Chapter 43: Seven Votes

There was a long silence after the voice faded away, and no one in the sea cave dared to move. The only sounds were the bells still chiming softly above them and the water slowly creeping up towards the ledge.

Nerine was the first one to speak, and she was trembling so badly that Kai could barely hear her.

"I have served at this shrine since I was eight years old," Nerine said. "Every day, I prayed to her, and I never once received an answer."

"I have served for sixty years," Elder Marrow said, gazing down at the water below them. "Not once did she respond to me either."

Elowen hadn’t moved from where she stood on the ledge, and her blindfolded face was still turned towards the water, as if she was watching something the rest of them couldn’t see.

"I saw a light in the water," Elowen said. "Only for a brief moment, when she spoke. It was not gold, and it was not white. It was the color of the ocean at high noon, and it was bigger than this entire cave."

[Kai]

"I know," Kai whispered. "I heard her too."

[No, that is not what I am saying. She was looking at me when she spoke. I could feel her, the same way I can feel your heartbeat]

Kai had no idea what a goddess looking at another goddess was supposed to mean, and he had no response to it, so he stayed silent and sat on the ledge with his knees pulled up to his chest while the water continued to rise around his feet.

Sunny made it back down the steps a short while later, breathing hard, with his sword back in its sheath.

"The priests are gone," Sunny said. "The moment the bells rang, they ran for their boat as if the ocean itself was chasing them. One of them left this behind."

Sunny pulled out a small leather pouch and emptied it onto the ledge, and a handful of gold coins poured out of it, every one of them stamped with a golden sun.

"That is the pouch they gave us," Elder Marrow said, and her face fell. "They were coming to take it back."

By the time the water had filled the cave, they were already back in the fishing boat that belonged to Nerine’s cousin, crossing a harbor that looked nothing like the one they had crossed that morning. Fishermen lined every dock, getting their boats ready to go out, and every time the bells rang out a new height of water, a cheer went up from one end of the harbor to the other.

Some of the fishermen recognized Kai sitting in the back of the boat with his wet hair stuck to his forehead, and they began pointing at him and shouting his name.

"God of Failure!" one of them shouted, holding a fish high over his head. "Come back and fail for us again!"

[He is at 3%. I believe he is the loudest man in the harbor]

"I’m sure he is," Kai whispered.

When they pulled up to the docks, Nerine climbed out of the boat after them and grabbed Kai by the arm before he could leave.

"I will attend the Conclave," Nerine said. "Elder Marrow will cast our vote, but I want to stand next to you when she does. I want them all to know that the priestesses of the Tide Mother are not afraid of you."

"You should be a little afraid of me," Kai said. "I nearly drowned in your shrine."

"Yes," Nerine said, and she smiled at him for the first time since Kai had met her. "But you surfaced."

Kai spent the rest of the afternoon in Hale’s bathtub, trying to scrub the smell of fishing nets out of his hair, while Syraphim reminded him every five minutes that he still smelled like Captain. That night, they all gathered around the long table in Hale’s dining room again, and the cook served them a fish stew that Garrick swore was the best thing he had ever tasted.

Princess Seris opened her notebook on the table to a blank page, where she had drawn seven circles, one for each of the churches, and she had already filled in three of them.

"There are seven churches in the Conclave," Princess Seris said, pointing to each circle in turn. "You need four of them to vote for you if you want to be declared a god. The Radiant Church will not be voting for you."

"Naturally," Kai said, and Garrick snorted into his stew.

"The Iron Father will vote for you, since Brannoch leads them now," Princess Seris said. "The Shrine of the Deep will not vote against you, but they will not vote for you either."

Kai began counting on his fingers, which took a while, because he kept having trouble deciding how to count the half.

"So I have one and a half," Kai said.

"One and a half," Princess Seris said. "And you need four."

She pointed to each of the empty circles in turn, and Hale leaned over his stew and named them one by one.

"The Harvest Lord," Hale said. "All of his priests are farmers, and they care about nothing but rain and crop prices. The Ashen Twins, who tend to the dead and never speak to anyone. The Weeping Saint, who is worshipped mostly by widows and the poor. And lastly, the Lady of the Silver Moon. Her priestesses wear veils over their faces, and none of them have spoken a word in public for as long as I have been alive."

"Those all sound like people who don’t talk," Kai said.

"They are," Hale said. "Which is exactly why the High Priestess believes she can buy them."

Mira had been silent for most of the meal, pushing her stew around her bowl with her spoon, but now she finally looked up at Kai from across the table.

"The voice in the cave," Mira said. "Nerine told us the Tide Mother never spoke to her in all her years serving her. And the High Priestess said the Radiant Mother hasn’t spoken in forty years."

"So?" Garrick asked, with his mouth full of stew.

"So what if it isn’t just the Mother?" Mira said. "What if none of them are speaking?"

The whole table went silent, and even Garrick stopped chewing, holding his spoon frozen in the air while a drop of stew slid slowly down his beard.

"Elowen," Kai said slowly. "In the tunnel, you told me part of what the High Priestess said was a lie. What if the lie was that the Mother chose to stop speaking on her own?"

Elowen set her spoon down and was silent for a long moment, her blindfolded face turned towards the candle in the middle of the table.

"The bells had no clappers in them," Elowen said quietly. "And for six days, the ocean had no voice."

Nobody needed her to say the rest of it out loud, because everyone at the table knew exactly what she meant. If the Radiant Church could take the clappers out of a shrine’s bells and stop a goddess from speaking, then it could have been silencing gods for years, and the Tide Mother was simply the first one anyone had caught them doing it to.

[Kai, I have something to show you]

"What?" Kai whispered.

[A new skill appeared after the Tide Mother spoke. You have 19 divinity points, and this skill costs 15]

The little golden window popped up in front of Kai, floating just above his bowl, and he read the glowing words slowly.

[Divine Echo (15 points): Allows you to hear the voices of other gods, if they are speaking.]

"If they are speaking," Kai whispered.

[I did not write the description. I only showed it to you]

Kai stared at the skill for a long moment, and then he looked up at his companions around the table, every one of them watching him and waiting to see what he would do.

"Buy it," Kai whispered.

[Skill learned: Divine Echo. Divinity points remaining: 4.]

For a moment, nothing happened at all, and Kai was starting to regret spending fifteen points on a skill that didn’t seem to do anything. Then he heard a faint sound coming from somewhere very far away, so quiet that it could have been the wind. It wasn’t the Tide Mother’s voice, because it was higher and softer, and it seemed to come from somewhere far above him, and it sounded like someone crying.

"Kai?" Mira asked, leaning towards him. "What’s wrong? You’ve gone pale."

Kai turned his head towards the window, where a bright full moon hung over the rooftops of the city, and as he looked at it, the crying grew a little bit louder.

"I think the Lady of the Silver Moon is trying to say something," Kai said.