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

"Read it out loud, Just the date."

I set the recovery order down on Ospren Vey’s breakfast plate at eight in the morning. Senior officer of asset recovery for the Towers.

There were eleven clerks in the main hall and every one of them had stopped writing.

"Majesty. We weren’t notified."

"The date, Vey."

"Asset recovery procedure states that..."

"The date."

He read it.

Then he read it again, slower, because smart men take longer to accept a number than fools do.

At the back of the hall, a clerk dropped his pen. It was audible.

"One day early," I said. "You dismantled fourteen of my wife’s constructs on an order signed twenty four hours before she measured anything in that courtyard."

"Orders are prepared in advance. Standard administration."

"Then give me the file number."

That stopped him.

"Any order prepared in advance opens a file," I said. "Thirteen years collecting settlements and I can recite from memory how a guild numbers its paperwork. Yours has no number. It was written and signed the same day."

I hadn’t slept.

I’d walked out of Roderic Alden’s room at four in the morning with two numbers in my head, his climbing and mine dropping, and with the certainty that I had fewer days left than I’d been counting on.

Zelina saw it on my face in the carriage and gave me the only advice that works at that hour.

If you’re going to humiliate him, do it before nine. At nine the accounting men arrive and the room fills with the witnesses he wants.

It was quarter past eight.

"Zelina."

She set the second paper on top of the first without a word, which from her is a form of cruelty.

"Entry log from your own delegation," she said. "The separation of adept Saoirse Wynne was voted on the twenty first at three in the afternoon. Your order was signed on the twentieth at nine in the morning."

"Which means somebody in the Chancellery knew on the twentieth what the Towers were going to vote on the twenty first."

Ospren Vey pulled the napkin from his collar and folded it in four before setting it down.

"Or it means," I went on, "the Towers voted on what the Chancellery had already signed. Pick which of the two disgraces you’d rather have read aloud in Council."

"Majesty, adept Wynne was separated for performance."

"Give me the figure."

"The figure isn’t necessary."

"There’s no third option," Saoirse said from behind me. Her first words since we walked in. "I checked last night. There are two."

She stepped forward and laid her notebook open on the table, a page full of columns.

"Fourteen constructs. Nineteen months. Four percent above guild standard on sustained load."

"That’s your claim."

"That’s the weight’s claim." She turned the page over. "Brizna carried forty kilos a hundred and twenty meters further than a factory construct before seizing. Every day. Nineteen months. It’s written down with dates."

"The committee rejected your paper."

"For being sentimental." She closed the notebook. "Not one of the seven reviewers disputed a single number. I have all seven notes."

Ospren Vey dropped his voice into the register of private business.

"Majesty. I can return the fourteen crates this afternoon and close the matter without minutes."

"In exchange for?"

"The date not leaving this room. The Towers hold open credit with your treasury. It could be extended through harvest."

Thirteen years pricing settlements and it’s always the same offer wearing different clothes. They give back what they stole and pay you not to say who stole it.

"Write it down," I said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"What you just said to me. Write it, sign it, and I accept." I pushed the inkwell across. "If the deal is clean, you won’t mind it being in writing."

Ospren Vey looked at the inkwell and didn’t touch it.

Then he looked at the eleven clerks.

A man who negotiates in front of his own subordinates has already lost, and he’d spent twenty years getting paid to know it.

"What does adept Wynne want?"

"Author," she said. "And I want three things."

"Adept..."

"The fourteen crates. The paper published under my name with the delegation’s seal. And the seven rejection notes filed alongside it, uncorrected."

That third one she’d worked out on her own. I wouldn’t have asked for it, and I’ve been asking for things for thirteen years.

"The crates this afternoon," Vey said. "The paper through the normal channel."

"The paper goes out Friday. Or on Monday I read the date out loud in front of three hundred nobles and you explain where it came from."

"I need my committee’s approval."

"Your committee is nine days away. Your clerks are four steps away."

He signed standing up, breakfast going cold in front of him.

When he lifted the pen, the clerk who had dropped his own stood up. He didn’t say anything. He stayed on his feet until we left, and none of the other ten told him to sit down.

Outside, Saoirse stopped on the bottom step with the notebook against her chest.

"Four percent," she said.

"I know."

"Nobody had ever said it out loud."

"You said it."

"I said it in a room where they had to listen." She adjusted the notebook. "You did that part and I don’t like owing things."

Zelina, who hates these scenes, applied herself to the cobblestones.

Until she got tired of pretending.

"Vaelion. That office’s entry ledger."

"What about it?"

"It logs palace mail on Mondays. Every Monday, twelve years running." She tugged her gloves straight. "We don’t send mail to the Towers."

"How much mail?"

"Small parcels. No sender." She started walking before I did. "Give me a day."

At the palace gate a Chancellery secretary was waiting with Decimus’s reply. Four lines, no heading and no signature.

Your refusal is noted. The offer expires Tuesday at noon.

The last shipment crosses the river Tuesday morning.

I won’t stop it. You can’t either.

Your wife is on the river, Majesty. Ask her what she’d rather have.