of that cell or that atom," Aylem explained. "Oh, Emily, that's a great face." She laughed. Everyone else did too except Twee, whose expression I couldn't read.

I was gobsmacked. Damn Cosm. It was bad enough that people like Huhoti could sense electron cloud structures, but being able to mark them, with something like–Surd save me–a magic marker? I think I blew a fuse on that one. How did that work? Did magic manipulate some kind of subatomic particle or quantum packet to make a label on something which didn't disturb the workings of classical physics?

*Yes,* Galt said inside my head.

I gasped because Galt had startled me. I was getting used to his lurking but I did find gods talking to me out of nowhere unsettling. I guess it's what you have to put up with when you're a prophet. Lucky me. Welcome to my career as a broadcast receiver and transmitter for deities.

"I felt that," Aylem was looking at me with concern. "What just happened?" Everyone was now looking at me.

I sighed, "I took what you said and fit it into what I know about quantum mechanics as applied to magic, wondering if marking something with magic involved a subatomic particle or a quantum of some kind of energy that didn't affect the realm of classical physics, which is where our non-magic perceptions live. And Galt said yes, inside my head."

The room was silent.

"The gods are talking to you directly now?" Lisaykos said after a long pause, with a twinge of worry in her voice. "I felt whatever that was too."

"Yes, for the last season or so," I apologized. I wanted to disappear down a hole. The sudden scrutiny of all seven people in the room was a tsunami and I was drowning in it.

No wonder prophets go insane.

"Aren't you worried when Galt talks to you like this?" Lisaykos asked.

"Yes and no," I shrugged, having gotten my composure back. "I like Galt. He's reasonable and easy to deal with. And he's fun. He isn't all zen and cryptic like Gertzpul, or confusing like Mueb, or perverse like Tiki. He's not hiding things like Mugash. I realize he's doing a whole lot of divine intervention right now, with me as his intervention adjustment tool."

The amount of quiet in the room was disturbing.

"I've surmised that Tiki had an outline planned for the Prophecy of the Great Breaking which is the third period of direct intervention by the gods. The gods don't like these intervention periods. They usually prefer to kick back and let reality run itself instead. I don't know why they do that, not intervene all the time, that is. Maybe it's the divine version of lazy."

"Emily," Kayseo was shocked. "How can you even think that about the gods? That's close to blasphemy."

"Hmmm," I shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. Here's a question for you: can a prophet blaspheme?"

Yep, I gobsmacked them with that question, but it distracted them. I needed that distraction. The topic of blasphemy was not a good one for me. It reminded me too much of Fassex.

"I was talking to Vassu, who implied that Tiki had this outline all worked up as to how things needed to go. But he didn't do his contingency planning and along came Aylem, who broke something in that outline. That's a conjecture I have made based on what Tiki said to me on the night before I went to Black Falls.

"Vassu intimated that Galt is a really senior god with a lot of experience and he gets a lot of respect despite not being the top god, who is Tiki, the god of time. So here's what I think is going on. Aylem broke the outline of how the Great Breaking was supposed to go with the mishap over the charm of a thousand stings. Tiki didn't have a contingency plan, and Mugash fumbled my recovery, so Galt got mad, stepped in, and started to fix things. He didn't bother to get approval from the rest of the gods, but he's Galt so he can get away with it. He's having a divine snit right now at Tiki and Mugash. Vassu and then Sassoo adjusted their own parts in the Great Breaking to mesh with Galt's fixes. So did Erhonsay."

Aylem's face was a piece of work, "When did Galt become vexed with Tiki and Mugash?"

"When I had that little meeting with the gods while I was unconscious after the attack by Priestess Voice Druyudros in Black Falls. That's when I found out Mugash had slowed my recovery. I'm not happy with Mugash, though I am less angry now than I was a season ago. It's the main reason why Galt is not talking to Tiki and Mugash right now. He was pretty sour at what happened at that meeting and how Tiki and Mugash handled things.

"Since then, he managed to be civil with Sassoo in Is'syal, and Sassoo did not try to get in Galt's way. This hints that the rest of the gods are willing to let Galt make his run at fixing things. He is currently talking to Erhonsay, Giltak and Vassu. Galt and Vassu cooperated on the divine intervention in Toyatastagka, which is where I burned my feet.

"I suspect Galt is lurking in my mind. I don't mind too much. He did startle me just now. I think he's trying to be helpful but I wish he wouldn't do that. I mean, he is the god of knowledge so he is essentially omniscient. In one respect, he's always lurking everywhere for everyone. The difference for me is that he's also paying attention.

"Would everyone please stop gaping? You're scaring me."