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

"They say you freed your wives last night, Your Majesty, but they also say you’re still alive. One of those two news items surprises me."

Decimus entered my study unannounced, the imperial chancellor, sixty years old, gray tunic without a single wrinkle.

The tyrant’s memories painted him with a single stroke: the only man in the empire Vaelion listened to.

"Chancellor. Did you come to offer your condolences in advance?"

"I came to play." He pointed at the chessboard by the window. "It’s Tuesday."

It was true: the memories confirmed the weekly match.

Twenty years of Tuesdays, even before Vaelion became the empeor.

I sat across from him and moved my king’s pawn forward two squares, because it was the only opening I remembered from my past life.

Decimus looked at the pawn.

"A new opening," he said. "You’ve been opening with the knight for two decades."

"Decades get tiring."

"So I’ve heard." He made his response without thinking.

"I’ve also heard about the dowries, the court is boiling and three lesser houses are already asking if the emperor is ill."

"And what did you answer?"

"That the emperor has never been healthier. Lying is half my job."

His eyes rose from the board to my face and stayed there.

"The other half is noticing when I’m being lied to."

"And what else is the court saying?" I asked, moving my knight.

"It says you pardoned the candle boy for spilling wax on the east wing rug, also that the emperor gave him an apple."

He captured my knight with a pawn.

"Apples, Your Majesty, are more dangerous than decrees. Decrees can be revoked but tenderness is remembered."

"Does tenderness strike you as a matter of State?"

"Everything you do is a matter of State."

He lined up my captured knight with the rest of his pieces.

"I will explain something I’ve gone twenty years without telling you because you never would have listened. An empire of thirty conquered kingdoms isn’t held together by love. It is held together because all their hatred points to the same place."

"To the throne?"

"To the man on the throne."

He smiled without his teeth again.

"A lightning rod doesn’t choose to be a lightning rod, Your Majesty. It is forged, it is placed at the very top and above all... it is not allowed to climb down in the middle of the storm."

We played six moves in silence. I lost a bishop out of carelessness and he took it without celebration.

"I’ll tell you something, Your Majesty, since today you are... renewed."

He arranged the captured pieces in a perfect row.

"The astrologers of the Tower confirmed the date the hero of prophecy will awaken this year."

"The hero?"

"The one the prophecy has named for a century, who will unify the empire." He smiled slightly, toothless.

"We are five years late, to be exact. His awakening ceremony should have happened five years ago and it didn’t, it seems the gods are unpunctual."

My System arrived five years late to a host it didn’t belong to.

I placed those two sentences next to each other in my head and I didn’t like the arithmetic.

I kept my chess player face, moved a rook, and asked what a bored tyrant would ask.

"And does he have a name, our unpunctual messiah?"

"Roderic Alden, a young man from the north. Humble, they say. Charismatic, they say."

Decimus captured my rook. "Check."

I blocked the check with my last bishop and used the pause to cast my own bait.

"And do you know him, Chancellor? The boy."

"I know his file. Knowing files is the third half of my job."

"Halves don’t come in threes."

"In this empire they do." He moved his queen with two fingers, unhurried.

"The north adores him, Your Majesty. Village by village. He cured a leper at twelve, stopped an avalanche by praying. Rumors grow on their own in the cold lands."

"You don’t believe in rumors."

"I believe in their utility." He looked up from the board. "An empire needs two things to survive itself: something to hate and something to love, they already hate you and it works wonderfully. The second awakens this year."

"And when he awakens? Prophecy heroes usually need a villain, Chancellor. In this empire the casting for that role is pretty much decided."

The Chancellor took his time to respond.

"When he awakens, Your Majesty, every man in the empire will take the place history has assigned him. Especially you."

"And if I refuse to take it?"

"No one refuses history."

He picked up my fallen king from the board and studied it in the window’s light.

"Pieces that refuse to move on their own... are moved. That’s the beauty of chess, Your Majesty. The board doesn’t care what the piece wants."

He returned the king to its square, knocked over, with a delicacy that made the gesture even colder.

He stood up, smoothed his tunic, and walked to the door.

"Ah... You lost in eighteen moves. Your previous record was thirty-one. Rest, Your Majesty... whatever it is you are planning."

The door closed.

I stayed a long time staring at the lost board.

A chancellor who rules for twenty years doesn’t drop phrases like that carelessly.

I had just failed a test whose existence I didn’t even know... or passed it, which with men like him amounts to the same thing.

I noted his data in my head just like I noted clients: what he said, what he avoided saying, where his voice changed, and it changed only once when pronouncing the hero’s name.

Roderic Alden.

I summoned the imperial archivist that very afternoon.

The empire’s register of religious ceremonies took up an entire wall of the archive.

I searched the year, I searched the north, I searched the surname.

Alden, Roderic. Awakening ceremony.

Seventh year of the current era.

And next to the entry, in official ink, a single word where the received gift should have been listed.

Result: NULL.

The archivist, a hunched old man who had spent forty years tending shelves, peeked over my shoulder.

"Ah, that register," he said. "How strange that you of all people ask for it."

"Why me of all people?"

"Because Chancellor Vanthel consulted that same page a month ago, Your Majesty. He consulted it, read it twice..."

The old man hesitated.

"And?"

"And he seemed satisfied."