Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

He counted the days line twice, which was no use to anybody, and did it anyway, standing at the ward board on the twenty-third of the month with his hands in his pockets.

WARD NINE: STANDING NOTICE

Levy assessed ................ 17.5

Assessment of N. Ashgrove in .. 292 days

Two hundred and ninety-two for her. Eight for him.

The days line on a standing notice is current, and it is the only line on it that is. Nobody in Ward Nine has ever remarked on this. The notice goes up on the first of the month at the seventh bell and stays up, the Levy figure sits where it was printed, the days figure counts, and if you stand in front of the board on the eighth it says what it says on the eighth. Kalen had walked past it two hundred times without once wondering how.

He had two clocks now and they were not printed on the same board and only one of them was anybody else's business. The ward's clock was up there in a frame under glass where nine thousand people could look at it. His own was on a sheet of blue paper that had come to his employer's yard so that his employer would see it first, and it said eight, and there was no glass and no frame and nobody in Ward Nine to look at it except the four people standing in front of the board with him, who all knew anyway.

The same four people were in front of it. Marra Sull read it the way you check a wound. The old man from the cooperage stood at the front and could not read a word of it and came every month all the same, and Kalen had worked out in about the second year that the old man came to be seen coming.

"Eight days," Marra Sull said.

"How did you know that?"

"Everybody knows that. Your notice went to Quill's and the yard talks." She did not say it unkindly. "My boy is up in the spring."

"I know."

"Two hundred and ninety-two of yours is a hundred and nine of mine," she said, "which is a thing I would rather not have been able to work out, and I can, now, because you stood here in the spring doing sums out loud."

She went off to the rope-walk and Kalen stood at the board a while longer.

Ferrin Ovel came up while he was still standing there and read it for his mother, who would not come, and wrote the Levy figure on the inside of his wrist in pencil to take home to her, and nodded at Kalen on the way past and did not say anything, because the Ovels were owed something by the Ashgroves, or the Ashgroves by the Ovels, and neither family had ever discussed it.

* * *

The bond application is form forty-one and form forty-one requires a ward certificate of standing, and the ward certificate of standing is issued by the ward filing office, which is one room with a counter and a man called Emmer Loy behind it.

"Certificate of standing," Loy said. "Yes. That is form nine."

"Then I would like form nine."

"Form nine requires your standing to be certified."

Kalen waited. Loy waited. The clock on the wall did what clocks do in rooms like that.

"By whom," Kalen said.

"By the ward."

"The ward is issuing the certificate."

"The ward is issuing the certificate, and the certificate requires the standing to be certified, and the standing is certified on form nine." Loy said this with no distress at all. "It is a known difficulty. There is a workaround and it takes about forty minutes and I will do it for you now, if you have got forty minutes."

"I have got eight days."

"Then you have got forty minutes."

It took fifty-five. Loy was courteous throughout and explained every field and apologised for none of it, because there was nothing in the room that Emmer Loy had done and nothing in the room he was going to pretend to be able to change.

That is what a workaround is, in a ward office. It is a man who has found the one order in which four impossible forms may be filled out, and who does it forty times a week, and who has never once written to anybody about it, because there is no form for writing to anybody about it. Kalen sat on the bench under the window and watched him do it and thought about a weigh-pan that runs four percent heavy and a shed full of hands who all correct for it the same way without discussing it.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Loy wrote Kalen's name at the top of the certificate in a clear round hand.

Then he opened a second book at the counter and wrote the name again.

"What is that one?"

"The register."

"Of what?"

"Of names," said Emmer Loy, and blotted it, and turned the book round so that it faced the wall, which was where it lived.

* * *

The Sedge Counting House has forty-one steps and a door that two men hold open, and Tam Oduya took him up all forty-one of them talking the entire way.

"Right. Bond counter's on the first landing, the man is called Herrick, he's fine, he's actually fine, he'll not do the thing where he looks at your coat." Tam went up two at a time. "The tea is good. Have the tea. Everyone says it and everyone is right and I have never worked out why it is so good, Kalen."

"Tam."

"Take the tea, Kalen."

It was a good room. That was the thing about it that Kalen could not put down afterwards.

Warm, and dry, and lit right to the corners, with a counter of some pale wood and a proper brass rail on it, and eleven clerks at eleven desks each doing one thing carefully and none of them doing two. There was no ash. That was the part his eye kept coming back to, standing at the rail in a coat with slag grit still in the seam of the shoulder: there was no ash on any surface in that room, and there was no reason there should have been, and Ashfall was a forty minute walk away.

Every single person in it was polite. A boy of about fourteen brought the tea on a tray and gave him the cup with the handle turned to his hand.

The tea was good. Tam was right about the tea and Kalen sat with it in a warm room for four minutes, and understood, in a way he never got words for, that this was where the ward's money went to be looked after, and that it was being looked after beautifully by people who would have been sorry to hear about Ilsa Fenn.

Herrick was fine. Herrick took the ward certificate and read it, and took the form and read that, and got the schedule out and went down it with a paper knife.

"Three hundred against twelve months' service. Bonded applicant, ward of residence, no prior bond." He turned it round. "You want line eleven."

Line eleven said: Applications from Bonded persons require a co-signer at Freehand standing or above, who assumes the obligation in the event of default.

"That is the only condition?"

"That is the only condition that ever matters," Herrick said. "The rest of it is dates."

"And if I bring one."

"Then you have got three hundred marks on Tuesday and I will make you the tea myself."

Tam was standing at his shoulder and did not say anything, which was, Kalen thought going down the forty-one steps, the single loudest thing Tam Oduya had ever done.

* * *

He asked Sabra at the eighth bell with the day book open between them.

"I want a co-signer."

"No."

"You have not heard the terms."

"No," Sabra said, and went on writing.

He stood in the office for a moment.

He had known the answer before he asked. He had known it on the forty-one steps and known it the whole way up Cinder Row, and had rehearsed the terms on the way, out loud, twice, on a public street, the way you do. He asked anyway. And the asking cost him something that was not going to appear on any sheet in any month, and that he was going to be carrying about with him at the bench for a long while, and that Sabra Quill knew the exact weight of, because she had been in this trade for twenty years and had refused people before.

She did not look up and she did not explain, because she never explained, and because explaining would have made it a thing she owed him.

Hesper Vane was on the folding stool under her own lamp and waited until Sabra had gone out into the yard.

"You are going to ask me next."

"Yes."

"Ask, then."

"Will you co-sign it."

"No," Hesper said, "and I am going to give you the reason, because you will construct a worse one on your own and then live in it." She closed the file. "If I sign that, I am an interested party. An interested party cannot hold the account. The account goes back to the House and the House assigns it to whoever is free, and whoever is free arrives on the thirty-third day at the seventh bell with a cart and two men and no history with you at all."

"And you arrive with a file."

"I arrive with a file, on foot, having sat in this office every evening for thirteen days working out what you have actually got." She said it without any weight on it whatsoever. "There is a great deal of discretion in the thirty-third day. All of it is mine. It stops being mine the moment I put a name on a piece of paper for you, and you would be buying three hundred marks with the only person in Kentra who is paid to know what your week looks like."

"That is nearly kind."

"It is not kind at all. It is correct, and it happens to be better for you, and I would tell you if those two things had come apart."

Three routes. All three closed inside eleven days, two of them by his own hand and the third by a line of print on a schedule.

SETTLEMENT, WARD NINE

Ashgrove, Kalen. Bonded.

Routes offered: 3. Routes closed: 3.

Balance -470.

8 days.

* * *

He went back past the board on the way home, because it was on the way, and because he had nothing left to do with his hands.

A man in a plain coat was taking a notice off it. He did it the way you do a job: two nails out, paper off, roll it, and a slip pinned into the gap with one of the nails he had just taken out.

Kalen read the slip over his shoulder, because he cannot stop.

WITHDRAWN. Nothing after it. No reason, no date, no reinstatement.

"That is the slag yard one," Kalen said.

"I only put them up and take them down."

"There is a man out of Fetter Street been up there all week for that sixty."

"Then he has had a walk," the man said, and put the roll under his arm and went off down the road toward the ward office with it.

Kalen stood at the board in the dark.

A designation lapses at the quarter and goes up again in the new one. He had asked what happens if one lapses and does not go up again and had been told, by a clerk with a card in a drawer, that it does not happen.

The slip was in a small square right-leaning hand he had been reading on dockets for three weeks.

There was no ward mark on it anywhere.

Which meant Ward Nine had not withdrawn it.

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