Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

There was a lamp burning in the house office at the ninth bell and it was not Sabra's.

Sabra's lamp was brass and had been re-wicked eleven times and stood at the left of the desk where it had stood since before Kalen came to the house. The one beside it was smaller and newer and had a green shade on it, and it had been carried in from somewhere by somebody who had made a decision about how long they were going to be sitting there.

Hesper Vane was on the folding stool with the file open and had plainly been on it for an hour past her time.

The lamp was the thing. A collector who sits in your office from the sixth bell to the eighth is a procedure. A collector who brings in a lamp of her own has looked at the arithmetic of the oil and decided that she is going to be in that chair often enough for it to matter whose oil it is, and has then gone and bought a lamp, in a shop, with money, on an afternoon. Kalen stood in the doorway and read the whole of that off a green glass shade in about a second and a half, and did not enjoy any part of it.

"You are late," she said.

"There was a designation on Cinder Row."

"I know. Landing two." She turned a page. "Taking it in order, the ward has not been able to work out what to write in the box, and the clerk has sent it up to the Assessor, and the Assessor will send it back, and in about nine weeks somebody will write lapsed and file it, and nobody in this ward will ever be told what happened on those stairs."

"I could tell them."

"You could," Hesper said. "Sit down. I am going to take you through the interest, because you are about to sign a contract and I would rather you signed it awake."

She put a printed sheet on the desk and turned it round.

STATEMENT OF ARREARS

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

Assessed -412 on the second. 4 per day.

Due day 32: 532. Assessed day 33: 536.

Grade of Collection: Third, by notice.

"Four hundred and twelve on the second. Four a day, every day, including the days you are lying on your back, including the days you are working two shifts, including today." She said it slowly and did not hurry any part of it. "Thirty days is a hundred and twenty. Five hundred and thirty-two on the thirty-second day, which is when settlement falls due."

"Then why does it say five hundred and thirty-six."

"Because settlement falls due on the thirty-second day and the Collection is assessed on the thirty-third."

Kalen looked at the two figures.

"That is four marks."

"That is four marks," Hesper said, "and I could have written five hundred and thirty-two on that line and nobody would have queried it, and I did not, because it is not the number."

Four marks is a day. Four marks is not the difference between anything and anything, at that end of a page, in a room where the figure in front of it is five hundred and thirty-two. There was not one man in Ashfall who would have written the larger number, and there was not one man in Ashfall who could have told you afterwards which number he had written, and Hesper Vane had put the true one down in ink on a form she was going to have to carry about with her for a month.

He sat with that for a moment. Out in the yard the sixth bell had gone an hour ago and the gate would be shut and forty of them would be standing at it, and a woman with her hair done and her good buttons on would be standing among them for the first time.

"Before we go on, now the part nobody reads," Hesper said. "It says Third grade by notice. That is not a prediction. It is a ceiling and a floor, and it was set by somebody who opened your file on the second, and it stands whatever you do, unless the shortfall comes in under a band."

She got a card out of the file and laid it face up.

COLLECTION / SHORTFALL BANDS

First ..................... 1 to 49

Second .................. 50 to 199

Third ................. 200 to 499

Fourth ................ 500 to 999

"So if I tender four hundred on the thirty-second day."

"Then the shortfall is a hundred and thirty-two, and a hundred and thirty-two is a Second, and the notice does not get to say otherwise." She left the card where it was. "That is the whole game and it is the only game. You are not paying it off. You are buying a band."

"Why tell me the bands?"

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"Because you would work them out for yourself on about the twenty-ninth day, at two in the morning, on the back of something, and you would be three days short of being able to do anything with it." She turned the card over. "Nobody has ever thanked me for this part."

"What do they do?"

"They tell me they were going to pay it."

"How many of them do?"

"In this ward, none. Not one, in four years." She put the card away. "In Ward Four it runs at about one in nine. Same Accord, same ladder, same forms."

* * *

Sabra came in at the half and did not appear to notice that there were two lamps on her desk, which was itself a kind of comment.

She sat down, opened the day book, and drew a line through a name at the top of the second column of hands.

"Who is off?"

"Doss."

Kalen looked at the line she had drawn.

"Doss has four hundred and sixty of Line."

"Doss had a Sealed brace on house money," Sabra said, "and the house has stopped paying. The brace went back with the place. Doss is off the books."

"Where has he gone?"

"Not gone anywhere," Sabra said. "He is in the ward." Sabra turned a page. "That is generally the trouble."

She went on writing. Hesper Vane did not look up from her file, and Kalen understood, without being told and without in the least wanting to, that a Freehand collector sitting in a reclamation house office from the sixth bell to the eighth every evening for a month is going to hear a great deal of a house's business, and that this was not incidental to the procedure, and was possibly the point of it.

Doss had put two hours into a quarry hammer on the first of the month and written it off, and two Third Hands had quoted him in the yard door afterwards as a man who knew what could be done. Doss had four hundred and sixty of Line, which was more than Kalen was going to have for a year, and a Sealed grade on his arm, and nineteen years in the trade.

The house had stopped paying for the brace, and that was the whole of Doss.

* * *

He waited until the two of them had gone, and then he sat on the strip bench with his back against the vise post the way he did every night, and let it come up.

ASSESSMENT: Kalen Ashgrove

Ward Nine (Ashfall), Kentra

Line ..................... 388

Balance .................. -468 IN ARREARS, day 73

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

Line three hundred and eighty-eight. It had been three hundred and forty on the first of the month.

In thirteen days he had worked every shift the house had, taken a First Collection off a dock, spent a day and a half flat, brought a dead Steady back out of a ruined plumb in a cold room, counted eight hundred articles of a ward's unclaimed stock in three nights, stood in a slag yard and let sixty marks walk away from him, and taken a bolt out of a door on Cinder Row.

Forty-eight of Line. Fifty-six of Balance, the wrong way.

He had known that it would be. He had done the sum himself, twice, on two separate nights, and had got the same answer both times and had not written it anywhere. Knowing a thing and reading it off the Accord's own flat little hand at the eleventh bell in an empty shed are not the same operation, and anybody who tells you they are has never done the second one.

He looked at the two numbers for a while. Then he made himself say the thing out loud in an empty shed, because there was nobody to say it to and it needed saying somewhere.

"It is worse."

That was the whole of it. Every single thing he had done had been the right thing and some of it had been the best work of his life, and the sheet had gone backwards, and it was going to go on going backwards at four marks a day for the rest of his life or until the Accord came and took the difference out of his hands.

The other row was Patterns, and it read four of six, and he sat with that as well.

He had thought, since a Tuesday afternoon in a cold room with a blanket round his shoulders, that he had five. He had said so to himself, out loud, watching a plumb hang dead still off the end of his finger. But the plumb was in his coat and not in him, and the sheet counts what is bound into a man, and Kalen had known that at fourteen the way you know the alphabet.

He had let himself forget it for eight days because he had wanted it.

Write down the ones you want to be true. He got the list out of his shirt, the one he had been keeping for three years of things he did not understand, and added a line to the bottom of it, and the line was about himself.

* * *

The contract was one page and Hesper had left it face up with the pencil across it, which was either courtesy or the opposite.

REBIND, REGISTERED

Belk, Aro (holder). Ashgrove, Kalen (contractor).

Article: mason's plumb, Steady, Sound, slipped.

Fee 40 on delivery of a true plumb. 1 attempt.

Failure is chargeable to the contractor.

One attempt.

He read the last line four times, which was three more than he needed to. Failure is chargeable to the contractor meant the value of the article, and the value of a brass and lead plumb is about eleven marks, and eleven marks was nothing at all. What it also meant was a failed rebind entered against his name on the register, where it would sit for as long as there was a register, and where every man who ever considered giving Kalen Ashgrove a piece of work would find it in about four seconds.

A Bind draw of twenty-two at nought point seven yield. A rebind is four draws. He had one.

He thought about the arithmetic on Hesper's printed sheet, five hundred and thirty-six against a hundred and twenty from designations he was not going to take, and forty marks off a mason, and nothing else in the world.

Forty marks was ten days. Forty marks did not buy a band. Forty marks was the difference between a hundred and seventy-two of shortfall and a hundred and thirty-two of shortfall, and both of those are a Second, and it changed nothing.

He signed it anyway, and he was honest enough with himself, sitting on a bench in a cold shed at the tenth bell, to know why: because a man had a tool that was broken and Kalen thought he could fix it, and no other reason had ever once been necessary.

He blew the green-shaded lamp out on his way past the desk, because she had left it lit, and it was hers, and he was not going to have her paying for oil in Sabra Quill's office.

Then he came back and wrote his name on the contract and dated it and put the pencil down across the top of the page.

One attempt.

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