"Depends on how complicated he wants it and how much of the carving he can just skip by being a Vala and wanting a mountain to be a certain shape. Actually waking it would just be a moment, like with any golem."

"I don't like this."

"Yeah, me either. If we're lucky he tried it and mountains lack the necessary structural integrity and he'll take a century to get anywhere on that and in the meantime we can kill him."

"You think we're within a century of having a way to kill him?"

"Don't really know. Your father guesses five or six years on injuring Thauron and I'm not sure how similar to expect the problems to be."

"The question that would bother me most if I thought this were real is why Thauron hasn't just waltzed in and destroyed the place."

"Bothers me too. Don't know."

The Enemy's servantmaking remains not-quite-reassuringly ineffectual.  The Dwarves have some great ideas for uses of automata, one of which is building railways between various locations in the far east of the continent. 

They report eventually that there are humans in the east.

"I suppose I should ask if they servantmake," Maitimo says wearily.

"I am tempted to say just leave them there until I have talking encrypted golems to go ask them with."

"Yep. I wonder if babies will start appearing here or only near extant humans."

"Or neither. Could just be a quirk of my world."

"Well, if babies don't appear and the humans are still mortal they'll die out quickly."

"Not if they breed like animals."

"...and Elves and Dwarves. That could be."

"Or maybe they do something else, or they're immortal, I don't know." Sigh.

"And we're not checking."

"I'd send them a courier but it seems optimistic to assume that they're literate, even if they woke up with a language we know."

"It took us millenia, and the Thindar never picked it up at all. So probably not, yeah."

"Should've been a hint that we could talk to the fake humans, really."

"Osanwe does translation. If my father'd been King he'd have wanted to learn their language before he went over there and then he'd have caught it, but I'm not my father in that."

"...yeah. Wonder if he's kicking himself over not insisting anyway."

"If so he hasn't said so. My family doesn't tend to express regrets. He did try explaining to me the last ten years of his work so I could be persuaded that at least ten years' objective time have passed since I was captured, but I'm not smart enough to understand it."

...Kib considers objecting to this characterization and decides it would not improve matters. "Well, I don't understand how it works either but I have my immortality necklace now."

"Forgive me for not finding that persuasive proof at least ten years have passed!"

"I know, I know, of course it's not. Findekáno thinks it's going to take fucking forever."