Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The pour line ran on a fifty minute loop and there were three of them on it.

Kalen watched from the mouth of the sand gallery on the first day and went no further, because the first thing you do in a room with Rendered in it is nothing at all.

They came from the east end, three men in slag aprons, walking. They always walk.

The first carried a bar on his shoulder, a six foot tapping bar with the point worn to a stub. The second pushed a barrow with nothing in it, and the barrow ran badly on a wheel that had been going out of true since long before the closure and that nobody had ever put right. The third came four paces behind the second, and carried nothing, and did not appear to be doing anything at all except being the third man.

He was the worst of them to look at.

They went the length of the pour floor to the west end, where the crucible frame had come down at some point and lay across the trough in three pieces. They stopped there. The first set the bar down on a rest that was not there any more, and the bar went on the floor, and he did not look at it. The second tipped the empty barrow into a trough with nothing under it. The third stood.

Then they turned round and went back east, and the floor was quiet for forty-one minutes.

Kalen timed it on the second pass and the third.

"Fifty and eleven," he said. "Fifty and nine. Fifty and eleven."

He wrote all three down, and then wrote down the barrow wheel, because loud things are load-bearing.

The floor was three inches deep in sand and slag grit and it took a footprint, which was the single most useful fact he learned in the first two hours.

Their prints were there in hundreds, laid over each other so many times that in places the sand had gone smooth and hard as a path across a common. The whole loop was written on the ground in front of him.

Where they stopped at the west end there were two hollows worn into the packed sand, about a boot apart. He looked at those for a while and then went back to the timings.

He had watched a Rendered work a loop once before, in the slag yard, on a day that cost him sixty marks he could not afford and gave him the only doctrine he owned.

A Rendered is not hunting and cannot be turned, because it is not coming for you. It is finishing a shift. If you can read the shift you can read where it is going to be, and if you can read where it is going to be, there is a place where it is not.

That was the theory. The theory had been tested once, on one man, in an open yard, in daylight, with a gate behind him.

This was three of them in a stone room a hundred and forty feet long, in the dark, with one door at each end.

And forty feet of open floor between the gallery mouth and the west wall, where the crucible frame lay with two Fine grades in it that he had called from where he stood without moving a foot.

* * *

He spent four days on it and it cost him nothing at all, and that was the part he thought about afterwards.

Four days at eleven marks a week is not nothing. He knew what he was spending. He wrote it into the schedule under a heading he made up for the purpose, and the heading was time.

It was the first heading in his working life that ever carried a figure that was not marks.

"There is a fast way," he said. "There is always a fast way."

He had Ward at fourteen, and at four hundred of arrears he had been able to hold it about nine seconds, and he was a good deal better off than that now. Forty feet of open floor is nine seconds if you are honest with yourself and six if you are not. One draw, one crossing, one Pattern off the frame, out on the second crossing. Two draws. Call it thirty marks and a First if it went wrong, and everybody has had a First.

Everybody has had a First. Kalen had had five.

The fifth had put him flat for a day and a half on a step in front of Ovel's, and his sister had costed it out for him in a level voice while he lay there. The figure she reached was a day and a half of her brother.

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"Nine seconds," he said. "And there is nobody within half a mile who would know to come and look."

So he did it slowly, which was a thing he had not been able to afford at any earlier point in his life.

He mapped the loop. He got the whole fifty minutes onto one sheet: where each man stood at every fifth minute, where the barrow went, which of the three turned wide at the trough and which one clipped the same upright on every single pass and had worn a shine into it at the height of a hip.

He learned the floor in the dark until he could walk from the gallery mouth to the sand hopper without a lamp, counting, and be within a pace of where he thought he was.

The first day was the timings. The second was the ground: where the sand was packed and would take a boot silently, and where it was loose and would not, and where a spill of clinker along the north wall made forty feet of floor no man could cross without announcing it.

The third day was the wheel.

It had a hitch in it. The rim had gone out of true on one side and came down on the flat of the flaw once in every turn with a small dead knock, and the knock was steady, and the knock was the loudest thing in a hundred and forty feet of stone.

Kalen counted the turns from the west end to the east end and the turns from the east end back, and after that he did not need to see the floor at all. He could lie behind the sand hopper with his eyes shut and know to within four feet where all three of them were standing.

He found the gap that evening.

It was not the forty-one minutes of quiet. That is the answer a tired man takes, and it is wrong, because the quiet ends at the east door and the east door was where he had to come out.

The gap was eleven minutes in the middle of the loop, when all three were at the west end with their backs to the room, and the barrow wheel was making enough noise to cover a man walking on ash.

Eleven minutes, four times a day. And the crucible frame was at the west end, which was the whole difficulty of it, because the gap and the work were in the same place at the same time. To use the gap he had to be standing behind them while they were standing there.

Fifty minutes.

He went in on the fourth day.

He came along the north wall on the packed sand with the lamp shut down to a thread, and stood up behind the crucible frame at the fourth minute of the gap, and was inside four feet of the third man for nine of the eleven minutes, working.

He does not remember much about the middle of it. He remembers the wheel, which came round and round out of the dark behind him and never once changed its note. He remembers that the third man's apron had a name stitched inside the bib, because slag aprons always do, and that he did not read it, and that not reading it was a decision he had to make twice.

He remembers going out. The gap does not end all at once. It ends with three men turning round, and a man crossing forty feet of open sand behind three men turning round is relying entirely on having got the arithmetic right four days earlier.

He got out with a minute and a half in hand and lay behind the sand hopper until his hands would hold a pencil.

He got the first Fine on the second run and the second on the third.

PATTERN: Even Load (Fine)

Held in: crucible frame, cast and forged, works no. 2

Draw: Force, measured

What the bound thing carries, it carries alike in every part of it.

Nine hundredweight and no man under it. H. Ferris

The other was in the trough plate, a Bank at Fine: heat put into the bound thing stays in it until it is called for. Both were works gear, laid in deep by men paid to make a thing that would still be there in fifty years, and both had been lying under a fallen frame being exactly as good as they were made.

He took them out through the metal rather than off it, the long way, four hours a piece, with the lamp shuttered to a slit and his back to a wall he had chosen for the sightline. Eight hours of cutting, in eleven minute pieces, across two days.

They came up Fine and they stayed Fine.

Two Fine grades, clean, for four days of walking very slowly and not one mark of Balance spent.

He wrote the rule at the bottom of the map, under the eleven minutes, in the same hand he had written the four piles in.

"Read the loop. Take the gap."

* * *

The pumps had not needed him once in the whole four days.

He noticed it on the fourth evening and put it down to having lodged more than he needed to.

He sat on the housing with both Fines in the holding tin and worked out that he had overestimated the burn by a third, and that a third of three days of stock was a day he could have back, and wrote the correction into the schedule with a small private satisfaction he did not examine at all.

* * *

He almost missed the fourth one.

It came onto the pour floor by the east door at the twenty-second minute, which was a time when nothing was supposed to happen, and Kalen was flat behind the sand hopper writing up the map and did not look for four or five seconds, because his hand was in the middle of a figure.

Then he looked.

It walked the length of the floor at the same pace as the others and it went nowhere near the trough. It went along the north wall, past the pour line, past the frame, and out through the west door into the dark, and it was gone for twenty-eight minutes, and it came back the other way at the fifty. Then it did it again. Then it did it again.

The three on the pour line did not look up. He had expected them to, and had no good reason for it, and afterwards he understood that this was the thing he ought to have found frightening: four of them on one floor, on the same fifty minutes, every one entirely alone.

Kalen lay behind the sand hopper for two hours and did not move.

"Twenty-two minutes," he said, under his breath, on the third pass. "Every time."

He got a proper look at it on that pass, when it came within twenty feet of the hopper with the lamp light behind it, and the first thing he saw was the shoulders, and the second thing he saw was the hem, and after that there was no arguing about it at all.

Nobody in a foundry wears a coat cut like that.

"That is not a foundry hand," Kalen said.

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