Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

Aro Belk had the plumb out of his apron before Kalen was through the gate and held it up by the cord without a word, which was the entire greeting.

"How long has it been like that?"

"Eleven months."

The bob hung and swung and settled and then, at about the fourth second, walked. Not much. It went out to the north about the width of a thumbnail and stayed there, patiently, the way a bad man waits.

"Sound grade," Kalen said.

"It was Sound. My father had it Sound and his had it before that, and I have had it forty-one years off him, and it has been like that since the spring before last." Belk was a wide man in his sixties with the flat forearms of the trade and no interest in being charmed. "You are Quill's Second Hand."

"Yes."

"You are not a Binder."

"No."

"Then do not tell me about walls," Belk said, "and I will not tell you about brass, and we will get along."

"Tell me about brass."

"Why."

"Because you have had that one forty-one years and your father had it before you, and between you that is more brass than I am going to hold in my life."

"It goes warm before it goes wrong," Belk said. "That is all I know and I could not tell you what it means."

He put it in Kalen's hand. It was heavier than it looked, brass over a lead core, with a mason's mark cut into the shoulder: A. BELK, in letters cut by somebody who had been paid to cut letters.

"Friday," Belk said. "There is a chimney breast on Fetter Street wants a plumb on Friday and I have got the job and not the tool, and I am telling you that so that you know what you are holding, not to hurry you."

"That is hurrying me."

"It is," said Belk. "How long have you got in it?"

"One draw."

Belk looked at him for a moment with the flat expression of a man who has been given a piece of bad news in a shop.

"Then Friday is not the problem," he said.

* * *

He had it on the bench in the strip shed by the second bell with the lamp down and the door shut, and he read it for two hours, and had nothing.

It was not like the other one.

The plumb out of the dead man's coat lining had been laid in by a jobbing binder paid by the piece, four times deeper than a Common needed, because he did not want it coming back to him. The carelessness was what had saved it. Ninety percent of that shape was still sitting where he had put it fifty years ago.

Aro Belk's plumb had been laid in by somebody who was good.

It was shallow. It was economical. Every part of the shape sat where a Steady wants to sit in a hanging weight and nowhere else, nothing doubled, cut throughout to the exact depth the grade required and not a hair deeper, because depth costs the binder and a good binder does not spend what the work does not need.

And when it went, half of it went, and there was nothing underneath it, because a good binder leaves nothing underneath.

Kalen sat with a cold cup at his elbow and the shape in his head and half of it was a hole.

He could hear the words that were left. The held thing does not drift. He could not hear what drift meant to this maker, and he had to, because a Steady in a plumb is not a general instruction. It is an instruction about one cord at one length off one pivot, and the missing half was where all of that had been written.

PATTERN: Steady (Sound, slipped)

Held in: mason's plumb, brass and lead, marked A. BELK

Draw: Ward, minor

The held thing does not drift.

Half the shape is gone. What is left of it is true.

The Accord's own account of it told him nothing he had not had in the first ten minutes, which is the Accord all over.

At the end of the third hour he put the plumb down and went to get the mason.

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* * *

"You have not started."

"I have been looking at it."

"You have been looking at it since the second bell."

"Yes."

Belk came in and stood at the end of the bench with his hat in his hand like a man in a room where somebody is ill.

"Show me how you hold it," Kalen said.

"How I hold it."

"How you hold it. Where you stand. What you look at. All of it, slowly, and do not leave a thing out because it is obvious, because obvious is what I am short of."

"You are asking me how to use a plumb bob."

"I am asking you how you use that one."

So the mason showed him, and it took forty minutes, and Belk was rude about six separate parts of it and did all of it anyway.

"Where do you stand."

"Where the light is."

"Which side of it."

"Left. Always left, because I am right-handed and I am not going to have my own arm between my own eye and the work." Belk put his hands up and set them where they went, and they went there without him watching them. "The nail goes in at my eye. Not at the height of the wall. At my eye. My father's arm was the same length as mine, which is luck, and my son's is not, which is not."

"Does he use it?"

"He will not use it. He has a rule and a level and a box of foreign nonsense and he is better than I am." Belk put his hands down. "That is not a complaint. It goes to him regardless."

There was a witness mark on the head, a thin bright groove where the cord had sat for a hundred years. It had not been moved in a hundred years and it was not going to be moved now.

Kalen turned the plumb over.

One face of the bob was brighter than the other three. Not clean: worn. A man had sighted on that face and no other for forty-one years, and his father before him, and the polish was a hundred and thirty years of somebody's eye.

"When did it go?"

"Spring before last."

"What happened."

"Nothing happened. It was in the bag and then it was wrong."

"Nobody drops a plumb and remembers it," Kalen said. "What did you do about it."

Belk looked at the far wall for a second.

"I allowed for it."

Kalen sat up.

"Say that again."

"I allowed for it. It goes north about a nail's width at the fourth second, so you read it at three and you carry the difference in your head." Belk shrugged. "Every mason in Kentra allows for something. My father allowed for a bad rule. It is not a confession."

"Show me a wall you have built since the spring before last."

"I have built forty walls since the spring before last."

"Show me the nearest one."

* * *

It was the store wall at the back of Belk's own yard, eleven feet of it, put up in the summer, and Kalen stood in front of it for an hour with a straight edge and a piece of chalk.

"Say something."

"No."

"You have been at that wall an hour."

"Yes."

"Is it wrong?"

"It is beautiful," Kalen said, "and it is wrong, and it is wrong by the same amount the whole way up, which is why it is going to work."

It was out.

It was out by a consistent amount, in one direction, from the bottom course to the top, and the amount was not a nail's width. It was a nail's width multiplied by a man's judgement, applied four hundred times by somebody carrying a correction in his head, and every course of it was wrong by the same figure in the same direction.

The wall was the missing half of the shape.

It was not a metaphor. Aro Belk had spent eleven months making a record, in stone, of exactly what his plumb had stopped telling him, at the scale of a wall instead of a thumbnail, and it was legible because a good man had been consistent about being wrong.

He went back to the shed and built it all in his head at once, the true shape and the broken shape and the wall, three drawings on tracing paper, and where the second one had a hole the third one had the figure.

He did not have to make a Steady. He had to make the half of this one that was missing, at a depth of nothing, in a shape cut by a better binder than he was ever going to be.

Kalen sat very still for about a minute with his hands flat on the bench.

Then he paid twenty-two marks he did not have, and put it where he was looking.

It took eleven seconds.

PATTERN: Steady (Sound)

Held in: mason's plumb, brass and lead, marked A. BELK

Draw: Ward, minor

The held thing does not drift.

Forty years at it and I never set one crooked. V. Ilder

The last line had not been there before. It had been under the half that went, unreadable for eleven months and probably a good deal longer, and Kalen read a dead man's name off a plumb bob and wrote it on the shed board before he wrote anything else, which was backwards, and which he did every time.

* * *

Belk hung it off the nail at eye height with the cord round the second knuckle and stood in front of it and watched it not move.

He watched it not move for a long time. Nobody in the shed said anything.

"Sound," he said at last.

"Sound. It is what it was. I have not improved it."

"It is what it was." Belk took it off the nail and put it in his apron and got the money out, forty marks in silver, and counted it onto the bench in fours. Then he stopped with his hand on the last four.

"Say what you did."

"I did not lay a new one in."

"I know you did not lay a new one in. I have been standing here."

He looked at Kalen properly for the first time all day.

"You did not lay a new one in."

"No."

"You read the old one."

"Most of it. The rest was in your wall."

Forty marks. Ten days of interest. It did not buy a band, and Kalen had the sum done before the last four hit the wood: four hundred and sixty-eight, less forty, plus three days of four, is four hundred and forty.

"That is not how anyone does it," Aro Belk said. "I have had three binders at that plumb. Every one of them wanted to take the old shape out and put a fresh one in and every one of them wanted eleven days and eighty marks and every one of them told me it would come back Common." He put the last four down. "That is how it is done. That is how it has been done my whole life."

"I know."

"You did it in a day."

"I did it in four hours," Kalen said, "and eleven seconds, and I could not have done it at all if you had not been wrong the same way four hundred times."

Sabra Quill was in the shed doorway with the pipe going.

She had been there some while. He had not heard her come. When Belk had gone out through the yard with the tool in his apron she came in and stood at the end of the bench and looked at the forty marks, and then she did not look at the forty marks.

She looked at him. Directly, for as long as it took the pipe to go out, which she did not notice.

"Where did you learn that."

"Nowhere," Kalen said. "It is cheaper to look."

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