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

"Your mage wife and I have been locked up for eleven hours," Zelina said. "If this goes wrong I am charging you for the eleven hours and the breakfast."

Saoirse’s tower at four in the morning was a continuous noise of dials and in the middle of the noise were two women who did not speak to each other a month ago sharing a table covered in paper.

Zelina was working standing up. Saoirse was working sitting on one folded leg. Between the two of them they had filled the wall with pins.

"You start," Zelina said. "It is your archive."

"It is your theft." Saoirse turned the scroll toward me. "Record of Roderic Alden’s awakening ceremony. Fifth year of the era. Result: NULL."

"I already read that."

"You read the copy from the imperial archive." She slid a second sheet next to the first. "This is the Towers’ ledger. The original. Zelina bought it."

"I traded it," Zelina corrected. "For the name of a man who owes money to the Towers’ head archivist. It is cheaper than gold and lasts longer."

Both documents said the exact same thing up to the last line.

On the last line they stopped saying it.

The empire’s copy had the result as null in official ink.

The Towers’ copy had a complete and registered and measured and archived mana signature with the curves drawn by hand by the overseer on duty. And right on top crossing through it was the word NULL written afterward with different ink and different handwriting.

"A null ceremony does not archive a signature," Saoirse said. "That is the whole meaning of the word. This one archived a powerful and clean and whole signature."

"So the ceremony worked."

"It worked too well." She tapped the sheet with her fingernail. "Look at the overseer’s stroke. He is measuring. He has the steady hand of a man working. And in the final third his pulse breaks."

I followed the line with my finger. It was true. The curves were neat and orderly and pure craftsmanship and suddenly they turned into a tremor.

"Something happened here," Saoirse said. "The overseer saw it and kept taking notes because it was his job and his hand trembled the rest of the night. He died eleven months later from a fall off a horse."

"Conveniently," Zelina said.

"Nobody falls off a horse eleven months later out of convenience," I said. "They fall when they have gone eleven months without sleeping."

Zelina looked up from her papers and left that hanging there for a second like someone recognizing a signature.

"Your turn," I told her.

"Attendance record." She pushed a thin sheet forward. "Every ceremony has three people. The aspirant and the Towers’ overseer and the crown’s representative. Three names. This one has four."

"Who is the fourth?"

"There is no name. There is a title." Zelina read it without any intonation. "Designated carrier."

Saoirse went very still.

"That figure does not exist," she said.

"Explain yourself."

"It does not exist in any registered awakening ceremony in four hundred years. I checked them last night. All of them." Her voice dropped a degree. "Vaelion an awakening is a reception ceremony. A soul receives a gift. There is nothing to carry because there is nothing to move."

Zelina placed the last paper on top of all the others.

A travel log from the chancellery. Sealed and boring and impossible to deny.

"And that day in that village there was a fourth man besides the aspirant and the overseer." She drove a red pin into the board. "Decimus Vanthel rode for two weeks to stand in a northern barn while an eleven year old boy received a gift that the empire archived as null."

Nobody said anything for a while.

I had spent weeks building Decimus Vanthel up as an administrator who spends men. And the man I was seeing now had traveled for two weeks to get a close look at how something was broken apart.

"The big piece is missing," Saoirse said. "I know what happened and I do not know what it is. That night in that barn something was split in two."

"And the other half?"

"It arrived late. Five years late. To you."

The first knock on the tower door sounded at twenty past four.

It was not an assault knock. It was the orderly knock of an official who knows they are going to open the door for him.

Tornillo opened it. Six men wearing the gray robes of the Towers walked in without a single weapon between them.

The one in front unrolled a parchment and read it out loud without looking at anyone.

"Asset recovery order. Former adept Saoirse Wynne was separated from the body on the twenty first. Any construct manufactured with a Towers matrix is the property of the Towers. We will proceed."

"There are fourteen of them," Saoirse said. "I assembled them."

"With our matrices my lady."

"I gave them names."

The official looked up for the first time and what was on his face was not cruelty. It was the absolute nothingness of a man doing his job at four in the morning.

"That is not recorded in the inventory."

They dismantled them right there in the chalk circle one by one using matrix wrenches and the efficiency of someone who has done it a hundred times.

Brizna let them. Constructs let you. It is what they are.

Zelina grabbed my arm before I could take a step and she held it tight because she was right and we both knew it. An anathematized emperor attacking Towers officials in the middle of the night hands Decimus the entire month.

At the ninth construct Saoirse stopped counting out loud.

At the thirteenth she stood up.

And Cardo the fourteenth one with the rivets bent outward who snagged on every curtain in the tower crossed the chalk circle and planted himself between her and the six men in gray.

With his arms open. Just like Tornillo in the hallway on the night of the attack.

The official sighed.

"A construct that interferes with an officer is removed by force. It is in the same document."

It took them less time with him than with the others because they took Cardo apart without any care.

When they finished the one holding the document rolled it up and gave a short bow toward me and left with the other five and fourteen matrices in two crates.

Saoirse remained standing in the chalk circle in the middle of her empty tower holding a brass plate with five letters written in her tiny and perfect handwriting.

She did not cry. I looked at her expecting it and it did not come.

"They performed four percent better," she said.

"Saoirse."

"I wrote an article. The Towers rejected it for being sentimental." She turned the plate between her fingers. "My data was correct. Their word was not."

I walked over and did not touch her because that was not what was needed.

"Give me the document," I said.

"They took it."

"Zelina has the document."

Zelina was already unrolling it because Zelina steals papers out of reflex just like other people breathe.

She read it once. She stopped. She read it again.

Then she handed it to me with two fingers and pointed to the bottom of the document where the issue date goes.

The recovery order was signed the day before.

Before the duel. Before Saoirse measured a single thing in that courtyard.

Someone had signed the dismantling of her tower twenty four hours before she discovered what she was going to discover.

[Log: the last of your wives was left without a home.]

[Investment detected: none.]

[You did nothing.]

[Integrity: 32%. No changes.]

[Off the record note: I would have named them too.]