Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The hammer had come in as scrap and Kalen was the third man to say it was not.

It had been in the yard eleven days. Doss had it first, four hundred and sixty of Line and a Sealed grade brace on his arm, and Doss had put two hours into it and written it off. Then Ivrell, who was First Hand and slow and good, and Ivrell had written it off as well and been sour about it for a week. A quarry hammer with a cracked collar and no maker's plate, worth eleven marks as iron and nothing at all as anything else.

Sabra had given Kalen the afternoon on it the way you give a boy a puzzle to keep him quiet.

He had it clamped head-down in the strip vise with the haft wrapped in rag, and he had been reading it for most of an hour. Not testing it. Reading it. A Bind draw of twenty-two marks meant that every guess cost him more than a day's wage, so he did not guess. He looked at the wear on the sockets, and the way the grain of the ash had gone tight around the collar, and the faint furred edge where somebody had been striking off-centre for years, and he built the shape of the thing in his head before he touched it with anything but his eyes.

Force eleven. Quicken nine. Ward fourteen. Read four.

Read was the only faculty he had that cost him less than a loaf.

Doss and Ivrell had both gone at the collar, because the crack was in the collar and the crack was the obvious wrong thing. But the wear said the hammer had been swung by a left-handed man for about nine years and by a right-handed man for about two, and a Pattern set by one and used by the other does not sit where the damage is. It sits where the damage sent it.

Kalen went in through the heel of the head, which nobody does, and found it in the fourth minute.

PATTERN: Cleave (Fine)

Held in: quarry hammer, ash haft, iron collar

Draw: Force, measured

The struck thing parts along the line the striker intended.

Twelve years I made these and never once cut myself. R. Odder

Fine grade. Not Sound. Fine.

He sat back on the bench and looked at it for a moment with his heart going, because a Fine grade Cleave was four days of house credit and he had just taken it out of a piece of scrap that two better men had condemned, and because for about ten seconds he was the best reclamation hand in Ward Nine and there was nobody in the shed to see it.

Then he wrote the mark down before he wrote the grade down, which was backwards and which he did every time. Four years ago he had started copying maker's marks out of the scrap bin onto the inside of a shed board, because maker's marks were the only Accord script in Ashfall that anybody left lying around. He had eleven hundred of them now. He could read about four hundred. One of them he knew better than his own handwriting, and he had never found out whose it was.

R. Odder was not that one. R. Odder was just a man who had made hammers for twelve years and been pleased with himself about it.

Kalen set the Cleave into the holding tin and put the tin on the weigh-pan, and then, without thinking about it, slid the counterweight a hair to the left. The pan ran about four percent heavy. Everyone in the house corrected for it the same way, by feel, the way you step over the third stair.

He was reaching for his father's draw-hooks when the light in the doorway changed.

There were five hooks in the roll and they were the only thing Corun Ashgrove had left that the house had not taken, mostly because they were worth less than the paperwork of taking them. The maker's mark on all five had been filed flat. Kalen had assumed wear, the first year. By the second year he had stopped assuming anything and started keeping a list of things he did not understand, and the hooks were near the top of it.

He got two fingers on the roll before the doorway went dark, and then he did not get any further, because a Rendered came in off the yard.

It came in at a walk. They always did. It was a man of about fifty with grey in his beard and a Sedge Counting House porter's coat on him, green wool, brass at the collar, the livery so well kept that for one whole second Kalen's body relaxed, because a Sedge porter in the yard was an ordinary thing and he had a receipt somewhere for the last one.

Then he saw the crate.

It was strapped across the man's back with binding cord that had been replaced so many times the knots had worn a groove into the wool. The crate had a Sedge dock stamp on the side of it. The stamp was dated six years ago.

"Out," Kalen said. "Go on. Out."

The Rendered turned its head toward the sound and kept walking.

There was a thing you learned about the Rendered in your first month at a reclamation house, and it was this: they were not hunting you. It would have been better if they were. A hunting thing can be turned. The Rendered were finishing a shift, and you were in the aisle.

Kalen had three hundred and forty of Line and four hundred and twelve marks of arrears against it, which in practice meant he had nothing. He could hold a Ward for about nine seconds. He could put maybe eleven of Force behind a hook and the Rendered was going to walk through eleven of Force the way weather walks through a coat.

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He got out of the aisle.

He got out of the aisle fast and badly, shoulder into the sorting rack, and the rack went over, and the strip vise went with it, and the quarry hammer came out of the jaws and onto the floor head-first, and the Rendered put a boot through it without breaking stride.

There was no sound when the Cleave went. There never is. There was a Fine grade Pattern that two men had failed to find and one man had, and then there was scrap iron and a stick.

The Rendered walked the length of the shed and out the far door, into the yard, in the direction of a dock that had been bricked up for eleven years, still delivering.

Kalen stayed where he was.

He counted the bolts in the gantry above him. Thirty-one on the near span, thirty-one on the far, and four in the plate at the join, which was sixty-six, which was wrong, because there should have been sixty-eight, and he lay in the wreckage of the sorting rack working out where the missing two had gone for a good while before he noticed he was doing it and made himself stop.

Two of the Third Hands were standing in the yard door watching him.

"You all right?" the taller one said.

"Fine."

"Was there anything in it?"

Kalen looked at the iron on the floor.

"No," he said.

"Doss says you could have taken it."

"Doss could not get a Pattern out of that hammer in two hours," Kalen said, "and he was not in here, and neither were you."

"He says at three hundred of Line you can hold one off a bench."

Kalen sat up out of the rack and looked at him. The taller Third Hand was nineteen days into the trade and had the specific confidence of a man who had never seen a bill.

"How much Ward have you got?" Kalen said.

"Eleven."

"Then you have got six seconds. Maybe seven if you are angry." He got up and started putting the rack back on its feet. "Doss has four hundred and sixty of Line and a Sealed brace on his arm that the house pays for. Ask him what he would do without the brace."

The Third Hand thought about it.

"Get out of the aisle," he said.

"Get out of the aisle."

* * *

Sabra Quill came down at the end of the shift with the day's tally in one hand and a lit pipe in the other and looked at the pieces of the hammer for slightly longer than she needed to.

"There was something in it," she said.

"Fine grade Cleave. Through the heel of the head."

Sabra did not say anything for a moment. Kalen had worked for her for four years and had learned to read the silences the way he read maker's marks, and this one was not the usual one.

"Doss had that hammer two hours," she said.

"I know."

"Whose boot?"

"A porter's."

"Ours?"

"Sedge livery," Kalen said. "Six year dock stamp on the crate. Green coat, brass at the collar, and the cord had been changed enough times to wear a groove in the wool, so somebody has been maintaining it."

Sabra took the pipe out of her mouth, looked at the ceiling, and put it back in.

"Maintaining it," she said.

"You do not get a groove like that from six years of one cord."

"No."

"So somebody has been re-tying a crate onto a Rendered porter for six years."

"Somebody has been re-tying a crate onto a Rendered porter for six years," Sabra said, "and that is a two mark question, and you have not got two marks."

"I have not got any marks."

"Then it is a very expensive question."

She kept the house books in two columns, in her own hand, in an ink she mixed herself, and the second column had no heading. Kalen had been looking at that second column across the desk for four years and had never once asked what it was, because Sabra charged for questions and he had learned early which ones he could not afford.

"Half a day off your credit for the Cleave," she said.

"That is not half a day. That is four."

"Half a day off your credit for the Cleave."

"Sabra, a Fine grade is four days at house rate. I can do the sum, I do the sums every night, it is four days."

"Half a day," Sabra said again, in exactly the same voice, and wrote it down, and that was the end of it.

She was doing him a favour and they both knew it and neither of them was going to say so out loud, because saying it out loud would have made it a thing he owed her, and Kalen already owed everybody.

* * *

He waited until the house was empty before he opened his sheet.

He did that every night. It was not a good habit. There was a kind of man in Ashfall who opened his Assessment eleven times a day and stood in the street looking at it the way a fisherman looks at weather, and Kalen had promised himself at fifteen that he was not going to be that man, and had settled instead on doing it once, alone, in a cold shed, which he privately considered a completely different thing.

He sat on the strip bench with his back against the vise post and let it come up.

ASSESSMENT: Kalen Ashgrove

Ward Nine (Ashfall), Kentra

Line ..................... 340

Balance .................. -412 IN ARREARS, day 61

Standing ................. Bonded

Craft .................... Reclamation, Second Hand

FACULTY draw yield

Force ............... 11 1.0

Quicken .............. 9 1.0

Ward ................ 14 1.0

Read ................. 4 1.4

Bind ................ 22 0.7

Patterns ................. 4 / 6

Next collection .......... 19 days

Read, four, at a yield of one point four. Bind, twenty-two, at nought point seven.

It was, as Sabra had put it once without looking up, a very clear sheet. The Accord had assessed him at thirteen and decided that Kalen Ashgrove was for looking at things and taking them apart, and that if he ever wanted to make anything it would cost him five times what it cost anyone else and come out worse.

He had made his peace with that. Mostly.

The last line was the one he had been avoiding all day. He had known it was nineteen days that morning and at the fourth bell and while he was lying under the sorting rack counting bolts, and he had got the whole way to dark without letting himself put the number anywhere he could see it, and now it was on a page in front of his face in the Accord's own flat little hand.

Kalen sat in the dark and did the arithmetic he had already done, and got the answer he had already had, and then he did something he had not planned on doing.

He went to the scrap bin.

He had seen it an hour ago and let it go, because the four o'clock cart paid and the scrap bin did not: a ward-tag lying face up under a coil of stripped cord. Brass, thumb-sized. Three lines of Accord script stamped into it, and a fourth line underneath with dot leaders running out to nothing at all.

He dug it out and turned it over twice and put it in his coat.

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