Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The trouble with a matched set is that the second one has to be wrong in exactly the same way as the first.

Kalen had four hooks in the roll and a shape in his head and nine days of a paid contract he was going to spend at a bench instead of on a floor, and no way at all of testing whether any of it worked until it was too late to change it.

He laid the four out on the sacking in the order his father had kept them, longest to shortest, which was not the order they were made in and was the order they were worn in.

The maker's mark had been filed flat off all five.

He had asked about that once, at eleven, sitting on the step of the rope-walk with the roll open across his knees.

"Where has the mark gone?"

"What mark."

"There is a mark on every tool in the world," Kalen had said. "There is no mark on these."

His father took the hook off him and turned it over twice and gave it back.

"What is the difference between a hook and a lever," Corun Ashgrove said, and Kalen, who was eleven and wanted very much to be asked things, had spent the whole walk home working it out and had never gone back to the first question.

He turned each hook mark-side down on the sacking now, the way you do with a thing you have decided not to look at yet, and got on.

A draw-hook does one job. You set the hook against the shape of a Pattern where it sits in the object, and you hold it there while you take the object off it, and the entire trade is in the word hold. Every reclaimer in Kentra pays for that stillness. Most of them pay in Ward, a draw at a time, all day, which is fine if your Ward is cheap. Kalen's was fourteen and was the second most expensive thing he owned.

So he had been paying in time instead. Bracing the hook against a knee, or a bench dog, or the heel of his other hand, and going slowly, and going slowly was what he was for, and it still cost him about a third of every working day.

Three hooks holding a Steady between them would cost him one Bind, once, in ash and iron, for the life of the tools.

That was the whole idea. He had been carrying it since the fourth week, turning it over the way you turn a bad tooth.

The problem was the yield.

Bind, twenty-two marks, nought point seven. What went in came out weaker than the shape he laid it against, every time, which is why nobody had ever asked Kalen Ashgrove to make anything in his life. He held Steady at Fine, measured. He could no more lay a Fine measured Steady into a hook than he could lift the gantry off its bolts.

But he did not need a Fine one. He needed the smallest true piece of the shape there was, laid in three times without drifting: a slight one, the kind of Steady that keeps a plumb line honest for a minute and does nothing else in the world.

And the shape he was copying was the only shape he had ever made.

He had rebuilt that Steady himself at his own kitchen table, out of a dead man's plumb bob, with a blanket round his shoulders and a head full of Collection heat, and he knew it the way you know a word in your own handwriting. He did not have to read it off anything. He had it, whole, at any hour, the way other men have a tune.

"Smallest true piece," he said, to the bench. "Nothing clever. One Bind in a tool is a Bind you never pay again."

He heard how that sounded in an empty sub-level and got on with it.

The first hook took the shape and did not hold it.

He knew before he was finished, the way you know a nail is going in crooked, and he stood at the vise and watched it let go over about four seconds, which is a very long time to watch twenty-two marks leave the room.

The second hook held.

He put it on the sacking and did not touch it for an hour, because a Pattern one hour old is not a Pattern, it is an opinion. Then he hung it off a bench dog with a cord and a lump of slag on the end of it, and went and cleared eleven feet of pipe gallery, and came back, and the slag was hanging dead still where he had left it. It had not moved in the time it takes a man to do a piece of work.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Kalen stood and looked at that for a while with his hands hanging.

Aro Belk had turned the mason's plumb over twice in his own yard in the spring, with three of his hands watching, and had held it up on the cord and watched it not move, and had then asked the only question anybody had asked him about it since.

"You did not make a new one."

"No."

"Then what did you do?"

"I looked at it until I could see where it had gone," Kalen said, "and put back the part that was missing."

"How long did the looking take?"

"Four hours."

"And the work."

"Eleven seconds."

Belk had handed it over the way you hand back a thing you have decided not to argue with.

"That is not how anyone does it," he said.

The third hook held on the second attempt, which cost him a day and taught him more than the second one had. A matched set is not three tools with the same Pattern in them. It is one shape lying across three pieces of iron, and the three have to agree, and iron does not naturally agree with anything.

He ate on the bench for six of the nine days and did not go up at all for four of them, and the lamp oil came out of the contract and he knew to the hour how much of it he had left.

On the sixth day he came very close to stopping. He had two hooks holding and two that were not, and four days of a paid contract spent on tools instead of on the floors he was being paid to clear, and if the fourth went the way the first had gone he would have spent the best week of the six on a set of three that would not agree with one another.

"You are a reader," he said, to the vise. "You are not a maker. That is the last one."

It was not the last one. He sat with it for about ten minutes and then went back to the bench, on the grounds that a man who stops on the fourth day has paid for four days and bought nothing, which is the worst arithmetic there is.

The fourth hook was where it went wrong, and it went wrong for a reason that was nobody's fault.

There was old iron in the tang. Not a flaw you could see, and not a flaw you could feel with a thumbnail, and he had gone over all four with a glass on the second evening precisely so that this would not happen. The shape went in and then walked, half a hair, the way a wall goes out of true above a bad footing. He had time to understand exactly what was happening to it and no time at all to do anything about it.

"Old iron," Kalen said. "That is old iron."

He had not known that a thing could go soft and crack in the same moment until he watched it.

That was twenty-two marks with nothing on the other side of it, and the Accord does not care why. It took the shortfall out of the clearance credit he had run up on the pipe gallery that morning, without a block and without a word, which is to say it took a day of his life and did not mention it.

He sat down on the floor of the third sub-level with the two pieces in his hands and did the count.

Five hooks. One broken under his own weight on a tray case eight days ago, going after a top row he was never going to leave without. One in two pieces. Three on the sacking, matched, holding.

Kalen put the ruined pieces into the roll with the good ones, which is not a sensible thing to do with a dead tool, and rolled it up and tied it and said nothing about it to himself.

On the ninth night he set the three up as a set for the first time, and put a Fine grade frame between them, and took the frame off its Pattern in eleven minutes without touching the hooks once from the moment they were set.

He did it again on something worthless, to be sure. Then a third time, because he wanted to.

Then he sat down on the bench with his back against the tag store and let it come up.

PATTERN: Steady (Common)

Held in: three draw-hooks, ash and iron, marks filed flat

Draw: Ward, slight

The held thing does not drift.

These were my father's. I have three left. K. Ashgrove

He read it four times.

Somewhere in the middle of the second reading he understood that the Accord had printed his own sentence back at him without softening one word of it, and had put his mark at the end the way it had put R. Odder's on a quarry hammer, and that in nine hundred years of doing this it had never once been kind and had never once been cruel about it either.

Line eight hundred and thirty. It had been seven hundred and eighty-five at the top of the week.

He had watched that figure move for a haul, and for a clearance, and once, on a pump housing with a cold breakfast in his hand, for nothing except having got better at his own trade. This was the first time it had ever moved for a thing he had made.

He thought about that on the climb out, at the rate of about one flight to the thought, which is how a man thinks on the foundry stair.

Five in him and a cap of seven. Seven was what somebody like him held at the top of a good year, and eight was a house hand with a house behind him, and every one of them was a slot, and every slot was a decision, and every decision was permanent unless he was willing to unbind and lose a grade, and he had nothing spare to lose a grade with.

Nobody had ever told the hooks they were only allowed three.

That was the thing. A rich man buys a bigger cap by having a bigger Line, and a poor man does not, and there was a third way sitting in his roll wrapped in oilcloth that the trade had been doing in front of him for four years without ever once saying out loud what it was. Patterns live in objects. That is not a trick and it is not a dodge. That is what a house is, and what a guild is, and it is why a Sealed brace on a man's arm is worth more than the man.

He came up into the yard at the second bell with the roll under his arm and his coat stiff with foundry cold, and stood a moment while his eyes did what they do.

Five slots in a man, and the sixth one priced a long way out of reach.

He was going to carry the rest in his coat.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!