Maker of Fire

High Priestess Raoleer, Building Shrine of Giltak

Lisaykos wasn't willing to leave the Blessed Emily alone with me and she needed to return to her shrine. So as a compromise, the three healers who kept track of our triple-revelator in Aybhas would take turns here in Omexkel making sure she did not overexert herself.

Every rotation, one would head home and another would arrive. The Blessed Emily didn't much like that she had "a keeper" following her around to make sure she ate all her meals, worked no more than two bells, got enough sleep, and spent at least two days every rotation doing no work. It was difficult for a living whirlwind like Emily to pace herself. She didn't like it much but she put serious effort into learning when to stop before she exhausted herself, mostly to avoid nagging by her keepers.

It took close to five rotations for the Blessed Emily to write up her revelation and then teach it to my staff at the Shrine of Giltak. When she handed me the completed manuscript, she told me that the first eight pages were the real revelation and the rest of what she had written were just examples and explanations. I asked her to teach it to my best mathematicians and they got all excited by it, especially Shrine Artificer Aduda, the Coyn who is our advanced math instructor. Then I had her teach it to me. I am glad I knew enough advanced math to understand it.

Emily stayed another rotation to work with the mathematicians, the bronze smiths, and the woodworkers. Together, the three crafts and the Blessed Emily created what she called a slide rule. She showed everyone who asked how to use it, including me.

Before that happened, Emily insisted on the realm setting a standard for length. That's because she wanted to create a scale bar engraved with both linear and logarithmic scales to use for creating slide rules calibrated to standard lengths.

High Priestesses Sutsusum of Gertzpul, Moxsef of Vassu, and Foyuna of Tiki flew in from their respective shrines to negotiate standard lengths for casting the bar since our four shrines were the ones that used distance measures the most. I don't know how Sutsusum and Moxsef felt about it, but one does not say no to someone who is a triple revelator. I'm not sure Emily realizes that even high priestesses would be hard-pressed to turn down any requests she makes. If she knows what sort of power she could wield, she doesn't show it. She's not a person with guile so I believe she hasn't a clue about the power her position gives her.

It took a little negotiating between the five of us, with input from my staff, to settle on a set of distance metrics that Emily would accept. This was important since the Blessed Emily wanted the scale bars for the slide rules to be the same length as the realm's standards. Foyuna even brought the original standard bar for one handwidth from the Crystal Shrine for the occasion.

Emily was set on using subdivisions of ten for everything. This made a great deal of sense to me since the Queen's numbers were a system built on multiples of ten, instead of the old system which was built on multiples of eight. We agreed that the handwidth would continue as the base measure. For future calculations, we would shift to using ten half fingers instead of five fingers.

Emily wanted to redefine the wagon-day as 10,000 hands but we managed to get her to accept a standard of 8,000 hands. That way, one wagon-day would stay very close to the original definition of the distance between the Shrines of Tiki and Gertzpul, which the Crystal Shrine had measured as 7922 hands plus three and a half fingers 32 centuries ago.

For some reason, the Blessed Emily was quite happy to keep the divisions of a circle measured in fractional units of its circumference, called perimeters. She then gobsmacked everyone when she stated that the multiplier between the diameter of a circle and its perimeter was not the 3.15 we've been using for centuries, but rather it was 3.141592.

"Oh!" Sutsusum made the best fish face I've seen in a long time. "That explains why our wheel measures of road lengths are always a little over compared to measuring with the metal staves."

"You use rotations of a w...wheel to measure distance?" Emily asked. Her question surprised everyone gathered to talk about standardized lengths. I thought everyone knew that long distances were measured with Gertzpul's wheel.

After Sutsusum picked up her jaw from off the floor, she replied in her high squeaky voice, squeaking higher than usual: "Yes, we always use rotations of a wheel to measure distances along roads. Then we must correct the measurement to get the true distance. The error is why the law says even large buildings can only be measured using metal staves."

“How can you be sure that the ratio of diameter to the circular perimeter is the value you just gave?" Moxsef asked with a disbelieving scowl.

The Blessed Emily didn’t react at all to Moxsef’s goading question. She smiled with good nature and jumped out of her chair to the floor. "Let me demonstrate that my value is more accurate than 3.15. Later, if you w...want, I'd be happy to show you two different methods one can use to derive the value of the perimeter to more accurate values, but for now, I can use the sliding rules to show the accuracy of my figure, assuming that the Holy Sutsusum knows the correction for the measuring w...wheel? Don't tell me what it is. Just tell me if you know it off the top of your head." She looked hopefully at Sutsusum.

“Given all the roads I built when I was younger, yes, I will never forget it," she chucked. "But how can you know the correction if you've never used Gertzpul's wheel, which admittedly is too big for most Coyn to handle?"

Emily just grinned at Sutsusum in reply. She’s such a hopeless mekaner that I wish I could get her to stay here. Still grinning, she pulled two rolled lengths of paper out of her pouch and unrolled them. I knew what was coming since she had used these to demonstrate the basics of the sliding rule to everyone. I suspect she did it to show the three visiting high priestesses the utility of Giltak's revelation, though she may have done it to politely teach Moxsef a lesson.

We were sitting in the third chamber inside the Shrine of Giltak using our usual cushion and chair arrangement so the shrine's Coyn of full artificer status could attend the negotiation as well as the priest and priestess artificers. I know it made the arch-conservative Moxsef uncomfortable but her antiquated attitudes about Coyn were her problem, not mine.

"Need help holding those down?" I asked the Blessed Emily. I had learned by now that paper liked to stay curled if it was kept rolled for a while.

She looked up at me, "please?"

I joined her and held the ends of the two rolls of paper down so they wouldn't curl.

"Just hold that one down, please, and I can slide this one," she instructed.

Foyuna, Moxsef, and Sutsusum got up and walked over to watch more closely. I motioned them to sit down on the floor, both because I didn't want them looming over Emily and because they were blocking the view for everyone else. I could tell Emily was a bit uncomfortable with the high priestesses watching so closely but it didn't stop her from sliding her half of the two scales.

"Now, let's assume that Gertzpul's wheel w...was measuring 3.15 hands for every actual 3.141592 hands traveled," Emily began. "Subtracting one from the other, the w...wheel overestimates by...," she began to mutter to herself as she produced a pencil and did the subtraction on the floor, "ten from two is eight, nine from nine is zero, five from nine is four, one from nine is eight, four from four and one from one are both zero, 0.008408."

I was left gaping at how fast she used the Queen's numbers. The method of tens was powerful but not intuitive for those of us who learned it later in life.

Emily spread out her strip of paper and slid it along mine, "let's use three significant digits since that's the best most slide rules can do, and use 0.00841 hands for the overestimate for every w...wheel rotation. To get the overshoot normalized to 100, w...we divide by 8.41 by 3.15 and we get," she squinted at the paper as she uncurled the whole strip, "2.67, which is 0.267 hands when we put the decimal point in the right place, w...which is the same as two and two-thirds half-fingers, which should be an overestimate of 1.33 fingers for every 100 hands measured. I might be off by one or two one-hundreds," she smiled tentatively at Sutsusum.

"The correction we currently use is one and one-third fingers for every one hundred hands," Sutsusum revealed in a wondering voice. “So you were able to accurately calculate the correction we use by using the difference between our incorrect value and your correct value and then scaling it to 100 hands. I am amazed at how quickly you were able to do division with the sliding rules. Can you teach this to me before I head home?"

Emily leaned back and looked at the healer currently attending her, “Twessera? Is after dinner w...workable?”

“Let’s see how tired you are after dinner, Great One,” Twessera gave her a measuring look. “If you go and rest after this, it should be possible.”

“Does that work for you, Holy One?” Emily said to Sutsusum. The high priestess of Gerztpul nodded.

“Well then,” Emily turned her attention to Moxsef, “does that calculation satisfy your question as to the accuracy of my number, Holy One?”

“It does appear so,” Moxsef conceded grudgingly. I was appalled by her rudeness at never using Emily’s rightful title and amazed by Emily’s ignoring that rudeness. How could she not get angry over the insult? I intended to have words with Moxsef about this later.

I was beginning to appreciate what Lisaykos said just before she returned to Aybhas, that living with the Blessed Emily was like being in a boat on a river that was nothing but rapids.

On the day after the negotiation for standard lengths, the Revered Priestess Artificer Huhoti used the standard bar from the Crystal Shine to create a mold with casting sand. Emily watched from a safe distance, seated cross-legged in a chair. I found the exchange between the two of them amusing. It was fun to watch the Blessed Emily do a fish face.

"So, you will be casting four times?" Emily asked while Huhoti was melting her bronze.

"No, just once," Huhoti said. "Why should I cast four times?"

"But isn't each of the shrines that measure things taking home a new standard handwidth bar?"

"Yes," Huhoti looked confused as to why Emily was asking such an obvious question.

"So how do you make four bars without casting four bars?" Emily asked, leaving both me and Huhoti gobsmacked. Emily's gaps in knowledge were sometimes really incomprehensible.

As soon as Huhoti comprehended what Emily didn't know, she explained it with a grin: "You have never cast metal with a Cosm artificer before, Great One?"

"I've never cast metal with anyone other than myself," the Blessed Emily explained. "Isn't casting metal the same for everyone?"

"Ah, yes," Huhoti's grin got bigger, "but after I cast the bar, we will go to the vault where I will split it into four bars lengthwise and then engrave each one with the linear scale. I also made the mold just a little bit longer than the standard bar the Holy Foyuna brought. I will remove material off one end of the new bar before I split it in four so each bar is exactly the same length. We'll do this in the vault so the temperature will be the same for both bars for the leveling and the splitting."

We had converted one of the old adits in the hillside into a vault to store the standard handwidth bar for our shrine. Once there, it would remain in stasis so it would never corrode. Since the temperature underground stays the same year-round, all future engraving of new bars for making slide rules would take place in the vault.

After Huhoti's explanation, Emily's jaw bounced out of the foundry, through the market square in Omexkel, and then down to the Rig River, where it caught a boat for the capital.

"You can level the new bar and then split it in four with magic?" The astounded look was precious. Her eyes were as big as silver coins.

"Well, of course. I'm an artificer mage, after all. It's what I do."

"Wow," the Blessed Emily said softly to herself. The Holy Foyuna, who was watching along with the other two visiting high priestesses, shook her head and looked amused.

"How do you know when you have the new bar level with the original?" the Great One asked.

"I use a charm gem with a level charm," looking like Emily should have known that.

Emily didn't. "How does that work?"

"You don't know?" It was Huhoti's turn to be gobsmacked. Emily shook her head no. This was turning into a very interesting conversation.

"I use the level charm to cast a level surface, which I watch using my close-in clairvoyance. Then I remove the bronze bumps, layer by layer until there are no more bronze bumps above the level line on top of the original bar. It's the only way to get them exactly the same length."

The Blessed Emily sounded like she was in awe, "you can see the layers of atoms with your clairvoyance?"

"I have no idea what an atom is. Is that what you call the bumps? Regardless, I can see smaller than most people," Huhoti explained, realizing that Emily really didn't know this. "Only the very best healers can see as small as the best artificers."

"Do the bumps look spherical but kinda fuzzy, and if seen from above the layer, the bumps would make hexagon patterns?"

"How did you know that?"

"Unbelievable," she shook her head as if something momentous had just happened. "You can see atoms. How is that even possible?"

"What's wrong, dear heart?" Twessera asked. She was sitting on the floor next to the Blessed Emily. "You look surprised at something."

"Remember the stuff I've been teaching at the Shrine of Mugash, about gasses, like oxygen and carbon dioxide and hydrogen?"

"Yes," Twessera didn't know where Emily was going with this. None of us did.

"The Revered Huhoti can see them!"

"You didn't know some mages can see that small?" Twessera asked, finally realizing why Emily was so gobsmacked. "It's not common. Kayseo can do it, and so can the Blessed Lisaykos and the Queen."

Emily let out a huge sigh, "dang!"