Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

There were four pumps in the gallery and three of them had been dead so long that the birds in them had gone to bone.

Kalen came at them on the fifth day, when he had run out of ways of putting it off. He had told himself for three days that the water was a question for later and that a clearance hand is paid to clear, and both of those were true, and neither of them was the reason. The reason was that a dry cellar in Ashfall is like a full purse in an empty street. You do not stand in it admiring the arithmetic. You look for who is holding the other end of it.

The gallery ran east under the melt floor, a long low vault with the four intakes coming up out of the sump through the flags like the necks of animals. Everything in it was cold in the particular way that iron gets cold underground, which is not the cold of weather and does not come off on your hands.

Number one had a nest in the impeller housing that had gone to grey felt and a few hollow bones, and had been a nest before anybody now alive had been born, and would go on being one. Number three had been left with its inspection plate off, which is the sort of thing a man does at the end of a shift he expects to come back from.

He put a hook on the housing of number two and turned it, and the whole assembly moved together, seized solid, two centuries of rust holding it in one piece like a fist.

Number four was warm.

Not hot. Warm the way a horse is warm. He put his hand flat on the casing and left it there and felt, through half an inch of iron, the deep unhurried shift of something taking its time.

"All right," he said.

The governor sat on the intake in a cast box with a hinged inspection plate, and the plate came off in his hands, and behind it was the cleanest piece of Accord work Kalen had ever put a lamp on. Nobody ornaments a governor. It was clean the way a sentence is clean when somebody has taken every unnecessary word out of it, and it had been laid in by a man who was extremely good and who had been given all the time he asked for.

PATTERN: Standing Order (Fine)

Held in: pump governor, cast iron, works no. 4

Draw: Bind, measured

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

hears it knows what it was told.

Hold the sumps at the third level until further order. Works order, 987.

Kalen sat down on the flags with his back against pump three and looked at it for a long time.

The first thing he did was get it wrong. He was able to admit that afterwards and could not admit it at all at the time.

He assumed it was clearing the workings, because that is what a pump is for. A pump takes water out of a hole. This one had evidently been taking water out of this hole for a very long while, and the tide mark six feet up the stairwell wall was where the water had stood before it got started.

Which made the whole thing a piece of luck of the kind that happens to other people.

Then he went down to the third sub-level landing with the lamp and found the sump standing at a mark cut into the stone. A hand's breadth of black water lying dead flat against a line somebody had chiselled there on purpose. Not falling. Not rising. Sitting.

The assumption came apart in his hands.

It was not clearing anything. It was holding a level.

"You are not clearing," he said. "You are holding a mark. That is a different job and it costs a different money, and whoever wrote you knew it, because he put until further order on the end like a man who expected to be back on Monday."

That was the shape of it, and the shape mattered. Clearing is a job that ends. Holding is a job that does not, and the two are priced differently by anybody who has ever employed anybody.

Two hundred years of somebody else's standing order.

The date on it was old paperwork, and old paperwork under a foundry is a floor covering. Half the ironwork in Ward Nine carried a year in the nine hundreds somewhere on it, on a casting boss or a stamped boiler plate or the back of a gate hinge, and the works had been wound down and shut and reopened in pieces so many times over the centuries that Kalen had long since stopped reading dates off metal for anything except amusement.

What mattered was that the order had still been standing when the place shut eight years ago. Nobody had ever come down and countermanded it. The man whose job that was had walked out of the gate with everybody else and had not come back.

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So the pump had held the level. Through the closure and through eight years of nobody, obediently, at a price.

Somebody had been paid to write that order. Kalen had a look at that thought and put it down again, because it went nowhere useful. A works order gets drafted by a man at a desk who has been told to arrange for the sumps, and the man goes home, and the man dies, and the sumps go on being arranged for, and there is no point in Ashfall in being sentimental about the difference between a thing that was decided and a thing that is simply happening.

That was the second thing, and it took him until the middle of the night.

* * *

A bound object does not run on virtue. It runs on a Balance, the same as a man does, drawn from wherever the binder lodged it, and a governor holding two hundred feet of marsh off a foundry floor had been drawing every hour of every day since long before anybody currently alive in Ward Nine had been assessed at anything.

Nobody had topped it up. You could hear it in the casing. There was a labouring note in the warmth of it, the sound a lamp makes in the last quarter inch of oil, and once he had heard it he could not stop hearing it.

He put the plate back on and went and found the works account, which was stamped into the housing where any inspector would want it, and read it standing up with the lamp held over his shoulder.

W9 / WORKS 4 / ORDER ........... standing

W9 / WORKS 4 / BALANCE ......... 41

W9 / WORKS 4 / LODGED .......... (none since 987)

Forty-one marks.

Kalen did the sum four times on the back of the schedule and got four hundred and something days on the outside, and the outside is not where you plan from. It is where you find out you were wrong.

"That is four hundred days," he said. "And I would not put money on the outside."

He put the lamp on the flag and sat with his back against the warm casing and thought about forty-one marks, which was ten days of his sister's tally credit at Ovel's, and which was holding two hundred feet of marsh out of a building.

Then he went and looked at the four piles and understood that his contract had been re-priced by an object.

* * *

He argued it out on paper, because he argued everything out on paper, and because there was nobody down there to argue it with him.

Kill it. That was the cheap answer, and it was a real answer and not a straw one. Unbind the governor, take the Standing Order off it as a recovery, and it comes out a grade down at Sound, which is a fortnight of eleven marks a week in one afternoon. Then the pumps stop. The marsh comes back to the tide mark over about a month, and he clears the first sub-level in a fortnight and walks away from everything under it.

Against that: everything under it. The store, the pour line, the record bench, whatever the third sub-level had on it, and the whole of the reason he had signed a contract that paid eleven marks a week in the first place.

Feed it, then. That was the other answer and it was ugly.

You cannot hand a bound object a Balance. What you can do, because the Accord in nine hundred years has never once declined a lodgement, is lodge material against the works order the object is executing.

The Accord credits the works. The object draws on the works. Every counting house in Kentra runs on that principle, and every apprentice in Ashfall has it explained to him wrong at least twice.

The material Kalen had was three days of cutting stock, brass rod, wire and eleven pints of lamp oil, all of it advanced against a threshold he was not going to reach.

He sat with the pencil and did not write anything for a while.

The thing that decided it was not sentiment, and he was careful about that afterwards, because he had noticed that men who are being sentimental about machinery will tell you at length that they are not.

It was that the water was worth more than the stock. Three days of consumables against four weeks of dry floors is not a close arithmetic. It is not even an interesting one.

The only reason it felt like a sacrifice was that the stock was in his hands and the four weeks were not.

"Take it, then."

He fed it at the second bell, in the cold, with his coat off.

The lodgement took the brass first and then the oil and then, in a way he did not enjoy watching, the wire, drawing it down off the drum in one long unhurried pull like a thread coming out of a hem. The casing came up under his hand from warm to properly hot. Somewhere below him in the dark, two hundred feet of standing water went on being held exactly where it was, and did not thank anybody.

NOTICE OF LODGEMENT

Materials lodged against works order 4,

Ashfall foundry, Ward Nine.

Credited to the works. Not to the lodger.

Kalen read it, and put his coat back on, and went to bed on a plank at the top of the first flight.

Credited to the works. Not to the lodger. He had known that going in, and had done it anyway, and the Accord had still gone to the trouble of telling him.

* * *

He went down at first light to look at the mark, because he wanted to see the level sitting exactly where the chisel had put it, which is a small pleasure and he had paid for it.

The water was a foot below the mark.

He stood on the landing and looked at that for some time.

A foot in six hours. The governor could not do a foot in six hours. It was not trying to; its whole instruction was to hold the mark, and it had held the mark for two centuries, and it had not had a foot in six hours in it even when it was new and somebody was still lodging against it.

Something else was taking water out of that sump.

Kalen crouched at the head of the sump stair with the lamp held out over the drop and counted the treads going down into the black, because his hands wanted something to do and counting was what they had.

Nineteen to the turn. Nineteen was wrong. There were twenty-one on the plan, and he had walked them himself with a rule on the fourth day and made a note of it, and there had been twenty-one then.

"Twenty-one," he said. "There are twenty-one."

Then the chain in the sump came up taut, and the water broke.

Something came up the sump stair, one step at a time.

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