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

I went to his office myself without an escort and without warning at seven in the evening on a Tuesday.

Decimus Vanthel was working standing up with three piles of files and an oil lamp in a room smaller than my closet.

"Your Majesty." He wasn’t surprised. "The Council is six days away. Meeting with me now is reckless."

"I came to return something to you."

I placed the list on his desk.

Eighty four names. Twenty years of private payments. The only page in the empire that didn’t fit anywhere.

Decimus looked at it.

He didn’t touch it and he didn’t deny it and he didn’t change his posture.

He just stared at it with the kind of attention you use to look at an old scar in the mirror.

"Your consort Flintstone does very good work," he said.

"Yes."

"I hired her twice years ago. She charges a lot and delivers ahead of schedule."

He walked slowly around the desk.

"What do you want me to explain to you Your Majesty? That I feel remorse? I do. That it changes anything? It does not."

"I want to understand why a man who signed two hundred and thirteen death sentences supports the widows in secret for twenty years."

"Because both things belong to me."

He poured himself water instead of wine.

"I signed the file because the army needed a punished noble house and the Orden Marr was the cleanest one available. A dirty culprit doesn’t unite anyone Your Majesty. An example only works when it falls on decent people."

He said that without any inflection.

"And the pensions," he continued, "because the widows serve no political purpose to me dead or alive so I can afford to let them eat. I use what is necessary. I take care of what is not. That has been my entire job for twenty years."

"You are describing a butcher who puts flowers in the slaughterhouse."

"I am describing an administrator." He took a drink. "Butchers sleep well."

I looked around the room.

No portraits or trophies or a single one of the three hundred things the nobility hangs on their walls to remind themselves who they are.

Just files and a narrow bed in the corner and a chessboard with a half finished game against himself.

Appraiser’s Eye swept the room without me asking and this time the label was new.

[True value of this room: zero.]

[The occupant owns nothing. Everything is registered in the name of the State.]

"Payment number eighty four," I said.

Decimus put down his glass.

"I knew we would get there."

"Mary Alden. Northern border. Started eight months before the other eighty three."

I took a step forward.

"You have been paying the mother of the prophecy’s hero since before the executions of the Orden Marr. Since before the prophecy existed in anyone’s mouth."

"Since before then yes."

"Explain it to me."

And Decimus Vanthel sat down for the first time since I had met him allowing someone else to stand over him.

"Twenty years ago this empire was dying," he said. "Not from war. Four open borders and thirty noble houses building private armies and a Church negotiating with the south and a weak emperor who let everyone love him but commanded no one."

"The tyrant’s father."

"Your father Your Majesty though I appreciate the nuance."

He clasped his hands together.

"I was forty years old with an administrative position and I calculated what the collapse was going to cost. Seven hundred thousand dead in the first decade. I calculated it three times. It came out the same."

"And you decided to prevent it."

"I decided to give the empire a cheap internal enemy."

He looked up.

"A hated emperor unites what no virtue can unite. As long as all the hatred points at the throne nobody arms themselves against their neighbor. Twenty years of internal peace Your Majesty. Five million people who never even found out they were being saved."

"Using my face?"

"Using your father’s face first then yours since it was better material."

He said it without cruelty just taking inventory.

"One man. Against seven hundred thousand. I would do the math again."

There wasn’t a single sound in the office except for the oil lamp.

"And the north?"

"The north was the second move."

Decimus stood up again and walked toward the half finished chessboard.

"A lightning rod wears out Your Majesty. Hatred needs an ending or it becomes a habit and habits don’t unite anyone. Every punishment eventually needs someone to end it."

He moved a white piece in his game against himself.

"Twenty years ago I went to the northern border to look for a boy."

"To look for him."

"I traveled through eleven villages. I was looking for someone with no records and no family name and nothing that could later contradict a story."

He moved a black piece.

"I found him in the twelfth one. Eleven years old and the son of a sick washerwoman and undefeated at chess against the tavern drunks for two coins a game."

The tea. The northern village. The only two defeats in forty years.

"He beat me twice," Decimus said, "and then he asked me if I was hungry. He asked that to me when I had spent two days looking for an instrument."

He aligned the pieces.

"I paid his mother a monthly pension."

He aligned another piece.

"And I paid the whole town for a story. An ordinary boy who started existing that winter."

"And then what?"

"Teachers. Southern swords and doctrine and rhetoric. Everything you need to manufacture a man people want to love without being asked."

"You manufactured the hero."

"I raised the hero."

And right there for the first and only time his tone shifted.

"It is the best thing I have done in forty years in office Your Majesty. Roderic Alden is a truly good man. I don’t say that as his author. I say that as the man who has tried the hardest to find a flaw in him."

"And you raised him for what."

Decimus looked at me and there was absolutely no need for him to answer but he answered anyway because the man didn’t leave jobs half finished.

"For the third act."

The lamp oil sputtered.

"An empire is not cured by dismantling the monster," he said. "It is cured by watching it die at the hands of someone better. The hero kills the villain and the thirty houses weep together and the Church blesses it and the north and south embrace over his grave and the whole country wakes up the next day believing the exact same story."

He went back to his file and picked up his quill.

"Twenty years of hatred are paid for with a single well placed death. That is an excellent exchange rate."

"You bought my assassination a month ago. From the guild. Using the emperor’s forged handwriting."

"An insurance policy. And a bad one at that since I hired a dirty execution in an alleyway when the play demands a stage."

His quill scratched across the paper.

"I would cancel it if the guild accepted cancellations. I apologize for the poor taste Your Majesty. It was a very busy week."

"Apologies?"

"For the method."

He looked up one last time.

"I cannot apologize for the rest. You are a decent man and that has complicated my life more than twenty years of dealing with nobles but decent or not the script is already written and there are five million people on the other side."

He put the quill away.

"Nobody is being cruel here Your Majesty. This is dramaturgy."