He is the MOST IGNORANT cleric of Abadar in existence, not that this is surprising or his fault in any way but it still irks him. 

:I didn't know that existed so no. Sorry.: 

"It's all right, it would only have saved a few minutes." He reads off the present draft of the advertisement for confirmation, and then if it's all well he can Scriven off a dozen copies to send in a dozen directions.

It's been...two, maybe three, candlemarks since his arrival? There should still be plenty of time.

:...We should warn people who express interest that it's winter in Valdemar. Speaking of that, er, since it seems like I'm not needed right here while you send those off and wait to her, where's the nearest place I could purchase clothing more suitable for the weather here.: 

Raad blinks at him. ..."Gratis," he says, tapping Joshel on the arm, "Endure Elements. Can't have you keeling over from not being used to the desert."

Oh that’s so much better. The situation feels about 30% less overwhelming and impossible now. It’s a much better solution, even, he would have felt so off-balance wearing random local-style clothing instead of Whites and he’s pretty sure he would still have been too hot.

:What do you think it makes sense for me to do now, while I’m waiting to go back?: he asks Cicerone Raad. :I really know very very few things about anything. I, er, did you in fact still want me to repeat some of that under your Truth Spell or were you convinced by all the diamonds?:

"The diamonds were persuasive but before I send these out it would be prudent to check. The best way to use it is to have you say everything we want you to confirm before I cast it, and then once the sand is flowing on the spell duration simply affirm that you've not lied to or misled me, instead of repeating the entire matter. Now, I don't believe it works reliably with telepathy, so I'm going to teach you the words for 'yes' and 'no' in Osirian, all right?"

:All right. …I should note that the Heralds do have a Truth Spell that we believe is reliable, but I haven’t actually tested that it works in this world and you would probably rather not take my word for it.:

"It would rather defeat the purpose to do it on this occasion but I will believe you about it afterwards, presumably!" says Raad agreeably, and then he goes over the "yes" and "no" words and gives Joshel a piece of paper to write them down on in case he's worried about mixing them up.

Joshel is fine with that! He will write it down phonetically in the Valdemaran script and add the translation for which one is “yes” or “no”.

….What specifically do they want him to confirm. Joshel is really quite sure he has not at any point knowingly, let alone intentionally, said anything false or misleading, but he…said a lot of things…and suspects he was not at his sharpest over the last candlemark. Due to being terribly overheated. And it would be really awful to accidentally mislead them because he knows nothing about how anything works here and said something that was easily misinterpreted.

They should cover this before the spell is up. "I'm going to ask you if you've lied to me, or misled me, or set out to leave me with a substantially incorrect understanding of the situation - redundancy is seldom necessary but it's inexpensive. And I'm going to ask if you came by the diamonds licitly."

:...I can confirm no to the first things and yes that I came by the diamonds licitly. I, um, I just want to check that Abadar won't be mad at me if it turns out later I completely forgot to mention something that changes your picture of the situation substantially.: 

"Innocent mistakes can get right past the spell. It only prevents knowing deception."

That does not 100% address Joshel's concern here but he will stop making it this man's problem that he feels unqualified for solo handling of incredibly high stakes interworld diplomacy and is mildly freaking out about screwing it up. (Also, while he's really very sure that he personally received the diamonds licitly, he did not actually think to ask if they were obtained in normal ways or via doing crimes - which seems not impossible given that Leareth's past plots involved, for example, the events in Highjorune - but he doesn't really want to get into that.) 

He double checks again which word is 'yes' and which word is 'no' and then he's willing to affirm that no, he has not lied to Cicerone Raad or misled him or set out to leave him with a substantially incorrect understanding of the situation, and yes he came by the diamonds licitly. 

Marvelous. Now Raad is going to get those diamonds INTO A SAFE DEPOSIT BOX for him and then send people out to all the nearest churches with enough circles, and get a wand of Gentle Repose priced...

—

Shavri counts down the candlemarks. After Jisa snaps at her for harassing her in Mindspeech four times in the space of forty minutes about how the researchers’ progress is going, she stops that. It won’t make it happen faster. She needs to focus on her job and let them focus on theirs and either it will be in time or it won’t.

It seems, for a surprising number of candlemarks, like she’s going to get away with her insane stimulant plan. Blai is clearly not happy, but he’s reasonably alert and according to Seldan, when she can get Seldan to answer questions at all, mostly remembers more or less  where he is and she gets quite a lot of sweetened-ginger-broth into him during the Remove Sickness duration.

It’s not until five candlemarks after dawn that she starts to really get worried. 

(For Blai, the forcible awakeness will actually last a number of minutes past the point when his body starts sending somehow-even-louder and less clear signals of something being terribly wrong. It’s not pain - he’s still getting painblocking - and the nausea isn’t really any worse than the average over the last candlemark, but he’s starting to feel lightheaded and floaty, and breathing is noticeably not working as it should.)

Oh no something is wrong. Seldan isn’t entirely sure but it’s enough to drag him awake. :Blai?:

:I think I'm dying??: says Blai. :I can't breathe - I don't have an Air Bubble, I - something's wrong -: The only thing stopping him from deciding that the thing wrong is that he's been renounced is that he can still feel all his orisons in their slots but he can't think of very many other things that would feel this bad.

:Shavri help:

She's right there. (And reading Blai's mind, because she does not really trust Seldan in this state to report usefully on what's going on.) 

...Wow Blai is remarkably conscious for someone who is having to work increasingly hard to breathe, because of the raging pneumonia that she can't effectively do anything about without draining energy he does not at all have to spare, and separately the fact that at least three infection sources have now made their way into his blood and his heart is now having a bit of a time. 

She sits down beside him. :Hey. You can breathe, you are breathing right now, it's just going to be feeling like a lot more effort than usual, because you have pneumonia. That's okay, you're the only person in here who can still roll over in bed, you can handle this for a few more candlemarks and then we'll have help and we'll fix it. ...Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to help you turn on your side, so that your worse lung is on top, and that should be a bit easier, and I'm going to get one of Leareth's mages to power a talisman we have that concentrates the vital component of air and that should help, and Seldan will be right here, and you're going to hang on for, like, less than five more candlemarks, and everything will be fine.: 

Oh no Shavri is worried. (The difference is that genuinely worried Shavri's mindvoice is much harder to mistake for the voice of an Asmodean seminary instructor.) 

...okay. He's just going to discard all the tone-of-"voice" information as irrelevant. He has instructions. A thing like an Air Bubble is coming soon. There's a projected end time.

The "thing like an air bubble" is a thumb-sized quartz focus wrapped in wire and strung on a leather cord which will go around his neck. They're extremely useful and also irritate all the Healers to no end, because how well they work at a given moment depends a lot on their exact position and sometimes you got it really just right and the patient moved and is now only getting half of the benefit, and also if you don't have mage-sight it's pretty hard to tell when the talisman runs itself out of power and impossible to tell in advance. And the duration after re-powering it is...about a candlemark...but can vary by fifteen minutes in either direction depending how sloppy the mage doing the job was. Also Valdemar really did not have enough Herald-Mages recently and they would get very snippy about the duty of "doze in a chair in the House of Healing and check on the talisman every forty minutes." It worked amazingly well for Sandra's lung problem; she could repower it herself, or Kilchas could do it for her, and she had gotten very good at positioning it right - but for all that it's been a wonderful thing to have, it's also frustrating. 

However. Shavri is treating the supply of "mages who work for Leareth" as approximately unlimited and feels well within her rights demanding that one of them sit right there for the next five candlemarks (it's not even the middle of the night!) and re-power the talisman well before it runs out. 

It helps some. Not nearly as much as having an Air Bubble instead of unbreathable air, but noticeably. Shavri gets three trainees to help her shift Blai into the exact specific position that Healing-Sight thinks is letting him get the deepest breaths with the least effort, and that helps a little too. 

(Shavri hates everything right now but she's not actually completely out of ideas or options. Vanyel survived being this sick before and that was without a Remove Disease at the end, though admittedly he didn't have the mysterious progressive damage problem then.) 

Blai focuses with all his might on staying in his prescribed position and taking breaths.

Seldan is exhausted and gluey-headed and stupid but there must be something very deep in the Companion-wiring that makes "his Herald might be in danger" override everything. He stays awake. He stays...calm where Blai can see it, at least. (He is at this point starting to tuck away some of his thoughts and feelings where Blai can't see them, because now does not seem like the time where being in full rapport and not hiding anything is the most helpful strategy.) 

Shavri is, for the moment, reassured enough that she doesn't hover. The junior Healer holding an energy-link for Blai is managing it fine. She bounces around doing her checks on everyone. Blai used his last channel before this, ninety minutes after the first one. She shakes Vanyel awake for his first of the day at the planned time and he's very bleary and displeased with her but he does wake up and do it. 

It helps negligibly with Blai's most pressing problems; he's still getting more out of the channels than anyone else, the limiting factor there is Stef, it would take longer than ninety minutes for Blai to start bleeding to death from the inside if the channels weren't fixing the injurylike damage that keeps coming back over and over and over. She goes back to not having any feelings at all. 

(It's going to take maybe another thirty minutes for Blai's remaining stimulant-boosted alertness to fully run its course and come to an abrupt end.)