Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The clerk at the watch house wanted the designations off his board a good deal more than Kalen wanted them off it, which was a thing Kalen worked out at about the fourth bell and should have worked out at the counter.

"Two current," the clerk said. "Sixty a head. You bring me the collar tag, I stamp the docket, the ward pays at the quarter."

"At the quarter."

"At the quarter."

"The quarter is eleven weeks off."

"The ward pays at the quarter," the clerk said, "and you are the fourth man to say that to me this month, and I have not got a better answer for you than I had for the other three."

"Who designates them?"

"The Assessor signs it."

"On what?"

"On a complaint." The clerk turned the ledger round and put his finger on the column, which was, Kalen thought, either helpfulness or the exact opposite. "Complaint comes in, Assessor signs, notice goes on the board. That is the whole of the procedure and I have got it on a card if you want to read the card."

"Whose complaint?"

"It does not say whose complaint. It says complaint received. That is the field." The clerk shrugged. "There is not a box for whose."

"Can I see it?"

"No."

"Is that a rule or is it you?"

"It is a rule," the clerk said, "and it is also me, and from where you are standing you would not be able to tell them apart, so take the docket."

Kalen looked at the column a moment longer than he needed to.

"There is a form, then."

"There is a form, and there is a card about the form, and I am supposed to read you the card." The clerk got the card out of the drawer and laid it face down on the counter, which Kalen took to be the reading. "Settlement at the ward's discretion. That is the line men ask about."

"What does it mean?"

"It means the ward decides whether it was a settlement."

"And if it decides it was not?"

"Then it was not. It has happened twice since I came here and both times it was a damaged tag, so do not damage the tag."

"How long have the two of them been up?"

"Nine days. Both of them."

"Both."

"Same morning, same hand, one after the other." The clerk turned the ledger back round. "That happens."

"Does it."

"It happens," the clerk said, in the voice of a man who has never once been asked to think about a thing and has no plans to take it up now.

"And if nobody takes them?"

"They lapse at the quarter and go up again in the new one."

"What if a designation lapses and does not go up again?"

The clerk looked at him.

"That does not happen," he said. "The second one is an indoor job, by the way. Take the yard one first. Everybody takes the yard one first."

DESIGNATION, WARD NINE

2 current. 60 marks on production of the collar tag.

Settlement at the ward's discretion.

Designation lapses at the quarter.

He put the docket inside his shirt with everything else and went up Cinder Row without reading the second entry, because the first one had a place on it and the place was on the way.

* * *

The slag yard is nine acres behind the foundry that had one purpose from 987 until 1196 and has had a different one since, which is that it is where the ward's bounties are, because it is where the work was.

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He got over the wall at the low corner at the first bell and found it in four minutes.

A foundry hand of about forty in a leather apron gone stiff as board. It had a barrow. It was filling the barrow at the breaker heap with a short shovel, working steadily and not fast, in the manner of a man who has eleven hours in front of him and intends to be upright at the end of them.

Kalen sat down on a slag block sixty feet away and watched it.

You cannot read a Rendered. There is nothing in one to read. Every man who has tried to look one in the face has come away with the same nothing, and after a while people stop trying and call the nothing peace.

You can read the work.

He watched four things and wrote none of them down, because he had nothing to write with. Where the loop started, which was the north face of the breaker heap and never anywhere else on the heap. Where it stopped, and for exactly how long. What it did when the route was blocked, because a shutter had been down across the middle of the run for years and the barrow went round it on the yard side every single time, and a thing with nothing in it does not go round an obstacle, it stops at one. And what it did when the barrow was empty, which was turn, and go back, and start again.

Nineteen minutes to the loop. He timed three off the ward bells and the third came in within four seconds of the first.

The stop was the part that mattered.

At the far end of the run there was an iron plate in the ground where a launder had been taken up, and nothing else at all, and the Rendered stopped at the plate and stood for eleven seconds with the barrow tipped up, and then set it down and turned round.

Eleven seconds is how long it takes to tip a barrow of slag into a launder and let it run. Kalen had watched men do it in this yard as a boy, from the good side of the wall, holding his father's coat.

So the instruction was four words long: fill it, wheel it, tip it, come back.

Somebody had said that to this man in 1196 and he had been carrying it out ever since. The heap had not gone down in eight years because the launder was gone, so the slag went onto the ground at the plate, and the yard hands shovelled it back for the first two years out of tidiness, and after that the weather did it.

Kalen counted the barrow loads while he thought about it, because that is what he does, and had got past two hundred thousand before he noticed he was doing it and made himself stop.

* * *

He went in on the fourth loop.

He went in because he had the sentence and he wanted the last word of it, which was the plate, and he was four feet inside the run when the sentence turned out to be four words long and not five.

The barrow came round the shutter on the yard side, which he knew, at the pace it always came, which he knew, and Kalen stepped back out of the line and put his heel on a slag block that was not where he had left it. The near handle went across his hip. It did not slow and it was not aimed and it went through him the way a cart goes through a puddle, and he came down in the grit on his shoulder and his ear and about three feet of the skin down the outside of his arm.

The Rendered went on to the plate.

Kalen lay where he was for a moment. Then he got an elbow under himself, and then a knee, and stood up on a hip that was going to be black by the seventh bell.

It had not turned round. It had not noticed. He had known that for four years and had never once had it done to his own body.

He got the hook out of the roll.

There is a way to do this and every hand in the trade knows it and nobody says it out loud in a shop. You do not fight a Rendered. You wait for the part of the loop where the hands are full, and you come in behind, and you put a hook under the collar seal and take the tag, and the whole business is four seconds, and the thing goes down where it stands and does not get up. Eleven seconds at the plate, every nineteen minutes, for as long as any man cares to wait.

Kalen stood at the plate with his father's hook in his right hand and sixty marks eleven seconds away from him, and did the other arithmetic instead.

Sixty marks was fifteen days of interest. It was a fifth of a bond he was not going to be given. It was payable at the quarter, which was eleven weeks after he needed it, and the clerk at the counter had known that and had said it to him twice.

None of which was the reason, and he knew it was not the reason while he was assembling it, and he assembled it anyway, standing on a plate in nine acres of slag with a hook in his hand.

The barrow came up the run.

He stepped off and put the hook back in the roll.

"There is no launder," Kalen said. "There has not been a launder at that plate since I was eleven years old."

The barrow went past him at the pace it always went.

"Finish the round," he said, to nobody, in an empty yard.

It finished the round. It went back to the heap and picked up the shovel, and the light went out of the yard the way light goes out of a place with a wall round it, all at once and from the bottom upward. Kalen sat on the slag block with his hip going and watched a man do a thing that had stopped meaning anything eight years ago and had never once been told so.

He stayed for two more loops. He could not have said why and did not try.

* * *

The gate was shut when he got down.

"Sixth bell has gone," the watchman said.

"I know."

"Then you know what it is."

"Four marks."

"Four marks." The watchman wrote it in the book, because everything goes in the book. "Name."

"Ashgrove. Ward Nine, Bonded."

"Where have you been."

"Slag yard."

"On the designation?"

"Yes."

"Get it?"

"No."

"You were up there yesterday as well."

"No."

"Somebody was. Over the wall at the low corner, same as you."

"Not me."

"Then there is two of you at it," the watchman said, and wrote that in the book as well.

He looked at the hook roll, and at the state of his arm, and at the grit down the whole of one side of his coat, and did not ask the follow-up, because in Ward Nine that particular follow-up does not get asked, and Kalen was grateful for it in a way he did not examine.

"There is a man out of Fetter Street been up there twice this week," the watchman said. "Bigger than you."

"I know."

"He will have it by Friday."

"I know."

"Can you not do it?"

"I can do it."

"Then that is worse," the watchman said. "I am not going to ask you about it, and you have had a four mark walk."

He pushed the small gate open with his boot.

He went round the long way by the cooperage. Under the lamp at the corner he got the docket out to see how far the second designation was going to make him carry his hip in the morning, and read the entry, and stopped walking.

It was in the clerk's hand, in ink, with an address on it.

Ovin, M. Cinder Row, the tenement, landing two.

Kalen had carried her coal up those stairs.

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