Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

Hesper counted the coin twice, on the office counter, in front of everybody, because the procedure said count it where the debtor can see.

"One hundred and six."

"One hundred and six."

"Apron."

Kalen put it on the counter and she went over it with her thumbs, seams first, then the shoulders, the way somebody does who has handled more of them than she would like.

"Sound," she said.

"Sound."

"It was Sound when it came off him?"

"It was Sound when it went on him five weeks ago and it is Sound now."

Hesper looked up at that, with the eye that worked and the one the colour of dishwater, and held it a moment longer than the transaction required.

"Ward rate is a hundred and twenty. I will take it at a hundred and twenty." She wrote. "Quill, you are witnessing this, and I want it entered in the house book with the grade on it."

"It is entered," Sabra said, from the desk, without taking the pipe out.

Doss stood by the door with his cap in his hands, because Hesper had made him come in person and had said so in writing, and he signed the assignment of sixty-four marks of final credit with a mark instead of a name. Kalen watched him do it. Four hundred and sixty of Line, eleven years in the house, a Sealed grade brace on his arm that two Third Hands had quoted at Kalen in the spring as though it were a fact about the world, and the man put a cross on a form because he had never been taught the other thing.

Sabra paid the sixty-four out of the house against a face that could have been cut out of the yard wall.

"Sixty-four," Hesper said. "Catalogue credit, six nights, certified by the Assessor's office at nine a night, fifty-four. Rebind fee off the mason on a bill, forty. Coin, a hundred and six."

"Three hundred and eighty-four."

"You have got there before me again."

"Assessed at five hundred and thirty-two."

"Assessed at five hundred and thirty-two," Hesper said, and turned the paper round so that he could read it, which she did not have to do. "If you are asking me to say it, say the rest of it out loud, Ashgrove. I would rather you said it than me."

"A hundred and forty-eight short. That is the Second grade."

"That is the Second grade."

Kalen put his hands flat on the counter.

Fifty to a hundred and ninety-nine. He had known the ladder since he was eleven years old, the way every child in Ashfall knows it, chanted at skipping ropes in the yard behind the cooperage, and there is no comfort in it and everyone pretends there is. A hundred and forty-eight was a week and it gave most of it back. Two hundred was a finger, or a year off the far end, or the colour out of one eye, and it did not give anything back at all.

Fifty-two marks between a week and a finger.

He was fifty-two marks off the thing that does not come back. He had been fifty-two marks off it for eleven days and had done every sum he could think of, and the last one he had done, at two in the morning on the boards at Tallow Street, was how much of Nessa's tally at Ovel's he would have to leave standing to close the gap, and the answer was all of it and it still did not close.

"You told me five hundred and thirty-six," he said.

"I did."

"It is five hundred and thirty-two."

"If you want it in order, it will be five hundred and thirty-six tomorrow," Hesper said. "Settlement falls due today. The Collection is assessed the day after settlement falls due, because the Accord does not do two things to a file on the same morning. I gave you the number you were going to be standing in, not the number on the form. You had nineteen days at the time and I did not think you should spend any of them arguing with me about four marks."

"I would have."

"I know. That is why."

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NOTICE OF SETTLEMENT

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

Assessed 532. Tendered 384. Shortfall 148.

Collection will be assessed at the Second grade.

Nobody in the office said anything. Out in the yard somebody dropped a length of chain and swore at it.

"When," Kalen said.

"Tomorrow. I cannot tell you the hour and I have never been able to tell anybody the hour."

* * *

The worst of it was the rest of that day, which he spent working.

That is the part nobody puts in a story about a Collection. There were eleven hours between the tender and the end of the shift and there was nothing whatever to do with them, and a man who does not work does not get paid, so Kalen went out to the strip shed and did an afternoon's stripping on a rack of pump gear off the old works, competently.

The yard knew. It had known since the morning, because there is no such thing as a private figure in a house of nine people, and Ashfall has a settled way of behaving around a man with a Collection due, which is to be scrupulously ordinary at him. Nobody asked. Nobody offered. One of the Third Hands carried a crate past him that he could have carried himself, and put it down at the far end of the bench without a word, and went away.

At the ninth bell he went home and ate and told Nessa in four sentences, and she asked two questions and did not ask a third.

He slept. That was the other thing he had not expected.

He came back at the first bell, because he was not going to have it happen on Tallow Street with his sister in the room, and he waited by the weigh-pan with his back against the post until the third bell of the morning, and then it came at him out of the flags.

A Second is not a First made larger.

A First is heat, and then the strength going out of you, and you can lie down under it and it is finished by the next afternoon. A Second arrives politely. It takes something, and then it tells you what it has taken by not letting you have it.

The heat came first, and it was the same heat, and he was almost pleased to recognise it.

Then the yard went the colour of a wet slate.

Not dark. Nobody tells you that either. It was not dark, it was a flat even grey with light somewhere in it and no edges anywhere, the way a window looks with a sheet over it, and he could see that there was a house and a gate and a shape that was Sabra, and he could not have told anybody which of the three had a pipe in it.

COLLECTION: SECOND GRADE

Overdraw of 148 marks assessed against

Ashgrove, Kalen.

Settled.

The block was the last thing he read.

He had it at about eighteen inches with one eye shut, and it went grey while it was still in front of him, from the outside in, letter by letter, so that the final word he got off the page was the one in the middle.

Settled.

"Sit down," Sabra said, from somewhere on his left. "You are going over."

"How long."

"A week," Sabra said. "Eight days. Eight for a man here in the winter, a hundred and ninety over." Her voice came nearer, and a hand took his elbow and put him against the post properly. "Eyes?"

"Eyes."

"Better than hands," said Sabra.

Somebody came out of the office. He knew it was Hesper because Hesper's were the only boots in Ward Nine that did not scuff.

"He is discharged," she said. "So that nothing is missed, the account is closed. There is no arrears line on him as of this morning, and I want that said in front of the master of this house, because a man does not remember what he was told on a day like today."

"He will remember it," Sabra said.

"He will remember it wrong."

"He will remember it exactly. That is his whole difficulty."

* * *

They put him on the bench inside the yard door and the grey settled and stopped moving, and after a while somebody laid something across his knees.

It was cold, and it had a handle, and it weighed about as much as a full tin.

"What is it."

"Lamp." Sabra's chair went back. "House stock," she said. "In the north shed since before you came. Nobody here has read it well enough to issue."

Kalen put his thumb on the collar of it and went round, and found the seal, and read it the way you read a mark in the dark, which he had done perhaps three times in his life and had never done well.

Guild warrant. A chandler's stamp with four points to it.

"Sealed," he said.

"Sealed."

"Sabra, that is a year of my credit."

"Eleven months of your credit." Sabra took her time about the rest of it. "You bring it back if you leave," Sabra said, "and you will not leave. Nobody who takes a Sound apron off a live man in two hours gets a better offer here. Repeat it and I deny it and charge you."

PATTERN: Attendance (Sealed)

Held in: a reclaimer's lamp, brass and horn

Draw: Ward, slight

The lamp is lit for a shift and goes out at the end of one.

I made four of these and I have got three of them back. H. Tarrow

He held it in both hands and could not see one edge of it.

Doss came over. Kalen knew it was Doss from the boots, which were somebody else's boots.

"Four words," Doss said. "Am I on wages."

"That is five."

"Am I."

"Ask Sabra."

"He is," Sabra said. "Third Hand's rate." Sabra took her time about the rest of it. "He walks that one up Tallow Street first." Sabra took her time about the rest of it. "I am not having him in a gutter with a Sealed grade lamp on him."

* * *

He opened his sheet in the yard before they took him anywhere, because he opened it every night and it was nearly morning and he was not going to lose the habit on top of everything else.

There had been thirty days of doubles standing in the house's ledger with nowhere to go, and every hour of it had settled at once when the account closed, because that is when the Accord settles: not when you earn it and not when you need it, but when the file is closed.

It came up grey. He got it to about eight inches and shut one eye and read it a word at a time while the edges went, and he had perhaps ninety seconds of it.

"What does it say," Sabra said.

"Line, five hundred and forty-five."

The pipe stopped.

"It said four hundred and eighty last night," Kalen said. "Balance is nought. Not minus anything. Nought, and no arrears line, and I have not seen a sheet without an arrears line on it since I was thirteen years old."

"Patterns."

"Five."

"Of six."

He held the page where the light was and read the last line three times, because a man does not want to be wrong about a thing like that in front of the master of his house.

"Of seven," he said.

Sabra Quill did not say anything at all.

"Seven," Kalen said, to a yard he could not see.

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