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

"Stay still," Saoirse ordered. "Mana laughs at people who move."

It was the third measurement session in her tower.

The place was a stone cylinder lined with instruments that buzzed and clicked and argued among themselves.

I occupied a chair in the center of a chalk circle. Her constructs worked around us.

They were articulated figures of wood and brass the size of children. Each one was busy and had its name painted on its chest in neat handwriting.

"Tornillo the big lens," Saoirse said without looking and the construct named Tornillo crossed the room with the lens. "Brizna stop organizing my papers. I want them in my mess."

The construct named Brizna dropped the papers with something akin to mechanical resignation.

"Do you always talk to them?"

"They work better with verbal instructions." She adjusted the lens over me. "And they say goodbye better."

"Say goodbye?"

"When they deactivate. A construct lasts between two and five years before the matrix runs out."

She wrote down a number.

"I used to just deactivate the early ones. Now I warn them the day before. They perform the same but..."

She searched for the word with the frown of someone translating from a language they do not master. "But it feels like a bad contract not to give notice."

A bad contract.

The coldest mind in the empire had built her own ethics out of workshop parts and it worked for her. Something about that carpentry felt more honest to me than half the creeds in the court.

"The data," she said changing the subject with her usual abruptness. She unrolled a scroll full of twin curves in front of me. "Five sessions counting the spikes I measured from a distance. The conclusion does not change. Two soul signatures in a single body. Yours is dominant and another one is coiled inside your System. That one is not yours."

"Whose is it?"

"That question cost me three sleepless nights." She pointed at the second curve. "Soul signatures are registered at birth in the temples but there is another record. The awakening ceremonies. Each ceremony archives the aspirant’s signature in the Towers. I requested the northern archive with a boring excuse."

She unrolled a second sheet next to the first one. Two curves side by side.

The second signature from my System and the signature registered at Roderic Alden’s ceremony five years ago. The ceremony marked NULL in the imperial records.

Identical. Spike by spike and valley by valley.

"Your System," Saoirse said with the flat voice she used for discoveries that scared her, "carries a piece of the hero’s soul inside it. Or the hero carries a piece of yours outside. The data does not distinguish the direction. Only the splice."

"And the null ceremony?"

"Null ceremonies do not archive signatures. That is the whole point of the word null."

She tapped the sheet with her finger. "This one archived a complete and powerful and clean signature. Roderic Alden’s ceremony happened and it worked and it produced this. Someone registered it as null afterward."

She took off her measuring goggles and looked at me without any instruments in the way. That was something she almost never did.

"Session forty one of studying the specimen," she said. "Hypothesis update. The specimen is not the glitch. The specimen is the crime scene."

"And are there any witnesses to the scene?"

"One documented."

Saoirse rummaged through her protected mess and pulled out a travel log sheet sealed by the Towers.

"Awakening ceremonies require an overseer from the Towers and a representative of the crown. The overseer for Alden’s ceremony died the following year. A fall from a horse. The crown’s representative signed with the chancellor’s seal."

"Decimus."

"His office." She corrected being exact even when it hurt. "But the travel log is more generous. The chancellor’s only documented visit to the northern border coincides with the week of the ceremony. He went in person Vaelion. The man who does not leave the capital even for state funerals rode for two weeks to watch a villager awaken."

The data arranged itself into an ugly and coherent picture. A successful ceremony registered as null alongside an overseer dead from a convenient fall and a chancellor on an unlikely trip. And five years later a System with two souls installing itself in the wrong man.

"I need you to measure one more thing," I said. "When the System installed itself in me on the night of the knives. Was there a trace left?"

"Mana traces last for weeks not months."

But she was already turning toward her instruments because telling Saoirse that something could not be measured was the best way to spend an afternoon watching her measure it.

"Although installations do leave a scar on the local matrix. Brizna. The environmental log for the imperial wing months three through five."

The construct Brizna trotted toward the archives. I followed it with my eyes.

"Why Brizna?"

"It was the first one I named."

Saoirse said it without looking up from her dials.

"The others came later when I proved that the named ones performed four percent better. I wrote an article about it. The Towers rejected it because the ruling word was sentimental."

She adjusted a dial with more force than necessary. "My data was correct. Their word was not."

"And what is your explanation? For the four percent."

She stood still for a moment with her back to me among her machines.

"Unpublishable hypothesis," she said. "Things work better when someone expects something from them."

We were climbing down from the tower when the world twisted.

First it was the Map of Debts lighting up on its own. New threads entered the palace through the east wing walls. They were fast and short and all made of the exact same material.

Contract debts.

Debts of blood paid in advance.

I knew that bookkeeping. I had seen it on the night of the spider.

"Saoirse. Back to your tower. Seal the door."

"What are you measuring that I am not..."

The first guard’s scream answered her from the courtyard followed by the bell. Then Chess Emperor unfolded the full board over my vision. Fourteen hostile trajectories converged on the palace from four points with coordinated and professional precision.

The assassins guild had returned.

"Change of plans," I told Saoirse as I was already running downstairs. "Tower. Seal. Now."

"The attack data would be worth..."

"Saoirse!"

"Sealing." Her voice followed me down the stairwell sounding equally offended and obedient. "Let the record show that science is losing out."

The palace woke up to the ringing of bells.

I crossed the courtyard counting trajectories on the board.

The fourteen hostile points moved with the coordination of a clock. Each group had its target and each route was rehearsed.

The guild was collecting on a deposit paid by a dead man with the punctuality of their trade.

Or at least that was what we all still believed.

And in the exact center of my vision while I ran toward the steel the blue window had the nerve to chime.

[External contract reminder detected.]

[The contract on your life remains active.]

[Note: the dead pay on time. It is their only virtue.]