The Demon Emperor's System: I Rose From a Dead Body

Chapter 6: The Debt Collectors Arrive

"Probably," Adrian said.

"Probably?"

"I think I owe them money."

Seraphina gave him a look that could have stripped paint. Then she crossed to the door, put her back against the frame, and listened to the house shaking.

Adrian rolled onto his stomach. The room swung. His ribs lit up like a struck match, and for a few long seconds he just lay with his cheek on the cold stone, breathing through his teeth.

*Eleven HP. Don't die of standing up.*

He got his hands under him. Then one knee. Then the other. The shirt peeled away from his skin with a wet sound he decided not to think about.

The window was six steps away. It took him nearly a minute.

He lifted the iron bar. It weighed about as much as a car. He slid the shutter open a finger's width and put his eye to the gap.

Below, the courtyard was full of fire.

Torches. A dozen, maybe more, jammed into iron brackets or held up in fists. Light jumped off wet cobblestones. The front gate hung off one hinge like a broken jaw, and a battering ram lay in the dirt with four men standing around it, breathing hard.

Behind them waited two wagons and a crowd. Thirty men, maybe thirty-five. Grey coats with brass buttons. A flag hung from a pole, black cloth with a pair of gold scales stitched on it.

The Brass Ledger.

The name came up from the dead man's memory like a cork from deep water. The biggest lending house in the capital. Adrian's debts, all forty-one thousand crowns of them, belonged to that flag.

It had started small. A few hundred crowns for a new horse. Two thousand to cover a bad bet at a card table. Then a ten-thousand loan, signed at a party, with half the room clapping. The man who'd owned this body had been charming and careless and very, very easy to flatter. Somebody had been feeding him wine and paper for a long time.

A fat man sat on a gray horse in the middle of the yard. Round face, waxed mustache, a scroll the size of a rolling pin held up over his head like a priest with a holy book.

"Lord Vale!" he bellowed. "Quarter-day was yesterday, my lord! The Ledger is here to collect!"

A few of the men laughed.

Adrian thought the word and the pane opened.

*Analyze.*

**[Target: Orsen Pike]**

**[Race: Human. Class: Collections Master.]**

**[Level: 9]**

**[HP: 88 / 88.]**

**[Weakness: Fear of fire. Left arm weaker than right.]**

The men around him showed up in smaller boxes, one after another, like a row of price tags. Level eleven. Level fourteen. Level twelve. A few at sixteen. Almost all of them were listed as *Hired Muscle*. All of them had clubs or short swords on their belts.

"Fear of fire," Adrian muttered. "Sure. He's got an army of torches."

"Count?"

Seraphina had come up silently beside him. She smelled of steel and smoke and old leather.

"Thirty-three," he said. His tongue felt thick. "Maybe thirty-five. Mostly heavies. Level twelve or so." He kept his voice low. "One guy in charge, the fat one. The rest are for show."

"Thirty-three." She weighed it. "That's a long evening, but I've had worse."

"You can't kill them."

She turned her head. "Excuse me?"

"They're Brass Ledger. Licensed collectors. The Crown backs every one of those contracts, and if you cut down thirty of them in my yard," he said, "soldiers come. Real soldiers, with seals and writs. They'll be here by noon."

"I'll be gone by noon."

"Will you?" He lifted his eyes toward her left wrist. "In five hours you'll be missing a hand, and you'll have the whole city hunting you. That's your day."

Her mouth went thin.

"You said clause nine," he went on. "You can't leave the immediate vicinity of the Subject until the seal burns. That's me. You're stuck here whether you like it or not. If I'm in this house, you're in this house."

"I could drag you out the back."

"Through thirty-three guys? On eleven HP?"

"I don't know what an *H-P* is."

"It's how close I am to being dead."

She said a word under her breath. It wasn't polite. Adrian decided it wasn't meant for him, and chose not to ask who it was meant for.

Down in the yard, the fat man waved the scroll again.

"Lord Vale! You've been served!" A pause, a smile you could hear. "We'll give you until we finish our wine to come out. After that, we take what we like."

The men whooped.

Two of them peeled off from the pack and jogged toward the broken gate. Three more took up torches and started towards the stable. One kicked in the door of the east kennel.

Silence from inside.

Adrian's stomach turned over. Four mastiffs, the size of ponies, who never shut up. They'd gone quiet an hour ago, and he'd made a clever argument out of it. He hadn't thought about what the quiet meant for the dogs.

"They're dead," Seraphina said, watching his face. "Aren't they."

"Probably."

"Sorry."

The word surprised both of them. She looked away first.

**[04:48:12 until collection]**

*Think.*

Most of the Vale staff had been let go months ago, said the memories. A cook, a stable boy, an old steward named Bram who'd left in a hurry the night the Gilded Hall fell apart. The house was empty. Seventy rooms, three floors, a cellar the size of a chapel.

Thirty-three men. A demon who couldn't kill them. A body that couldn't run.

And thirty-three men who were going to walk through every room and take every single thing, including the chair Adrian stood on, and then sell the roof tiles.

He turned from the window.

The study lay behind him, wrecked. Overturned shelves. The split desk. Dead men on the floor, still warm. A flat tin of snuff on the ground beside the first body. A crossbow beside the second, its string loose. Papers everywhere. The lead washers in their little cloth sack.

The crossbow bolt Seraphina had dodged stood in the bookshelf, still shivering.

Adrian looked at all of it. Then he looked at it again, slower. The way a person looks at a pile of loose parts before they know what the machine is going to be.

Below, boots hit the front steps. A door banged open. Somebody whistled at the chandelier. Something large and expensive hit the floor and broke into a lot of pieces, and the men cheered like it was a game.

A voice called out in the marble hall.

"Lord Vale? We know you're in there!"

Seraphina's eyes flicked to him.

"Well?" she said.

"Give me the crossbow," Adrian said.