Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

There were two ways to get the Pattern out of the winch head, and Kalen had spent the morning proving that only one of them was worth doing.

The head had come off a demolition on Fetter Street, eleven stone of cast iron with a bronze seat sunk into the back of it, and the house book had it entered as scrap with a Sound recovery against it, which is what you write when you have looked at a thing for four minutes. Kalen had looked at it for two hours. It was not a Sound. It was a Fine, laid in by a man who had put his seat in bronze because bronze does not sweat, and it had sat in a wet wall for sixty years doing precisely what it had been told.

Ivrell would have cut it out. That is what you do. You find the seat, you draw the shape off the metal, you put it in a holding tin and the tin goes on the pan, and it works, and it costs you a grade, every time, without exception. A Fine goes in. A Sound comes out.

Everybody in the trade knew it and everybody in the trade said it the same way, as a fee, the cost of doing business, the house's cut.

It was not a fee. Kalen had worked that out at seventeen and had never once found anybody who wanted to hear it. A fee is charged by somebody. This was handling. You cannot take a shape out of the metal it was written into without bending the shape, in the same way you cannot get a word off a page without tearing the paper, and calling it a fee is a way of not having to think about it on a Tuesday.

So he did not take the Pattern out of the winch head.

He took the winch head off the Pattern.

It took four hours and eleven blade changes and most of a lamp. He cut the casting away in sections, working out from the seat, keeping the bronze in its own iron the whole time so that the shape never once had to hold itself up unsupported, and at the end of it there was a lump of metal the size of a fist on the bench and eleven stone of cast iron in pieces on the floor. The lump was ugly. The lump was Fine.

Sabra came down at the change of the shift and stood over it with the pipe going.

"That is four hours," she said.

"It is."

"On one recovery."

"On a Fine." Kalen put the blade roll down. "Ivrell does six in four hours and every one of them comes off the pan a Sound, and a Sound sells at nine. I have got one Fine. A Fine sells at forty."

Sabra picked the lump up and turned it over twice.

"Forty-four," she said, and wrote it into the first column, and did not mention the four hours again, then or ever.

Then she put a folded paper on the bench and sat down on the end of the sorting rack, which she never did, because Sabra Quill did not sit down in the strip shed.

"Six weeks," she said. "The sealed floors under the foundry." Sabra did not go on straight away. "Ward let, countersigned, legal. Nobody has taken it in eight years."

"Why not?"

"Eleven a week," said Sabra. "A third of anything over the threshold."

Kalen unfolded it and read the schedule and then read the threshold twice, because the threshold had been set at a weight nobody was going to reach with one barrow and one man.

"That is not pay," he said.

"No."

"That is a way of writing down that you would rather nobody went."

"A ward clearance let by a ward with no money," Sabra said. "Nobody wrote it to mean anything." Sabra tapped ash onto the flags. "On the board four times." Sabra stopped there for a moment. "Back four times. The last man lasted nine days and sent up a bill for lamp oil."

Kalen kept reading. Bad pay in coin was one article and bad pay in service was another one entirely, and this was a clearance contract, which meant the ward paid the house in coin and the Accord credited the hand who did the work in service. Service is the only currency in Kentra that goes onto a Line instead of into a pocket.

Eleven marks a week was an insult. Six weeks of unsupervised Accord work under a foundry was not.

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Nobody else in the yard would read it that way, because everybody else in the yard was paid at house rate and got their Line moved for them by somebody at a desk, and had never in their lives had a reason to work out which of the two numbers they were actually being handed.

"I will take it," he said.

"You have not read the back."

"I have read the back. The back says the ward accepts no liability for standing water, foul air, or anything the ward describes as residual works activity, which is four words doing the work of one." He folded it along its own crease. "Sabra, those floors have been shut since long before the closure. Whatever is down there is sitting exactly where it was left."

Sabra took the pipe out of her mouth.

"Yes," she said. "The difficulty with it."

She signed against the sill with the paper on her knee, in her own ink, and blotted it on her cuff the way she did, and then held on to it.

"One condition," she said.

"Go on."

"You do not settle anything down there."

Kalen waited. Sabra looked at the doorway.

"Why?" he said.

"No."

That was the whole of it. He got the contract and he did not get the reason, and he had eleven marks a week and no way of pricing a question he could not even shape properly, so he put it in his coat beside the ward-tag and went out through the yard while there was still light in it.

* * *

He got as far as the top of Cinder Row before he stopped, which was further than he had expected to get.

Hanne Torr lived four doors up from the tally shop and hauled sacked slag for the brick kilns, and she came down the Row with a hundredweight on a shoulder strap and her right hand set on the slip-hook, and Kalen saw the fault from thirty feet away and it went through him like cold water.

A Carry does not hold a load up. That is what people think it does. What it does is put the weight where the maker decided the weight should go, which on a hauling strap is the flat of the shoulder and the long muscle of the back, and the fingers on the hook are there to steer. When a Carry slips, the shape does not fail. It moves. It goes on putting the weight somewhere, faithfully, and the somewhere is now four fingers on a piece of iron.

Her hand was already wrong. Two of the fingers had gone the pale grey of a thing that has been squeezed for a month.

"Stop," Kalen said. "Put it down. Put it down where you are, not on the kerb."

She put it down where she was. People in Ashfall have a good ear for that particular voice.

He got the strap off her and his own coat off after it and knelt on the coat in the road so the leather stayed out of the ash, and read the Carry end to end while she stood over him with her hand shaking and told him twice that it had been fine on Tuesday.

PATTERN: Carry (Sound, slipping)

Held in: hauling strap, hide and iron, maker's mark worn

Draw: Force, minor

The bound thing puts the load where the maker set it.

Shoulder and back. Never the hand. J. Rell

Never the hand. J. Rell had thought that mattered enough to say out loud on a piece of strapping sixty years ago, and had been right about it, and was not available.

It took eleven minutes. The slip was in one place and it was a small place, and Kalen did not make a new Carry, because there is no sense making what is already sitting in front of you with one piece missing out of it. He found the piece. He held the true shape and the broken shape together the way you hold two drawings on tracing paper. Then he paid twenty-two marks of Bind that had been allocated to nothing at all, and put the piece where he was looking.

It went in crooked. He knew it was crooked while he was doing it and he did it anyway, because the light was going and her fingers were grey and a ridge in a rebind is something a good binder would find in ten years, and Hanne Torr had about four days.

It would hold. It was not good work. Those were two separate facts and he was going to have to live with both.

"What do I owe you," she said.

"Nothing."

"Everybody says that first."

"I am not saying it first," Kalen said. "I am saying it instead."

She looked at him the way people look at a man who has said something they intend to think about later. Then she went into the shop behind her and came out with the heel of a loaf and put it in his hands, and he took it, because he was not so noble that he would not.

Twenty-two marks. A full day of everything he had, spent standing in the road, on a stranger's shoulder strap, before he had cut a single thing on a contract he had signed that morning.

He ate the bread walking. It was very good bread.

* * *

The foundry gate was chained and sealed with the Assessor's seal, and the ward's man came out of his hut with a key on a ring the size of a bracelet and made Kalen say his name and his Standing twice before he would use it. Then he went back to his stove.

The upper works were a shell and everybody in Ward Nine knew what they looked like: rain coming through the crane rails, birds in the sand hoppers, ash lying an inch thick and going up in a slow grey wave when the door moved. It was the stair at the north end that nobody had been down. It went through a floor plate, and the plate had a hatch in it, and the hatch carried a seal gone black and hard as a scab.

Kalen broke it with a hook, lifted the hatch, and put the lamp down through the hole.

The air that came up was cold and dry and smelled of iron filings and nothing else at all.

He sat back on his heels for a while and thought about that.

Ashfall is built on marsh. Everyone who lives in it knows so, because everyone who lives in it has a cellar with a brown line on the wall, and there were two hundred feet of workings under his boots, and the pumps that held those workings had stopped when the foundry stopped, eight years ago. Eight years of marsh coming up through two hundred feet of stone is not a puddle. It is a lake with a staircase down into it.

He went down the first flight with the lamp out in front of him and his other hand flat on the wall.

The treads were dry. The wall was dry. There was a tide mark on the stone at chest height, brown and level and old as anything else down there, and the water was supposed to be six feet above where he was standing.

Something was still pumping.

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