Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

Tam bought the beer, which was the trouble, because Tam always bought the beer and Tam had no palate whatsoever.

"It's from the new place off Fetter," he said, setting it down. "They do it with the ash still in. I said to Mata Ovel, I said, this is the coming thing, and she said it tastes of a gate post, Kalen."

"It tastes of a gate post."

"Kalen. Drink your beer."

The beer house on Tallow Street had eleven tables and a stove that did nothing and a landlord who had taken a Second at forty and would tell you about it before you had your coat off. Ashfall has a great many rooms of this kind. They are warm in the way a coat is warm, which is to say only where you are touching them, and everybody in them is owed something by somebody.

It was the only room in Ward Nine where Kalen ever sat with his back to a door, which was not because it was safe. It was because Tam had been sitting in the same chair at the same table since they were both eleven, and there are two or three things a man will not give up even when the arithmetic tells him to.

He had three days on the notice. He had told nobody, and Tam had been talking for a quarter of an hour without once asking, which meant Tam already knew and had decided to come at it sideways.

"How is your mother."

"She's all right, Kalen." Tam turned the cup round on the table. "She's on the schedule. It's fine."

"What schedule."

"The arrears schedule. It's a standard thing, they do it for everybody, you pay across four years instead of all at once and the interest comes down a quarter. There's a form. I did the form."

"And in four years."

"In four years it's paid, Kalen," Tam said, and then, because he was seventeen and could not leave a silence alone, "there's a grade coming up in the autumn. Clerk of the second desk. If I got that it would take a third off her in one go. A third. Off. Like that, Kalen."

He snapped his fingers, and it did not make a sound, and he laughed at himself and drank.

Kalen filed it and said nothing about it, and he was going to think about that for a long time afterward in a room with no lamp in it.

"Tam. Who works out the Levy."

"Nobody."

"Somebody works out the Levy."

"No, that's the thing, that's what I am telling you." Tam leaned in with the enthusiasm of a man who has finally been asked about his work. "It comes in already made. It arrives at the fourth desk on a return, on paper, from the ward, once a quarter. The fourth desk enters it. The sixth desk checks it against the last one. The ninth desk allows it and it goes up to the seat. Eleven desks in that building, and every one of them does one thing to that number, and every single one of them does it right."

"Show me."

"I cannot show you a return."

"Show me one you have carried."

Tam looked at him for a moment. Then he went into his coat and came out with a docket in a folded oilskin and put it on the table face up and turned it round so that it was the wrong way for both of them, which was Tam's idea of a precaution.

Kalen had it before it was flat.

W9 / RETURN / ENTERED ....... 17.5

W9 / RETURN / CHECKED ....... 17.5

W9 / RETURN / ALLOWED ....... 17.5

Three lines. Three different hands, and he could tell that from the far side of a table in a beer house by one candle, and a fortnight ago he could not have done it with the thing under his nose.

"That's a routing slip," Tam said. "That's all that is. It goes on the front of the bundle so the porter knows where it has been."

He could see the three hands without trying. The first was fast and slightly uphill and had been taught somewhere that made you finish your figures. The second belonged to a clerk of about fifty who lifted the pen between strokes because the joints were going. The third had used a different ink and had written the number smaller than the space allowed for it, which is what a careful person does at the foot of a column that has already been agreed.

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Three people. Not one of them had been in a room with either of the others that day, and all three had touched Ward Nine before dinner.

"There are three hands on it."

"There would be. Three desks."

"Not one of them is wrong."

"Well, no, Kalen." Tam looked genuinely pleased. "That's what it is for. If the fourth desk enters it wrong the sixth catches it, and if the sixth lets it by the ninth catches it, and it hasn't been caught in years because nobody enters it wrong. They're good at it, Kalen. That's not a joke. They're careful people and the tea is good and everyone says good morning."

Kalen turned the docket back round with one finger.

He had walked into the beer house looking for a thief.

He had been looking for a thief since the second of the month, in the way that you look for a person: a face, a coat, a desk with a drawer in it. He had got as far as deciding in advance that he was not going to be surprised when the thief turned out to be dull and small and well dressed, because they always are, and he had been faintly pleased with himself for that.

There was nobody to be surprised by.

The number came in from the ward already wrong. Eleven desks then handled a wrong number correctly, in order, on paper, over three signatures, and every man and woman in that building could stand up in a hearing in front of anybody in Kentra and swear that they had done their work properly, and every one of them would be telling the truth, and the number would still be seventeen point five.

Nobody is wrong and the number is still wrong.

He sat with that for a while, and it was not what he had expected it to feel like, because he had come in braced for a face and had been handed a procedure instead, and a procedure will not look at you.

And Marra Sull's son would come up in the spring.

That was the piece of it Kalen could not put down. He could not hold nine thousand people, he had tried at the ward board and it had gone straight through him. He could hold a boy coming up in the spring, and a baby on a woman's hip, and an old man from the cooperage who came to the board every month and stood in front of a notice he could not read, and there was not one person in the Sedge Counting House he could point at and say: it was you, you did this to him.

"The number that comes in is wrong," Kalen said. "Standard is fourteen. Ward Nine is assessed at seventeen and a half, and it has been three and a half over since 987."

Tam nodded and drank, and it took Kalen a moment to understand that he was not going to be surprised by it.

"That's a variance," Tam said. "Wards have variances. I've seen them on the front sheet and nobody has ever once mentioned it to me, Kalen."

"Nobody is stealing," Kalen said.

"No, Kalen," Tam said. "Why would anybody steal? It's a Counting House. There's nothing in it but paper."

"Everybody is filing."

"Everybody is filing." Tam drank his terrible beer. "You say that like it's worse."

"It is worse."

"How is it worse. Nobody is doing anything wrong."

"Because if a man is stealing you can catch him," Kalen said. "You find him, you take him to the ward, and it stops. That is a thing that has an end. There is nobody to catch. There is a return that comes in already wrong and eleven desks all doing their work properly, and if you sacked every one of them in the morning and put eleven new people in, the number would arrive next quarter exactly the same."

"You are saying nobody can be blamed."

"I am saying there is nobody it would help to blame."

"That is not the same thing."

"No," Kalen said. "It is worse. If it were the same thing I could go and be angry at somebody and come home."

Tam thought about that for longer than Kalen expected him to.

"Then you would have to go at the return," he said.

"Yes."

"That is not a person either. That is the ward book."

"Where is it."

Tam opened his mouth and shut it again, and for about a second and a half he was not seventeen, and then the second and a half went.

"Have you got it settled," he said. "The thirty days. You've got three left, Kalen, you know you have, and you haven't said one word about it and I've been sat here waiting."

"It is arranged."

"Is it."

"It is arranged," Kalen said.

That was the fourth thing he had said since the second of the month that was not true, and he had them in order, and he could have recited them, and he did not write them down anywhere because there was nowhere to write them where Nessa would not find it.

Tam sat back and was cheerful again inside about two seconds, which was the best thing about him and would one day be the worst.

"Well then, Kalen," he said. "Good. Right."

"Where is the ward book, Tam."

"Second floor," Tam said. "Back of the returns room. They're not secret, they're just heavy. There's a counter in front of the door and you have to be Freehand to stand at it, and I've carried a hundred bundles past that counter and never once been through."

"What is behind it."

"Shelves. Sloped, like a bakery. One book to a ward, and the ward letter cut into the board in gold, and they're that thick." Tam held his hands apart, then looked at how far apart they were and brought them in a little, which was the only honest thing anybody did in that room all evening. "There's a rail and two clerks and a chair for the clerks and no chair for anybody else. You don't turn a page yourself. You say the page and they turn it, Kalen."

"Freehand."

"Freehand or above." He put the docket away, and did it carefully, which he had not done taking it out. "That is not a wall, it is only a rule. I know the difference does not help."

"No."

They finished the beer, which took a while, because it was bad. Somebody at the next table was telling a story about a horse and getting it wrong.

"What are you going to do," Tam said.

Kalen looked at the wet ring the oilskin had left on the table, which had four folds printed in it, and did not answer for a moment, because the true answer was one he had only had for two nights and had not said out loud to anybody.

"I want to see a ward book," he said. "The one for Nine. Not a copy, not a return. The book."

"You cannot."

"No."

"They will not let a Bonded within eleven feet of it."

"Second floor," Kalen said. "Back of the returns room."

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