The Hero System Glitched And Now It Pays Me to Love My Assassin Wives

"Consort Flintstone’s brother," the archivist said trembling, "does not appear in the death records."

I had been pulling that thread for three days in silence with two newly trusted men and without saying a word to Zelina.

The original guarantee of the tyrant’s deal was the brother’s life against the network’s obedience.

The brother died anyway everyone said.

The papers told a different story.

"Explain yourself."

"The transfer to the cliff fortress was registered Your Majesty. The execution was not. In its place there is an order for a transfer of custody."

The archivist turned the page with two fingers with the care of someone handling gunpowder.

"Signed by the warden of the fortress in favor of a northern commercial consortium. Three years ago."

"They sold the prisoner?"

"The term in the document is labor assignment Your Majesty."

Sold to the north.

Alive perhaps in some mine or galley or quarry of the circuit that fattened half the border nobility with cheap meat from the imperial prisons.

Appraiser’s Eye scanned the warden’s signature and spat out its verdict.

[True value of the signature: two hundred crowns.]

[Paid by the consortium. The consortium belongs to...]

[Tracking...]

The trail went cold there in a tangle of frontmen that not even the Eye could untangle from a desk.

I would need Zelina to follow it.

And right there exactly there the problem started.

Because telling Zelina meant handing an unverified hope to the woman who had built her entire life over that brother’s grave. If the trail died in a northern pit I would have killed her twice.

And if the brother was alive Zelina Flintstone would abandon everything to go look for him alone crossing the exact territory where the chancellor was hoarding weapons for six hundred men.

Logic said to verify first. Get certainty and then speak.

That very afternoon Zelina walked into my study unannounced with her work folder under her arm and stopped halfway.

She sniffed the air. Literally.

"The head archivist was here," she said. "His tobacco is unmistakable and the head archivist does not climb three floors for ordinary matters."

"Reviewing records from the cliff fortress. Routine."

I said it without the Tongue active thanks to all the gods of this world and the previous one because it was a lie by omission with the bone showing.

Zelina studied me for a moment with those eyes that dismantled alibis for a living.

"The cliff fortress," she repeated neutrally.

"Routine," I repeated.

She let two seconds pass that cost me dearly. Then she opened her folder on the desk and moved on to the day’s work and I didn’t know if she had believed me or if she had just stuck a black-headed pin in some internal board where I also had my map.

With Zelina not knowing was the answer.

We worked for an hour on the northern shipments.

When she gathered her papers already at the door she spoke with her back turned with the voice of things that are said with your back turned.

"My brother is buried in the north courtyard of that fortress. Mass grave from the year of the guarantee."

"I am telling you just in case your routine passes nearby. There are people who steal flowers from graves. This empire is that poor."

She left.

I was left with the file burning in the closed drawer and with a new question as a gift. If the grave existed and had a record then who buried who in the place of the sold brother?

[DING]

The blue window lit up mid afternoon without warning with the format of old debts.

[Deferred dispensation: completed.]

[What you deserve has been found.]

[Reward x1000: Map of Debts (S)]

[Effect: you see what each person owes. And to whom.]

The world changed texture before I finished reading.

Above the archivist coming out of his chest a thread of gray light pulled toward the treasury wing. He owed money.

Two thin threads toward his children. He owed time.

Over the guards in the hallway were small tangles of favors and bets and half-paid loyalties.

I closed my eyes.

When I opened them it was still there. The entire city seen from the balcony crossed with threads just like a sick loom with each person tied to their creditors by ropes only I could see.

The perfect power for a mediator. Exact and useful and tailor-made for me.

And that was what chilled me.

My System dispensed swords turned into chess and requests turned into cooking and it made mistakes with a method and a vocation.

The fact that it had spent days searching its broken inventory until it found the perfect gift meant it knew me.

That it studied me.

That it had learned to want to give me something good.

"Since when do you know what I deserve?" I asked the air.

[Since the tribunal Chapter.]

[Correction: since before that.]

[Correction: do not ask things that drain me.]

That night I tested the Map calmly from the high gallery watching the court eat dinner.

The threads told the truth of the empire better than any report. Who owed who and how much each bow weighed and which loyalties were mortgages.

Lunara had almost no threads.

Two threads. One toward me thick and steel gray which was the debt of honor declared before the room.

Another one toward the gallery of banners so heavy it sank into the floor.

Calista was a reverse tangle with hundreds of threads coming in and almost none going out. Half the city owed her.

She owed almost nothing except for a thin and very short thread toward the sky that I preferred not to look at for too long.

Miralys had no threads toward any living person in the room.

Hers came out of her chest in a single tight bundle crossing the south wall and vanishing toward her burned land as hundreds of kilometers of debt stretched toward people who could no longer collect it.

She lived tied to a country of dead creditors and she carried it upright eating dinner in silence without the weight showing to anyone except someone with a cursed map to see it.

And Zelina. Zelina was the surprise of the evening.

I expected to find her clean since she was the woman who collected everything in advance precisely to never owe anyone.

She almost was.

A single new thread came out of her chest thin and recent from this week.

It came toward me.

I looked away before reading the label. There are accounts that a decent mediator lets mature.

And then I swept the high table and the Map paid me the price of the entire evening.

Decimus Vanthel the man who owed no favors and collected in rooms and paid in structures had a single thread coming out of his chest.

Tense all the way to the north losing itself beyond the walls and beyond the map toward the exact border of the shipments.

I focused my sight until the skill granted me the label.

[Debt of: Decimus Vanthel.]

[Creditor: Roderic Alden.]

[Nature: ...life.]

The chancellor owed his life to the hero of the prophecy.

Or the hero had given it to him.