Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

On the second morning he built the piles, because a man who works out of one heap works twice.

He did it before he did anything else, sitting on the pump housing at the bottom of the first flight with the lamp on the flag beside him and a cold end of ham on his knee, drawing the shed out on the back of the contract schedule with a carpenter's pencil.

Four piles. Strip, which was anything holding a Pattern worth more than the labour of getting it. Whole, which was anything that would sell better as the thing it already was, and which nobody in the trade ever remembered to keep separate. Sell, which was metal by weight and did not need him at all.

And leave.

"Strip, whole, sell, leave," he said. "And leave is going to be the big one, and you are going to want to argue about that in a fortnight, so write it down now."

There is a particular kind of stupidity that comes of not writing down the things you have decided not to do, and it looks exactly like being busy. He had watched two Third Hands lose a week to it at the house and had never been able to say so out loud without sounding like a foreman.

"Right," he said, to eleven tons of standing iron. "Four piles."

The iron had no opinion. He had begun talking out loud on the first evening and had decided, after some consideration, that a man who talks to a rack of gear two hundred feet under a dead foundry is either working or going, and that the difference between the two was whether he was getting answers.

He was, as it turned out.

"There is nobody down here," he said, to settle the point. "That is the whole of the wage. Eleven a week and nobody down here, and if anybody would like to argue about it they may go up and take it to Ivrell."

* * *

The first sub-level was a store, and the store had not been emptied, and that took about a minute to understand and most of the morning to believe.

Four racks ran the length of it in the dark, iron uprights and elm shelving with the dust lying on them in a soft even fur that had never been disturbed by so much as a draught. On the shelving was the ordinary furniture of a working foundry: bench clamps, moulder's rules, ladle yokes, crane hooks, gauge blocks, forty tally boards standing on their edges like books. All of it stacked to a system. All of it labelled, in a hand that ran its capitals the old way.

Somebody had shut this room the way you shut a shop for the night, expecting to open it in the morning, and had not opened it, and the dust had come down on top of the expectation and stayed there.

Kalen went along the racks with the lamp and did not touch anything for a quarter of an hour.

Then he took a bench clamp off the end of the first rack, set it on the flag in front of him, and said, before he had read it properly, "Common."

PATTERN: Purchase (Common)

Held in: bench clamp, iron, works no. 1

Draw: Force, slight

What the bound thing closes on does not shift while work is done to it.

For the north bench. Do not take it off the north bench.

"Common," he said again, with satisfaction, and put it in the strip pile, and then read the second line twice and looked around at a room that had not had a north bench in it for a very long time.

That was the whole of the method, and it arrived in about four seconds, which is the usual way with methods.

He could call it. Not read it. Call it. The shape a Pattern makes when it is sitting in a thing has a weight to it, and the weight had always been there, and he had always taken about an hour to arrive at it, and somewhere in the last six weeks the hour had become four seconds. He had not noticed because nobody had ever put forty unknown objects in front of him in the dark and made him say the answer out loud before he was allowed to look.

So he made himself do exactly that, all morning, and kept the score in the margin of the schedule.

"You are a bench clamp," he said, to the next one along. "You have been a bench clamp since before the ward had a Levy on it. Say something surprising."

It did not.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Sound," he said, to a moulder's rule in boxwood and brass.

PATTERN: True (Sound)

Held in: moulder's rule, boxwood and brass

Draw: Read, minor

The holder can tell whether a made thing is still doing what it was made to do.

Twenty year of pours and never a bad box. E. Sallow

"Sound," he said, to a crane hook with a wire seizing on the eye.

PATTERN: Hold Fast (Sound)

Held in: crane hook, forged, works no. 3

Draw: Force, minor

What the holder closes his hand on stays closed on, whether or not the hand does.

Set for the melt floor. Do not lend it out.

Thirty-one calls before the lamp needed trimming. Twenty-six right.

That is a proportion a reasonable man would take into a room with him. Kalen sat down on the flag with his back against the rack and looked at the five he had got wrong, and found that four of them were leather.

He was good on iron. He was better on brass, and better again on bronze, and passable on stone. On hide, on wire, on gut, on anything that had been alive before somebody made it into a tool, he was calling grades the way a man reads a language he taught himself off shop signs, which was precisely what he had done.

He wrote leather: no in the margin. Then he crossed it out and wrote leather: slower, because no is what you put down when you would rather not do the work and have found a way of describing that as knowing yourself.

"Leather. Noted."

Then he went back and took the fifth one down off the rack again, which was a slagger's gauntlet, and made himself go the whole way through it. It took eleven minutes.

It was not a Common.

PATTERN: Fair Wear (Fine)

Held in: slagger's gauntlet, hide and wire

Draw: Ward, slight

Damage taken doing the work you were told to do is assessed as ordinary use.

Made for my brother. He was told to do it. M. Sallow

Kalen held it in both hands in the dark for a while.

He had one of those in himself, at Common, off a scrapped house apron at seventeen, and it had been the single most useful object he had ever owned. It worked out at about one day in nine of not being charged for a burn.

Two rungs up.

M. Sallow had made it for a man who was going to stand in front of a crucible until either the crucible or the man gave out, and had put the reason on the outside where anybody could read it, in six words, and had then presumably gone home and had his dinner.

"Made for my brother," Kalen said. "Yes. All right."

The Accord had no view on any of that. It filed the grade and it filed the sentence and it did not distinguish between them, because it does not distinguish between anything, and the one entirely reliable thing about the Accord is that it will hand you a dead man's last opinion in exactly the tone it uses for a bench clamp.

He put the gauntlet in the whole pile and did not put it on.

The tally boards he left where they were. Forty of them, elm with an iron rim, standing on edge in the rack the way they had been stood by somebody at the end of a shift, and he went past them four times that day and did not open a single one, and could not have given a reason that would have satisfied anybody, including himself.

Then he took a small brass floor bell off the end of the fourth rack, because he wanted to finish the morning on something easy.

"Common," he said.

PATTERN: Standing Order (Common)

Held in: floor bell, brass, works no. 4

Draw: Bind, slight

A thing that has been told what to do goes on doing it, and whatever

hears it knows what it was told.

Ring at the sixth. Works order.

He turned it over in his hands. Four inches of brass and a cracked wooden grip, and it had been told to ring at the sixth bell, and it had been told that by somebody who had every reason to believe the arrangement was permanent, and it had not rung in two centuries because nothing had drawn on it and a thing that cannot draw cannot obey.

It was still being told, though. That was the part that stayed with him.

"There is nobody left to tell you anything else," Kalen said. "And you are still being told."

He put it in the whole pile.

* * *

Here is the rule, he wrote on the back of the schedule, under the four piles.

"Call it before you look," he said, out loud, to a store room. "If you are right you have saved an hour. If you are wrong you have found out something about yourself for the price of saying it in an empty room, which is the only rate in Ashfall anybody can afford."

Then he wrote down the first six words and left the rest of it in the air where it belonged.

He did the arithmetic sitting on the pump housing with the lamp turned low. An hour a piece is four pieces a day and a bad living, and it was the living he had been making since he was fifteen. Four seconds a piece, with the long reading kept back for the ones that argued, was thirty pieces a day and possibly forty.

Six weeks at forty was not the contract he had signed. It was a different contract with the same signature on it.

He thought about what forty a day looked like from the outside, which was a habit he had picked up recently and did not enjoy. It looked like a girl at a kitchen table with a rate sheet and three columns on it, and the third column in a different pencil, and it looked like her getting to the bottom of the month and having to go back and rule an extra line.

He opened his sheet on purpose, which he had not done since the ninth morning, sitting down, with a cold breakfast, in the driest place in Ward Nine.

He read it twice, and then again.

ASSESSMENT: Kalen Ashgrove

Ward Nine (Ashfall), Kentra

Line ..................... 655

Balance .................. -34

Standing ................. Bonded

Craft .................... Reclamation, Second Hand

FACULTY draw yield

Force ............... 11 1.0

Quicken .............. 9 1.0

Ward ................ 14 1.0

Read ................. 4 1.6

Bind ................ 22 0.7

Patterns ................. 5 / 7

Next collection .......... none assessed

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