“How long have you known?” She approached the desk. There was no wind in this room with the door closed.

The corners of his mouth twitched up, a reflex rather than a smile. “We found the first one through an audit, if you believe it. Two years back. Junior priest combing through transaction data.” He held one hand in front of his face, thumb and finger so close that from Kai’s angle they seemed to be touching. “So small a thing. I saw it move, in the pool, one night. I’d never imagined one of our idols could look like that.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? What would you have done?”

“Told people,” she said.

“Who?”

“Other priests. Pilgrims. The Hidden Schools. Someone. I mean. We created sentient life. Right? That’s what this is. We built idols, and they woke into gods.”

“And what happens then?” He crossed his arms over his chest. His clothes melded with the shadows, with the wall. “Pilgrims don’t come to us because they’re looking for gods. They come because they want the appearance of worship without the responsibility. They come to hide. They want safety, protection.” He looked up, and she saw real hope in his face, or an echo of hope, long disappointed. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

She couldn’t.

“And what if they learn our idols don’t work the way we said? You’ve seen other god havens fall. Soulstuff will flee to lands that make the same promises we can’t keep. Back then, understand, we had one god awake. Thousands sleeping. No sense whether this was a miracle or an inevitable product of our system. If we should expect idols to wake once a decade, or every hundred years, every million. What do you do?”

“Talk to the god.”

He did laugh, this time, sadly. “How? Pray? Oh, dear Lord, or Lady, forgive me this most grievous fault of creating you bound in chains. The mind reels. And even if we could communicate, what could we say when it asked for freedom? What if it tried to communicate with its faithful? Do we let one accident, one freak, destroy our way of life?”

“Think, Jace. We spent fifty years waiting for the gods to come back. And they did. Not from the direction we expected, not in the way we hoped, but there are gods on Kavekana again.”

“They aren’t our gods, Kai. Our gods left us. They sailed off across the ocean, and no half-sentient ghost babbling in the pool at night can take their place.”

“Not at first,” she said. “But one day.”