The Royal Summons
In which our protagonist answers a king's letter, and the road to the capital has opinions about it.
The road to the capital started with a dead horse.
The horse was grey, well-bred, and had been killed cleanly across the throat by someone who knew exactly where the artery ran. The rider was still in the saddle, his livery soaked with blood that was already drying to the color of rust, and a green sigil was burned into the leather of his dispatch bag. The sigil was not paint. The sigil was, in the language of the system pulsing at the edge of Kenji's vision, a piece of the same code that the horn had carried out of the cult camp in Oakhaven.
[Object scan: dispatch bag, royal seal, partially destroyed]
[Trace: bag contents intact. Letter survived. Letter is the original summons.]
[Compiler note: the third warning has been delivered in person. The system is, in a small way, paying attention.]
The third warning. Orven had told him, three nights ago, that the third warning was the one the system would let him hear. Orven had not said it would be delivered by a dead man on a hill road. Orven had not said the third warning would be a corpse.
Kenji knelt in the road. Elara was already off her horse, sword drawn, scanning the tree line. Lian was sitting very still on the carriage step, notebook closed, eyes wide. Pip orbited Kenji's head, blue, urgent, and the pulse was the pulse the dragonfly used when the system had just confirmed something it had suspected for a long time.
"Read it," Elara said, without looking at him. "Read the letter. Tell me what the king actually wants before the next one of these comes down the road."
Kenji read it. The letter was the same letter that had been sent to Oakhaven, the king's invitation, the summons to court. The king's handwriting. The king's seal. The king's plain, tired, hopeful prose. The letter had been copied, sealed, and put on a fast horse, and the horse and the rider had been killed two days out of the capital, in a way that said, very clearly, the kingdom's invitation is not welcome here.
The cult was watching the roads. The cult was, in a small way, ahead of them.
[detect_mana: 4 sources identified. Threat level: moderate. Stamina: 78%.]
[Compiler note: stamina is fine. Trust is a separate variable. The system is, in a small way, ahead of the developer.]
He closed the bag. He stood up. He looked at Elara.
"We are still going," he said.
"Of course we are still going," she said. "But we are not going the way the king planned. We are going the long way. The way that does not pass through the cult's preferred ambush corridors."
"You know another way?"
"I am the captain of the guard. I have been walking the roads of this kingdom for seven years. I know every place a small group of robed men with a green sigil would wait for a royal messenger. I also know which inns are safe. The cult has been funding inns for years."
Kenji looked at her. He thought, not for the first time, that the woman he had decided to love was, in the driest possible language, a senior engineer who had been asked to onboard a junior.
"Okay," he said. "You lead. We follow."
They followed. The long way took two weeks instead of one, and the long way taught Kenji that the kingdom had legacy code. The legacy was in the roads, the bridges, the milestones, the way-stations, the entire network held together by spells no one in living memory had been asked to debug. The legacy was in the towns, every one of which had a clock tower, and every clock was three to seven minutes slow. The legacy was in the people, who had built their lives around the system's bugs, and were not going to thank him for the fixes.
"You cannot just fix things," Elara said, on the tenth day. "You have to know what depends on them."
"I know," he said. "I am, in a small way, learning."
She smiled at him. It was the second smile he had ever gotten from her on the road, and it was a small thing he was going to remember for a long time.
[Compiler note: the developer is, in a small way, learning. The system approves.]
The capital, when they finally reached it, was a system shock.
It was huge. Five times the size of Oakhaven, with stone walls three times as high, a castle that was a small city, a market that was a town, and a population that Kenji could not even estimate. The streets were paved. The sewers were organized. There were street lamps that lit up at dusk, fueled by a mana lamp that someone had designed and built and was now maintaining, and the design of the mana lamp was, in the language of the system in his head, the design of a person who had been told the lamp was a candle and had decided to make the candle a system.
"This is legacy code," Kenji said, to no one in particular.
Lian, who had been reading her notebook, looked up. "What?"
"Legacy code. Code that has been in production for so long that no one remembers the original design. The original developers are gone. The documentation is missing. The patches have been applied by dozens of different people, each of whom understood a different part. The system works, mostly, but no one really knows why."
"Is that bad?"
"It is not bad. It is just the way it is. And it is what the king has asked me to debug."
They were escorted to the castle. The king, Theodore, met them in a small audience chamber, not the throne room. He was, Kenji saw, a man in his fifties, with the tired eyes of a person who has been responsible for a long time and has not had a good night's sleep in years. He had a kind face, though, and a careful handshake, and a habit of looking at people as if he was actually listening to them.
"Strange Sage," the king said, smiling slightly. "I have heard a great deal about you. Most of it is true, which is unusual."
"I try to be consistent, Your Majesty."
"Good. Consistency is rare. So is competence. You have both." He turned to Elara. "Strange Captain. I am told you held the walls during the siege."
"I did, Your Majesty. With the Strange Sage's firewall."
"I am told you also walked the walls with him at midnight. I am told a great many things. I am told you are now an item."
Elara did not flinch. "We are, Your Majesty."
"Good. I like it when competent people find each other. It makes my job easier." He turned to Lian. "And you must be the apprentice. The one who learned to cast a firewall in three months. The academy is very interested in you."
"I am still learning, Your Majesty," Lian said, quietly.
"Of course you are. We are all still learning. The day we stop is the day we become useless."
He led them to a small room, with a table covered in papers, and a single chair. The chair was for the king. The other people in the room stood.
"Here is the problem," the king said. "My treasury is being drained. I do not know by whom. I do not know how much. I have accountants who tell me the books balance, but the money is not where it should be. My spies tell me there is corruption, but they cannot prove it. My nobles tell me everything is fine, but the kingdom is poor, and the southern kingdoms are richer, and I do not know why."
He paused. He looked at Kenji.
"You debug systems. I have a system that is broken. I need you to debug it."
"Show me the books," Kenji said.
The king smiled. It was the smile of a person who has been waiting for someone to say that for a very long time.
"I was hoping you would say that. The books are in the next room. They are very, very long. And before you start, I should tell you, in the driest possible language, that one of the king's messengers was killed on the road two weeks ago, and the king's seal was on the bag, and the king's seal was the only reason you are not also dead."
He said it quietly. He said it the way a king says a thing that he has had a long time to think about. He said it as if the death of the messenger was, in the larger accounting, a small thing, and the larger accounting was, in the larger accounting, the only thing that mattered.
Kenji looked at Elara. Elara looked at him. The room was quiet.
Pip orbited the king's head, slowly, and pulsed once, very softly, in a tone that was, in a small way, ahead of all of them.