"Why don't they, anyway?"

Shrug. "You can only tell alignment for powerful people. I think the theory is everyone's got it but usually too faint to pick up, and once you're powerful it's not that faint anymore."

"But what is 'powerful' supposed to mean?"

"You've - changed the world a lot, I guess?"

"I guess I haven't done that."

"Wizards don't get it until third circle, so, you can be quite accomplished in your field and still not count in the way that gets a reading off alignment. 

I wonder if it goes away. If you're never allowed to do anything ever again."

"I wouldn't know."

"How... does one... pray?"

"You kneel, ideally at a church or altar or something dedicated to the god but I think in principle anywhere will do, and you close your eyes, and you clasp your hands and you think about the god and imagine everything that they are, seeing you, and choosing to notice you, and then you think whatever it is you wanted to think at them."

"That... sounds weird."

"It would be sort of surprising if your world had people do similar things what with how there are no gods."

"I suppose that's true enough."

"Maybe if we got the paladins to pray with us it'd be louder, since they're the right alignment. And I bet they'd love and feel so smug about it."

"I was actually thinking of trying Abadar but really don't want to ask Fazil."

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense. I can do that one with you if you want? Abadar should be able to hear me, since He's neutral."

"...sure, okay." ...kneeling.

Carissa tries to think what she knows about Abadar. Lawful neutral. The founding god of Axis. God of wealth and commerce, shows his favor with successful voyages. This is not even definitely treason, though - it feels terrifying.

She conceded, in the argument earlier, that it seemed plausible that Axis was better at inventing things than Hell. 

She tries to reach for - what does it mean, to give yourself to the god of wealth and commerce, what does Abadar want from the people in his shining city -

Nothing.

Law. She believes in Law. In - rules, that you are punished for disobeying and not punished for obeying - in it being possible to do things right. She's mad at herself now, for not having a better articulation than that, because she knows that's not it -

- I want to do valuable things. I might want to do valuable things for You, if I understood...

Kyeo doesn't have a lot to work with.

He is trying to reach - the god of the thing Ibyabek doesn't have. The god of - the thing behind the pictures.

And then there's a brief sense of brushing against something overwhelming, like sticking your head out of a car while it's going at its top speed -

- and a sudden blur of a hundred things that don't fit into the format sending them or the format receiving them -

- stores full of products, their proprietors patrolling them, looking at what people choose so they can adjust the prices, order more, keep things on the shelves and guess what new things people want -

- a thousand conversations, in restaurants, in taverns, people value this and that's important in itself but they're doing more than that, they're trading ideas, trading wants, trading dreams, growing each others' dreams bigger -

- a woman in Osirion learns how to make magic items without being magic, starts selling them at much much cheaper than the usual price, hires apprentices, trains people in what she's doing, and from a gods-eye view there's a ripple cascading out around the world, making things better -

- another woman, tinkering with a spinning-wheel, another ripple -

- a man working on magic, a ripple, a man at a paper-mill, a ripple, a group of people with some kind of mechanical loom, a ripple, until the world is awash in them -

- two people, speaking over a shabby wooden table. 'If I work extra hours for six months,' he is saying, 'we'll be able to afford a place across town' - different people - 'if I take in some laundry we could do without his income, send him to my uncle' - 'if we put aside a copper every day' - 'if we plowed an extra field' - and their dreams realized, gloriously, a place across town, a son who is a master craftsman, comfortable new furnishings and new careers, glass bowls and metal tools and dresses and feasts -

It's like being told that actually on most planets you can add two and two and get five and having pairs of things swept into heaps and shown to be five, over and over.

A hundred refinements making a better way to do a shipping manifest making a better shipping manifest, there's so much detail, a thousand experimental spinning wheels discarded, one that works, dozens and dozens of restaurants, people throwing themselves into the sea of what other people want and finding it the fastest teacher in the universe, the purest teacher in the universe, the teacher that has more to teach you the more you are ready to learn -

And then Kyeo is alone on the floor with a headache.

Well, and Carissa, whose praying is not getting her anywhere.

"Is it supposed to hurt?"

" - did it work?" She's looking at him with something like awe. "Uh, I don't know. Paladins do healing - I think sometimes people go blind or mad from talking to gods but - mostly gods who're crazy, I think -"