Page 330 of Sins of the Heart
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SINS OF THE HEART
Mal shrugged. “Just confirming my facts. So who’s
he sending?”
“Ammut.”
A surprise. He’d have thought Osiris would keep her
close to hand with Mal coming for a visit. “She’s
coming here?”
“No. You know how this works.”
He did. If it were a small meeting, those involved
sent hostages to each of the players.
If it were a massive gathering, the rules changed.
Sutekh’s reply had just told Mal exactly how big this
meeting would be.
There was a protocol to such things. With so many
gods and demigods scheduled to attend, a simple exchange of hostages between any two wouldn’t do a
whole hell of a lot toward keeping the peace. They’d
just slaughter each other and be done with it.
Instead, each ruler sent a hostage to another ruler,
who in turn sent a hostage to a third ruler and so on
down the line. That way, if one was slaughtered, it automatically dragged an ally into the war.
Of course, bloodthirsty creatures that Underworlders
were, the god whose hostage had been killed would kill
the one in his possession even though they were unrelated to the one who’d done the killing in the first place,
and so on, until everybody had a dead hostage. And the
6,000-year-old ceasefire would be over.
Mal found a certain dark irony in the whole setup.
“So who’s sendingyoua hostage?” he asked,
mildly curious.
“Hades. He sends Persephone.”
