Page 52 of Swordheart
As they rode away, he saw that the indigo cloaks had the same teardrop-shaped symbol on the back.
When the hoofbeats had completely faded, he said “Now what was that all about?”
“Ugh.” Halla dug her hands into her hair. “Priests of the Hanged Mother. Nasty people. There didn’t used to be many of them until about five years ago—after the Clocktaur War, you know—”
“I don’t.”
“Gah!” Halla shook her head. “I forget, sorry. Okay, so some artificers in Anuket City dug up this army of monsters and then Anuket City decided to start sending them out to attack people. Archenhold surrendered immediately. You couldn’t not. I saw a column of them go by, and they’d have trampled us all flat and not even noticed. So then they went after the Dowager’s city—oh, don’t worry about it. They all stopped working one day. Went berserk and smashed each other to pieces. For about a year after that, we had the occasional rogue clocktaur roaming around, but the paladins handled it. Anyway, the point is that Archenhold had surrendered, right?”
“All right,” said Sarkis.
“Well, they sort of… un-surrendered… after the clocktaurs stopped working, but no one was terribly happy with the Archonwho surrendered in the first place, so he got deposed, and then the new Archon was chosen, and it turned out he really liked the Hanged Mother. So all of a sudden this obscure little priesthood gets a lot of money and a lot of public power and becomes effectively the state religion, not that we have state religions, but if we did, it’d be that one.”
“And I take it they are not well thought of?” said Sarkis, who was pleased that he had followed the conversation this far.
“Oh no. Nobody likes them. I mean, they likethemselves,presumably, but nobody else does. Nasty bunch. Their goddess hung herself with her own hair.”
“Why?”
“I dunno. God reasons, I guess. Anyway, they like to root out people they think are heretics or witches and torture them into confessing. Then they burn them. They didn’t used to be able to get away with it so much, but now that the Archon looks favorably on the Motherhood…” She shrugged.
“You never mentioned them before.”
She gave him a wry look. “It didn’t really come up. I wasn’t going to askthemfor help, was I?”
“Have I mentioned that your entire country should be put to the torch?”
“Frequently.”
“Consider it mentioned again. What was all that about cauliflower?”
“Oh, that. Hardly anybody kills stupid women,” said Halla. “They kick us out of the way, they smack us occasionally, but nobody thinks we’re a threat.”
“You’re not stupid,” said Sarkis, remembering that she’d said something similar a few days ago. At the time, he had disagreed with her mostly out of courtesy, but he was beginning to suspect that Halla was in some ways much sharper than he had realized.
“I try not to be. Except when I am trying very hard to convince someone that I am.” She grinned abruptly. Her grin made his stomach turn over rather oddly, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
Sarkis suddenly remembered her babbling about dragons when they had first met. A suspicion woke in the back of his mind.A strange swordsman appearing in the middle of her room at night…of course she’d try to defend herself. However idiosyncratic that defense might be…He eyed the back of her head thoughtfully.
Halla, meanwhile, was scrambling out of the ditch and onto the road. “Not too much farther now. Let’s go slowly, though—I don’t want to run into those priests again if we can avoid it.”
CHAPTER 17
“Tell me about your wife,” said Halla, an hour later.
They were walking along the side of the road now. Traffic had picked up enough as they approached Amalcross that they were becoming lost in the crowd. Covered in road dust, the pair did not stand out from any other pair of travelers making their way toward the larger town.
“My wife?” said Sarkis. “Why?”
She shrugged. “You know all about my late husband.”
She was rather proud of how calmly she said that, as if it didn’t matter at all. They were two people exchanging information. She absolutely was not trying to find out what Sarkis had respected about his former wife in hopes that he would think Halla less useless.
Because that would be strange. And would imply that I care. And I absolutely do not care in the slightest. At all.
She grimaced. She had always been a poor liar, particularly to herself.
Sarkis didn’t seem to have noticed. “True enough,” he said. He thought for a moment. “She was tall. She had dark hair and she was very tanned.”
