Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The Rendered came to the ward gate at the sixth bell.

Nobody had ever decided this. There was no notice about it and no one herded them, and for the first two years after the foundry closed the ward watch had made a genuine effort to move them along and had then, in the way of all ward watches, discovered that it was easier to write a rule that made the thing they could not stop into the thing they had intended.

So now there was a rule. The Rendered assembled at the gate between the sixth and the seventh bell and the gate stayed shut and the ward went about its business, and Kalen walked home along the far side of Cinder Row every evening like everyone else, and looked.

He never looked for long. Long enough to go along the front rank once, right to left, which was the way you read Accord script and which he had stopped being able to unlearn.

There were about forty of them tonight. A woman in a slag apron. Two men who had clearly worked the same bench, standing the same distance apart they must have stood for thirty years. A boy of maybe sixteen with a runner's satchel over his shoulder, and Kalen made himself look at the boy for a full second, because it was easy to stop seeing them and he had decided a long time ago that he was not going to be a man who had stopped seeing them.

They were not doing anything. That was the thing that got people, the first time. There was no moaning and no reaching. They stood at the gate the way you stand at a gate, and when the seventh bell went they turned around and went back into the burnt end of the ward to wait for tomorrow.

A woman further along was talking to one of them. That happened too. The watch had a rule about that as well and did not enforce it. She was holding a bowl and she was not trying to make him take it, she was just holding it where he could see it, and telling him something about a roof, and the man in front of her was looking at the gate.

Ashfall had built a whole grammar around this. You did not say dead, because they were not, and the Accord had been quite clear about that in the one notice it had ever issued on the subject. You did not say gone, because people found it upsetting. You said at the gate. My father is at the gate. Her boy has been at the gate since the spring. It was the sort of phrase a ward invents when it has to say a thing four hundred times a year and cannot afford to feel it every time.

Kalen went along the rank once, right to left, and did not find what he was looking for, and did not say what he was looking for, not even to himself, which took a certain amount of doing.

Then he went home.

* * *

The Ashgrove rooms were two flights up over a rope-walk on Tallow Street, and they were warm, which was the one thing you could say for them, because the rope-walk ran a drying stove until the ninth bell.

Nessa had the table set. This was not a good sign. Nessa set the table when she had worked something out and wanted him sitting down for it.

"There is bread," she said, "and there is the end of the ham, and I have had mine already, so do not do the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you cut it in half and look noble."

Kalen sat down and cut it in half.

"You are a very predictable man," his sister said.

She was twelve. She had their mother's face and their father's hands, big square hands she had not grown into yet, and she was going to be taller than Kalen by the time she was fifteen, which he was already dreading. She had chalked a tally on the doorframe beside the hinge. Kalen had noticed it a month ago, four strokes and a cross, and had assumed it was the days to her birthday and had been quietly touched, and had not said anything in case saying something ruined it.

There were rather more strokes on it now than there had been a month ago.

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"Where did the ham come from?" he said.

"Tally credit."

"Nessa."

"Four a day," she said. "I know. I have got it written down."

"You have got it written down."

"I have got it written down," she said, and pulled a folded paper out from under the bread board and flattened it on the table with the heel of her hand, and Kalen looked at it, and stopped chewing.

It was a rate sheet. She had drawn it herself, in pencil, ruled with the edge of a knife. Down the left she had the days of the month. Along the top she had three columns: what he brought home, what the tally shop charged, and the difference.

The difference column was in a different pencil, which meant she had gone back and added it later.

"How long have you been doing this?"

"Since the winter."

"Nessa, how long."

"Since the winter," she said, and looked at him steadily, and he realised she meant the winter before last.

Kalen put the bread down.

"You are eating on tally," Nessa said, "and paying four a day for the privilege, and the four a day goes on the arrears, and the arrears is what the four a day is calculated from. So it goes up faster every month even when nothing happens. Even when you have a good month. Even if you had two good months in a row, which you have not, ever, in my whole life."

She said it the way you would read out a delivery docket.

"I did the twelve month," she said. "Do you want the twelve month?"

"No."

"I did it anyway."

"I know you did."

She slid the paper across. He did not look at it. He had done the twelve month too, twice, at two in the morning, and the second time he had done it he had got a different answer than the first time and had spent forty minutes hunting his mistake before he understood that he had not made a mistake. He had used the ward rate the second time instead of the house rate, and the two numbers were not the same.

He had not thought about that in weeks. He thought about it now, with his sister's handwriting in front of him, and something went quietly sideways in his chest.

"Where is the ham from," he said. "Really."

"Ovel's."

"Ovel's does not do tally."

"Ovel's does tally for me."

"Ovel's does not do tally for anyone. Ovel's has a sign about it."

"Ovel's wife knows what happened to Da," Nessa said, "and I am twelve, and I am extremely charming, and if you go down there and pay it off in front of her out of pride I will put slag in your boots."

Kalen looked at his sister for a while.

"How much?"

"Nine."

"Nine."

"Nine and a half," Nessa said, "and I will get it, so leave it."

* * *

He went back to the house that night, which he had not intended to do.

It was a twenty minute walk each way and he did not have twenty minutes to spend on anything. He spent them. He went back along Tallow Street and across the top of Cinder Row with the wind coming down off the burnt end and the ward-tag going over and over in his coat pocket under his thumb, and by the time he got to the house yard he had built the whole thing into a question with four words in it and had convinced himself, the way you do at that hour, that it was a cheap question.

Sabra was still there. Sabra was always still there. She had the lamp turned down to nothing and the second column open and she did not close it when he came in, which was either trust or contempt and with Sabra it was genuinely difficult to tell.

"There was a docket on the porter," Kalen said.

"On the Rendered."

"On the Rendered. Pinned inside the coat, collector's docket, blue paper, folded in three. I saw it when it went past me. It has been rained on and it is still legible, so it is not six years old, it is recent."

"You got all that out of a coat going past you at a walk."

"Read four," Kalen said. "At one point four. It is the one thing I am for."

Sabra took the pipe out of her mouth.

"Somebody pinned a collector's docket to a dead man's coat," Kalen said.

"He is not dead. That is rather the trouble."

"Somebody pinned a collector's docket inside the coat of a man who is walking around Ward Nine delivering a crate to a dock that has been bricked up for eleven years. Who does that. Who is it for. Nobody is reading it. He is not going to hand it to anybody."

"Two marks," said Sabra.

"I have not got two marks."

"No," she said. "And I would not sell it to you tonight if you had, because you would go and do something about it, and then I would be short a Second Hand, and Second Hands who can read a maker's mark are not lying about in the street."

"Sabra."

"Ask me a cheaper one."

Kalen stood in the doorway with the ward-tag in his coat pocket and his sister's rate sheet folded inside his shirt, and he thought about the difference column in the second pencil, and about the house rate and the ward rate not being the same number, and about a man with a six year old crate on his back walking toward a bricked-up dock.

"All right," he said. "Cheaper one. Who taught you to read the ward book?"

Sabra Quill looked at him for what felt like a long time. The lamp was down so far that he could not see her eyes properly, only the pipe going, and going, and stopping.

"Nobody," she said. "That one is free."

He was halfway down Tallow Street before he understood that she had answered a question he had not asked.

He wanted the name on that docket. Not the way he wanted his arrears cleared, which was the way a man wants weather to change. He wanted it the way you want the last figure in a column that will not add up.

It was the first thing in four years he had wanted for himself.

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