Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

It took him two nights to get back, because on the first of them his hands would not hold a hook, and a man who cannot hold a hook has no business opening that door.

He came at the eighth bell with the lamp turned down and the roll of his father's draw-hooks inside his coat, and he stood outside the cutting shed for four minutes listening to it breathe, and then he opened the door slowly, the way you open a door when the thing behind it is finishing a shift.

It was not finishing a shift.

It was sitting on the bench with its back against the post and its head down, and it was wearing a bound leather apron, and when the light went across it, it said, "Do not."

"All right."

"Do not come in."

"I am in," Kalen said. "There is a docket on your door. I nailed half of it up myself."

The man on the bench lifted his head.

Doss had lost weight in a way that had gone past his face and into his hands. There was a pale band round his right forearm where a Sealed grade brace had sat for eleven years and where the skin had not caught up with the loss of it. The apron was good. It was a rebinder's apron, heavy leather, shoulder straps worn to a shine, and it sat on him the way a thing sits when it has been on a long time.

"Doss."

"Ashgrove."

"You are off the books."

"I am off the books."

Kalen put the lamp on the far end of the bench where it would light the apron and not Doss's face, and sat down on the sack pile by the door with his hands where they could be seen, and did not go any nearer.

"How long have you had it on."

"Five weeks."

"Take it off."

"No."

"Doss."

"I cannot take it off," Doss said. "That is the whole of it."

Kalen looked at the apron for about a minute without saying anything, which is a long time in a shed at night, and read it.

Sound grade. Ward draw, minor, and the shape of it was the shape of a thing made for a man who worked where the gear did not stop for people: it made whatever was executing an instruction fail to count the wearer as an obstacle. A Rendered went round you. A closing frame did not know you were in it. For a scavenger going into buildings nobody had cleared, it was worth more than a year of anything else in Ward Nine.

And it had been on a living body for five weeks, and the shape had gone in past the leather.

That is what a Pattern does if you let it. It finds the nearest thing that will hold it. The apron had been made to draw off whoever wore it, and it had been drawing off Doss since the spring, minor, steady, all day and all night, out of a Balance with nothing in it.

"How many Collections."

"Two."

"Firsts."

"Firsts." Doss put his head back against the post. "The next one will not be."

"No."

"Twelve days. Maybe nine. I have got it on the wall there in charcoal and I would rather you did not look at it."

Kalen did not look at it.

"Who took it off the man you had it from."

"Nobody. He is at the gate."

"You went to the gate."

"I went to the burnt end," Doss said. "He was sat down. They sit down out there, some of them, when there is nothing to walk to. He had it on and he was not using it and I have been in four buildings this month that would have had me if I had not."

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Kalen thought about a rebinder in a heavy leather apron sitting down in the burnt end with nothing left to walk to, and then stopped thinking about it, because there was a job in front of him and it had a clock on it.

"I am going to take it off you," he said.

"Somebody tried."

"Who."

"A binder off Cinder Row. Wanted six marks and the apron." Doss held up his left hand, and two of the fingers had the shine of a burn that had healed badly. "He was going to cut the shape out at the seam. He got a hook on it and I put him through the door."

"That would have killed it."

"That is what I said to him."

"That is not why you put him through the door."

Doss looked at him.

"No," he said.

* * *

The way everybody in Ashfall takes a Pattern out of a thing is to cut it. You find the shape, you get a hook under the edge of it, and you pull, and it comes, and it comes out a grade down because you have torn it sideways through the thing it was living in. Everybody knows this. Every reclamation house in Kentra is built on it, and half of what the trade sells is Patterns that were better yesterday.

Kalen had never once seen anybody take a Pattern out along the line it went in.

It went in at the seam. It comes out at the seam.

He had thought about it for four years and had never had a reason to try it, because a grade off a Common is nothing and a grade off a Sound is eleven marks, and eleven marks was not worth four hours of his eyes.

A Sound grade apron was a hundred and twenty.

"Sit up," he said. "Get both arms out of the straps and leave it hanging on you. If it comes off the shoulders before I am ready it will take the shape with it and you will have the third one tonight instead of in nine days."

"How long."

"Two hours."

"You have not got two hours."

"I have got five days on the notice and no way on earth to pay it," Kalen said, "so hours are the one thing I have got a surplus of."

He laid the five hooks out along the bench in order and did not use any of them for the first ninety minutes.

He read it instead.

It had gone in at the shoulder seam, both sides, which meant the maker had laid it in from the top with the apron over a form, and it had settled downward through fifty years of wear the way a Pattern settles into leather, and there were nine places where it had gone through into Doss. Not deep. It was not trying to keep him. It had found something warmer than leather and gone that way, the way water goes down a wall, and each of the nine was a hair thinner than the one above it.

Kalen found all nine and did not touch one of them.

He worked from the seam. He put a hook where the shape had come in and eased it back the way it had come, half an inch at a time, and every time the shape moved the nine threads went slack in order, top to bottom, because they had gone in in that order, and a shape will unmake itself the way it was made if you have the patience to let it.

"Talk," Doss said, after the first half hour.

"About what."

"Anything. It is going up my arm."

So Kalen talked, because he could not stop reading things out loud once he had started. He talked about the seam and the form the apron had been laid over and the maker's stamp under the left strap, which was worn to two strokes and which he had on his shed board at home as number eight hundred and something, and Doss said nothing at all and did not move, and it went on for an hour and a half like that.

Twice Kalen had to stop and put his hands flat on the bench because they were shaking again, and both times Doss looked at the far wall and waited, and neither of them mentioned it.

At the end the last thread came off the inside of Doss's left arm with no more sensation to it than a hair coming off a coat, and the apron went slack on the bench, and it was leather.

"Off," Kalen said.

Doss got out from under it.

He sat with his forearms on his knees, and after a while he put his head down and stayed like that, and Kalen turned his back and packed the hooks into the roll one at a time and took as long over it as he possibly could.

The apron was Sound. It had gone on Sound and it had come off Sound, and there was not a maker in Ward Nine who would have believed that without holding it, and there was nobody in the shed to see it except a man who had been off the books since the turn of the month.

That was twice now.

"It is Sound," Kalen said.

"I know what it is."

"It is a hundred and twenty at ward rate."

"I know what it is," Doss said. "Take it."

"I am not taking it off you."

"You are not taking it off me. I am giving it you." He stood up and stood there and did not appear to think anything further was required. "There is sixty-four owed me at the house. Final credit. I cannot draw it because I am not bonded there any more and Sabra will not pay a man who is not on her book. You can have it."

"Doss."

"Four words," Doss said. "You did not report."

He went out.

* * *

Kalen sat in the cutting shed with a hundred and twenty marks of leather across his knees and his own house's stamp on the door, and did the sum, because the sum was the only thing he had ever been able to do at speed.

A hundred and twenty. Sixty-four. Forty on a bill off the mason. Six nights of Marn's catalogue at nine a night was fifty-four, and a hundred and six in the tin, and it came to three hundred and eighty-four, and he owed five hundred and thirty-two on the day, and there was no arrangement of those figures that changed it.

He was going to be a hundred and forty-eight short. He had known that for eleven days.

What he had not done, in eleven days, was ask himself why he had spent a month trying to earn four hundred marks in a ward where nobody had ever earned four hundred marks.

Four hundred was his number. It was his father's number before it was his. It was one man's arrears, it had a name on it, and the name was his own, and every hour he had put into it had gone into a hole that had been dug for hours to be put into.

Three and a half was not a number about him.

Three and a half was on every tag in a back room he had a key to, in a hand nobody had signed, since the year 987, and it was the only figure he had ever found that he could prove and could not pay.

He put the apron over his shoulder and blew the lamp out.

He was going to stop chasing his own debt.

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