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

"Shut the door. What I’m about to show you, your guard can’t see."

Roderic Alden set the book face down on the bed and sat on the edge with his hands on his knees.

The room had a chair, a table, a pitcher. Nothing on the walls. Eleven weeks living in the palace and he still hadn’t unpacked.

"Sit down."

"I’ll stand."

"So did I, the first time." He turned his right hand palm up. "I hope it does more for you than it did for me."

The air above his palm split open into a blue window.

I knew that light. I knew the typeface.

[Hero System v0.7]

[CARRIER: Roderic Alden]

[Load: 70%]

I stared at the number until the candle on the table sputtered.

"Thirty," I said.

"What?"

"Mine reads thirty." I opened my own window with two fingers and turned it toward him. "And it’s going down."

Roderic stood slowly. He set his palm next to mine and the two windows hung a hand’s width apart, same header, same version, the same worn edges in the lower corner where the frame doesn’t quite close.

Seventy and thirty.

A schoolboy from Vell could have done that math in two seconds.

"Seven years wondering what was missing," Roderic said. "And it was eating at your table."

I tried something before I believed any of it. I spoke to his window the way I speak to mine, in the tone you use to ask the System for a valuation.

Nothing happened. It didn’t even flicker.

"It won’t answer you," he said. "I tried yours during the duel. Same thing."

"During the duel?"

"It lit up on you in the second pass and I saw it." He rubbed his right wrist. "Nobody else did. I’ve been waiting for you to come since then."

Eleven weeks of holding that and not asking. Thirteen years pricing settlements had taught me that a man like that is either very patient or he’s billing somebody else.

"How long have you had it?"

"Since I was eleven. I don’t remember anything before eleven." He closed his fist and the window went dark. "I start in a barn, straw in my mouth, a man in a gray cloak asking my name."

"Did you give it to him?"

"I gave him the one he told me to give."

He sat back down. He was the one avoiding my eyes now.

"It gives me missions," he said. "Has since then. Want to see them?"

"I do."

He opened his hand again and the list scrolled down the window in a column, each line with a date beside it.

Learn to hold a sword like a man of forty. Completed in eleven months.

Win over the people of the town. Completed.

Let them see you pray. Completed.

Don’t ask about your mother. Completed.

I read that fourth one twice.

"I was twelve," Roderic said, without being asked. "I did what it said because the first three had worked out."

"And what did it give you back?"

"Nothing you could point at. Everything I have I got by working for it." He pointed at the number. "All it does is raise that."

I ran the Appraiser’s Eye over him out of professional habit and without asking permission, and I regretted it before I finished reading the answer.

[True value: subject incomplete.]

[Accountability module missing.]

[He didn’t lose it. It was taken out of him.]

I shut the window before the light hit his face.

"What did it say?" he asked.

"That you’re missing a piece."

"Ah." He nodded slowly. "I already knew that. Seven years knowing it and not knowing which one."

Out in the corridor, Lunara’s guard shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The palace was in that hour when only the sleepless move.

"What do you want, Roderic?"

"For you not to sign the chancellor’s paper."

"That paper gives you the empire."

"That paper gives me your seat, which isn’t the same thing." He rubbed a hand over his face. "And it gives it to me empty. I’ve sat through two councils with you. I know what happens when you walk in and I know what would happen if I did."

"Flattery is cheap at this hour."

"I’m not flattering you. I’m telling you they trained me to look like something, and nobody trained you." He looked up. "I’ve spent eleven days refusing a mission. Do you know what refusing costs?"

"Three percent."

"For you." He gave a smile with no weight behind it. "For me it costs memory."

He went quiet for as long as it takes a man to decide whether to say the ugly part.

"On the fourth day I lost my mother’s face," he said. "I know she existed. I know she used to sing to me. I don’t know what she looked like."

"What mission."

"The one that says kill the tyrant."

He said it in the same flat voice he’d used for the straw in his mouth.

"And it’s still there," he went on. "Every morning, the letters a little bigger. Yesterday I found out I don’t remember the name of the village either."

"So why refuse?"

"Because my first day here they served me soup with the left hand."

I lifted my head.

"Nobody who serves in your house touches a plate with the right in front of you," he said. "Your poisoner wife taught them that so their palms stay visible." He shrugged. "A tyrant doesn’t bother with that. I’ve spent seven years studying how to look good and I recognize the work when I see it."

Bren Olvar taught me to expect a trap in every free confession.

I didn’t find one that night, and I haven’t found one since.

"One more thing," I said. "In the duel you switched guard halfway through a thrust. Left foot to right, sixth pass."

"Yes."

"Bren Olvar taught this body that switch twenty two years ago. Nobody teaches it outside this capital."

Roderic looked at his own right hand.

"I know," he said. "I did it before I decided to. Like signing your name."

"So who taught you?"

"Nobody." He closed the hand. "That’s the problem. I’ve got things in me I never learned, and I’m missing things I actually lived."

"Show me the number again," I said.

He opened his hand.

The blue window came back, and under the header there was a line that hadn’t been there before.

[Load: 70% ▲ 71%]

Roderic looked at it the way you look at a thermometer.

"There it is," he said. "Again."

"Again what."

"It fills on its own when I’m near you." He closed his fist slowly. "Goes up a point every time we talk for real. Three since I got to the palace."

"And what happens at a hundred?"

"I don’t know." He picked the book up off the bed and set it on the table, squared to the edge. "But you’re going to hit zero the same day."