Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The coat was Sedge.

Kalen followed it out through the west door on the second morning of watching it, at a distance of forty feet, in the dark, without a lamp, which is a thing you can do in a place you have spent a fortnight mapping and which you should not do anywhere else.

Green wool. Brass at the collar, two buttons on the left cuff and one gone off the right. Not a porter's coat. A clerk's, cut narrow through the body, the pockets set where a man wants them if he spends his day standing at a bench with his hands out in front of him. It was in poor condition, and it was in poor condition in the particular way a coat goes when it has been worn for two centuries by somebody who is not aware of it. Nothing had torn it. Nothing had caught it on anything. It had simply gone, thread by thread, the way cloth goes when it is asked to do nothing for a very long time except be worn.

It walked at the pace they all walk. Out through the west door, along a service passage under the flue, up eleven steps, and into a room off the passage that Kalen had marked on his plan as a store and had not opened.

It was not a store.

It was an office. Twelve feet by fifteen, dry as a drawer, the stone floor bare of everything except a fine grey dust that lay in the places where nothing walked. There was a stool that had not been sat on. There was an inkwell with the ink dried in it to a black disc and a crust round the rim where somebody had filled it too full, once, and had meant to wipe it.

And there was a bench, and on the bench there was work.

Kalen stood in the passage outside with his back to the stone and did not go in. He put his hand into his coat pocket and got his thumb on the ward-tag, and made himself count off the seconds instead of thinking, because thinking at that moment was going to produce something he would have to act on.

He got to four hundred and eleven before the clerk came out and went back down the way it had come.

* * *

He followed it two full loops before he did anything, which took an hour and forty minutes and was the correct decision and did not feel like one at any point.

The loop was this. East door onto the pour floor at the twenty-second minute. The length of the floor along the north wall, past three men carrying nothing to nowhere, none of whom looked up. Out by the west door, along the passage, up the eleven steps, into the office. Fourteen minutes at the bench, standing, with its back to the door. Then out, down, along, back across the pour floor from the west, and away east through the far door into a part of the workings Kalen had never been into and was not going into.

Twenty-eight minutes away. Fourteen at the bench. Eight on the stairs and the floor. Fifty on the whole.

The three on the pour line were finishing a shift. That was ugly and it was legible and Kalen had known what he was looking at from the first pass, because he had seen it in a slag yard and had seen it at a ward gate every evening of his adult life.

This was not that.

A shift ends. That is what a shift is. Somewhere in the last two hundred years the men on the floor should have run out of pour to make and boxes to fill, and the reason they were wheeling an empty barrow to a trough with nothing under it was that the work had ended and the instruction had not. There is nothing in the Accord that stops when a foundry does. There is only a man who was told to do a thing and who is still being told.

The clerk had work.

There was something on that bench and it was being done. Correctly. Fourteen minutes at a time, four times a day, for as long as anybody cared to sit in a passage and count.

Kalen sat in the passage and counted.

On the first loop he learned the geometry, and on the second loop he got the hands.

That was the thing that stayed with him afterwards, more than the coat and more than the loop. He was flat on the passage floor at the door line with his cheek on the stone, which gave him about nine inches of the bench under the clerk's elbow, and it was enough. The left hand held the tray steady. The right hand went out and came back, out and came back, in the same short arc, and there was a small correction in the wrist at the end of every fourth movement: an adjustment, a settling of something that had gone slightly out of square.

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Nobody teaches you that. You get it after about eleven years of doing the same job at the same bench and then you have it for life, and then, apparently, you have it for a good deal longer than that.

Kalen had watched a Rendered work before. He had watched one wheel barrows to a pour that stopped in the year his father was taken. This was worse, and it took him most of the second loop to say why, and when he had it he wished he had not gone looking.

The one in the slag yard had been repeating a movement. This one was making decisions.

"Right to left," Kalen said, into the stone. "It is reading them."

* * *

He thought about settling it.

He would rather not write that down, but he thought about it, standing in a cold passage with a hook in his hand, for about ninety seconds.

It was a designation job and it was not his. He was a clearance hand on a ward let, not a bounty man. He had never taken a bounty in his life. He had turned down two, and the second one had been on the stairs of his own building, and he had walked a woman he had known for eleven years out of a stairwell and then stood in it explaining to the neighbours why he had left sixty marks on the ground.

Sabra had said one condition and had declined to explain it, and Kalen had assumed for a fortnight that it was about liability, or about the ward, or about her own paper, those being the three things Sabra Quill had ever cared about in his hearing. Standing in that passage he understood that he did not know what it was about, and that he was not going to find out for the price of not doing something, which is the cheapest thing anybody had ever asked of him.

But that was not the reason either.

The reason was that it was working. Whatever it was doing at that bench it had been doing since before the ward had a Levy on it, and it was the only thing in two hundred feet of dead building that was still producing anything at all, and Kalen Ashgrove had never once in his life put out a light in order to find out what a room looked like dark.

"You have got work," he said, into the passage, at a distance of forty feet, to something that could not hear him.

Then he waited until it was at the far end of the loop, and went in, and looked at the bench.

* * *

There were two piles.

They were ward-tags. Brass, thumb-sized, three lines of Accord script stamped into the face and a fourth line underneath with dot leaders running out. He had one in his coat pocket and had carried it since a Tuesday in the spring, and he had spent nine nights in Vessel Marn's back room by candle to find forty more, and he had thought at the time that forty was a very great many.

"Two piles."

The left-hand pile was eleven high and it was ordinary.

Ward tags, sorted, quarter by quarter, oldest at the bottom, standard and assessed and variance and the fourth line carrying a disposition: a route, a receiving column, a destination. Ward Two, to the general fund. Ward Eleven, to the general fund. Ward Six, to a crown works Kalen had never heard of, which he took to be a bridge or a road or one of the other things a kingdom builds and then has to pay for.

He read six of them and put them back in the order he had found them in, which took longer than reading them did.

Nothing about the left-hand pile was interesting, and it took him half a minute to understand that he was looking at what a ward-tag is supposed to look like, and that he had never in his life seen one.

The right-hand pile went from the near edge of the bench to the wall.

It was sorted by year. It was in shallow wooden trays, and the trays were racked in a case behind the bench that went up past the lamp light to a ceiling he could not see, and the case was full, and the near end of the near tray was this quarter and the far end of the case was not.

"How many," he said, to nobody at all.

Kalen took one tag off the top and read it.

Standard. Assessed. Variance, three and a half, carried 987.

Fourth line: dot leaders, and nothing after them at all.

He put it back. He took one from the middle of the same tray, and then one from a tray four rows up, and then, with his hands going badly, one from a tray so high that he had to get a foot on the bench to reach it, and the whole tray came down off the rack and he caught it against his chest.

Every one of them. Standard, assessed, variance three and a half, and a fourth line with nothing whatever on it.

"Nine nights," he said. "For forty."

He got down off the bench. Then he got back up on it, because he wanted the top row and there was no version of himself that was going to leave without the top row, and this time he put a draw-hook into the upright of the case to steady his weight, and put the weight on wrong, and the hook broke.

It made almost no noise.

A quarter inch of good old iron with the maker's mark filed flat off the shank, snapped through at the bend, lying in two pieces on a bench two hundred feet under Ashfall.

Four.

Kalen picked up both halves and put them into the roll with the others, because he kept everything, and then stood still in the dark holding the tray against his chest with his ears going, listening for a full minute for something coming up eleven steps.

Nothing came. It was eleven minutes away at the west end of a pour floor, standing behind two men who were putting nothing into nothing.

He took his own tag out of his coat pocket and set it down on the bench beside the right-hand pile and looked at the two of them together in the lamp light.

They were the same tag. Not the same kind of tag. The same.

He had carried that brass out of a scrap bin in the spring and put it on a kitchen table in front of his sister and called it a mistake, because that is what it had looked like: one wrong figure sitting in a ward, waiting for somebody to notice. A mistake is a thing you can take to a counter. A mistake has somebody at the other end of it who goes pale.

Here were the trays.

Somebody had been filing his ward's blank line for two hundred years, by quarter, in order.

They had never once run short. Somebody was still doing it.

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