Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The double finished at the ninth bell and Kalen stayed in the yard afterward with his arms hanging, because there was a thing his hands did after a double and he had decided not to do it where the Third Hands could see.

They shook. Not badly. It went off in about a quarter of an hour if he kept still, and the difficulty was finding somewhere to keep still where nobody would ask him why.

He had been on doubles for nine days. Sabra gave him the second shift the first time he asked and wrote it into the first column in her own hand without comment.

One of the yard hands came past with the gate chain over his shoulder.

"You are on again tomorrow."

"I am on again tomorrow."

"Strip shed, then the four o'clock, then the strip shed."

"That is what a double is."

"I am saying it out loud so that somebody has." The yard hand shifted the chain. "Doss came round the back this morning. Wanting the scrap bin. He asked me first, which he has never done in his life."

"Doss is on the sorting rota."

"Doss is off the books," the yard hand said. "Turn of the month. The brace went back with the place and Sabra put a line through him the same as anybody."

"Who told you that."

"It is in the book. It is not a secret, it is a line."

He went off toward the gate. Kalen worked out that Doss had four hundred and sixty of Line and no brace on his arm, which is a different man from the one two Third Hands had quoted at him in the spring, and then stopped, because he had his own arithmetic to do.

Four a day on the arrears. Twelve hours at the house came back as two and a half in service credit, at house rate, because there was no other rate, and there was no thirteenth hour to sell because the house shut at the ninth bell. So the arrears went up four and came down two and a half, and the difference was one and a half marks a day, every day, whether he worked a double or lay on the boards with his boots on.

He had known that for a week. He had checked it four times, the way you check a step you have already fallen down.

The other number was in a tin under the third board from the window on Tallow Street. A hundred and three marks, and coin did not touch the arrears. Coin was money. Balance was what the Accord would let a man spend. The only door between them was tithe, and tithe went in whole or it did nothing, and a hundred and three against four hundred and seventy-four was a gesture.

So there was a hundred and three marks under the floor, and his sister was eating on tally at four a day, and both of those were true at once and would go on being true.

Nessa knew about the tin. She had never once mentioned it, which was how he knew what it was costing her.

* * *

The night job was off Fetter Street, in a stock loft over a dry goods yard, and it paid five marks and the loan of a lamp.

The man who owned the loft met him at the foot of the ladder with the lamp already lit and the particular cheerfulness of somebody who has decided in advance not to pay for anything.

"It is the one rack," he said. "It has gone at the end there. I want the Pattern lifted out before I take the rack down, because the Pattern is worth more than the wood and I am not a fool."

"Who told you it has gone."

"It creaks."

"Everything creaks."

"Not like that it does not."

Kalen went up.

The loft was low and dry and stacked to the roof with oil in stone jars, which is a thing nobody wants over his head in any quantity. The rack was oak, four bays, iron shoes at the floor, and somebody had laid a Pattern into it a long time ago and laid it in properly.

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He put the lamp on a barrel and read it, and it took about four seconds, and then he read it for two minutes more because four seconds felt like cheating.

PATTERN: Shoulder (Sound)

Held in: a stock rack, oak standards, iron shoes

Draw: Force, minor

The load stands where the standards stood.

Forty year of these and none of them down yet. M. Ballow

Where the standards stood.

Kalen took the lamp along the run and found it at the third bay, which was a doorway. Somebody had cut through into the next loft, and to cut a doorway you take out two standards, and to take out two standards you put a beam across, and the beam was there and it was a good beam.

The Pattern had not been told about any of it.

It was still holding the load along the line where the standards had been. Four feet of loaded rack standing on the shape of two uprights that had been out of that floor for a year, and it had carried them the whole time and had never once complained, because a Pattern does not complain. It does what it was told, to the thing it was told about, until it cannot.

He went back down the ladder.

"How long since you had that door cut."

"Last spring. Why."

"Because the Pattern in that rack thinks the standards are still under it and it has been holding four feet of nothing up for a year." Kalen wiped his hands on his coat. "It is at the end of it. Get your stock off the third bay tonight and I will lift the Pattern out in daylight tomorrow for the same five marks."

"You have been up there eleven minutes."

"Yes."

"Ivrell was up there in the winter for an hour and a half and said it wanted a new shoe."

"Ivrell is a good hand and he was looking at the shoes," Kalen said. "It is not the shoes. Somebody moved the standards out from under a Pattern that was told to hold the line the standards were on, and it has been doing what it was told ever since, which is more than anyone in this yard has done for it."

The man looked up the ladder, and then at Kalen, and Kalen watched him price the two things against each other and arrive, the way people do, at the cheaper one.

"It creaks," the man said. "It has creaked for a year."

"Yes."

"You are telling me it comes down tonight."

"I am telling you it comes down. I do not know what night."

"Then I will have my oil off it," the man said, "and I will do it myself, because I am not paying you five marks and a lamp to watch me carry jars."

He went up the ladder.

* * *

Kalen went up after him because there was nothing else to do, and he was four rungs from the top when the rack made a noise that was not a creak.

There is a sound a Pattern makes at the end and it is not a sound. It is the shape going slack. He had heard it twice before, both times on a bench, both times with the thing clamped and cold and nobody standing under it.

The man was in under the third bay with a jar in each hand.

Kalen got his shoulder against the near standard and drew.

Ward came up like standing into wind, and the run stopped where it was, and the whole weight of it arrived across his back and neck at once, and he set his feet on a floor he could not see and held it. He counted, because he counted. He had held a jaw for six seconds in the spring and had thought at the time that was the top of him.

He got to thirteen.

"Out," he said. "Not the jars. Out."

The man came out under his arm on his hands and knees with one jar still in his fist, which is what people do, and the rack came down behind him in three pieces over about two seconds and took the ladder with it.

Kalen let go.

COLLECTION: FIRST GRADE

Overdraw of 12 marks assessed against

Ashgrove, Kalen.

Settled.

Twelve. He had expected fourteen, because one draw of Ward at fourteen is one draw of Ward at fourteen, and he sat down on the loft boards in the dark and worked out that a man had come off the third bay alive and the Accord had priced that at two marks off.

Two marks. Sabra had charged him one to learn that the discount existed. He would have paid four.

Then the heat came, and after the heat his hands stopped.

It was not pain. His hands were there and they were warm and they did what a hand does when you have slept on it, which is nothing, and he lay on his side on the boards and could not close either one of them.

"The ladder has gone," the man said.

"I can see that."

"Then how do we get down."

Kalen looked along the gable end at the wall plate, which was six inches of oak with a clear drop onto the cart shed roof at the far end of it, and which he was going to have to cross with his elbows.

"Slowly," he said.

It took two hours. He did most of it on his forearms with his hands held out in front of him like a man carrying something he has been told not to drop, and the owner went first and talked the whole way, and neither of them mentioned the five marks.

At the bottom Kalen sat against the cart shed wall until the feeling came back into his thumbs, which it did, in the wrong order, starting with the left.

"Three," the man said, counting it into his coat pocket because Kalen could not hold it. "There is no rack now, is there. There is no Pattern to lift out of it."

"There is no rack because you went up the ladder."

"I am not saying you were wrong."

"You are not saying I was right, either."

"Three," the man said, "and I will put your name about the yard, which is worth more than two marks in this ward and you know it."

Kalen took the three. He was not in a position to argue and both of them knew it, and it went in the tin that night and made it a hundred and six.

Then he stood up in the yard and heard it.

The cutting shed was at the dark end, door pulled to, a house docket nailed to the frame, because it had been on the reclamation list since the winter and nobody had got to it. There was a light in it that was not a lamp. There was gear moving on the bench, slow and regular, the way gear moves when somebody is wearing it.

Kalen stood eleven feet away with two hands that would not close.

Something inside the cutting shed took a breath.

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