Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The counting office had been under water for two centuries and had not formed an opinion about it.

Kalen came in over the sill on the second morning of the fifth week with the water at his boot tops and going down, and stood in the doorway with the lamp up and let the room tell him what it was.

Four desks. A rack. A press against the far wall with its doors shut. A clerk's chair, the kind with the low back and the worn spot, still square on its feet, because it had been under water and not under weather, and weather is what takes furniture apart.

Everything soft in the room had gone. The ledgers were pulp in their own shape on the shelves, a hundred books standing in a row and not one of them a book any more, and he put a finger against a spine and it went in like bread. He stood there with brown water on his finger and did a small piece of arithmetic about what a hundred intact ledgers out of the year 987 would have been worth to him, and then wiped his hand on his coat and did not do that again.

Everything hard had waited.

The cold in a drowned room is its own cold. It comes up through the boots and it does not move, because nothing down there has moved in two hundred years, and the air over the water smells of nothing whatever, which is worse than smelling of something. Kalen had got used to that in the first fortnight and stopped noticing it, and then noticed it again every time he came in over a sill.

He worked the nine days after that the way you work the end of a job, which is faster and worse. Racks out. Frames out. The bound door off the strong cupboard, which took a morning and a half. A bundling frame with a Common Carry in it that he had off in nine minutes, because he set the three hooks and did not have to hold anything with his hands.

That was the difference and it kept surprising him. Nine minutes, both hands free, nothing to pay at the end of it.

He had a system by then and the system was the six weeks. Read the room. Take the manifest first and the gear second. Work the far corner before the near one, because the far corner is where the will goes. Wire every tin lid rather than trusting a lid. Never carry a thing up the stair that he had not already entered, because a thing that goes up unwritten becomes a thing you have to explain.

By the ninth day he had eleven Common Patterns out of the office and the two floors above it, packed in tins with the lids wired and the lots chalked, a fair copy of the manifest folded into his coat, and a cough he had picked up in the second week and had decided to keep until the contract ended.

The eleven were what eleven Commons always are. Two Carries out of bundling frames. A Fair Wear off a foreman's apron that had gone to threads around it. A Purchase in a set of tongs. Three Hold Fasts, one of them in the strong cupboard door. A Tally in a counting board, which he set aside and looked at twice and said nothing about to himself. And three more that were worth entering on a manifest and worth nothing anywhere else.

The two Fine ones came out of the same room, an hour apart.

The first was in an order rack: brass, six feet long, hung with forty empty hooks, where a shift's standing orders had been put up every morning by somebody who had been very careful about it. He read it for most of an afternoon before he touched it, sitting in the water with his back against a desk, and what he heard when he could hear it properly was a thing he had already met.

He had met it in the pump gallery in the first week, hanging off a governor the size of a coffin that had been executing one instruction since before there was a Ward Nine to execute it in. He had read that governor for two nights running, not because there was anything he could do about it, but because it was the best made thing he had ever put his eyes on and he could not leave it alone.

The rack was the same shape. Cleaner, because nothing had been asked of it for two hundred years, and a thing that is not used does not wear.

A thing that has been told what to do goes on doing it, and whatever hears it knows what it was told. That was the whole trade of the works, and the whole trade of the ward, and about half of what was wrong with both.

He pulled it clean in forty minutes and put it in a tin on its own.

Stolen story; please report.

The second Fine was in a weigh frame and was a Tare, and he was pleased about that for reasons he could not have defended in front of anybody, since a Common Tare is worth eleven marks and a Fine one is worth thirty and neither is worth an afternoon.

"That is four," he said, to the room, and then said the four out loud in order, because he had been under a foundry for five weeks and there was nobody to stop him.

Then he opened the press.

It was oak with a brass lock, and the lock had a Pattern in it that had died a long time before the water got to it, and he had the doors open in four minutes without breaking anything, which he was going to enter on the manifest as opened and not as forced.

Three shelves. Two of them held a hundred and eleven brass tally weights in graded rows, which was the most valuable thing he had touched all week and which he entered at scrap and stopped thinking about inside the hour.

On the top shelf, in a lead box about the size of a fist, wrapped in oilcloth that had gone to nothing around it, there was a foreman's seal.

Kalen knew what it was before the cloth was off it, because his hand knew what it ought to weigh and his hand was wrong.

"No," he said, to nobody at all. "No, that is not what that is."

It was a die on a short turned shank, brass, four fingers long, with a chip out of the rim of the face where somebody had dropped it on stone a very long time ago. The face was cut with the works mark of the Ashfall foundry, which he had copied onto a shed board at sixteen and had been able to read at seventeen. Around the shank ran a line of script and a crown.

He carried it to the desk and sat down in the dead clerk's chair, which took his weight without comment, and read it properly.

Crown grade. Not Sealed. Crown.

And under it the Pattern, which he could hear as clearly as he had ever heard anything, because it had spent two centuries in a lead box in a locked press under two hundred feet of standing water and nothing whatever had been asked of it.

What the holder marks is marked as made by him, and the mark cannot be filed off.

Kalen sat in the chair with the lamp on the desk and the seal in front of him and did not touch it again for a long time.

He knew, in the ordinary way that a man in a trade knows things, what a Crown grade Pattern was worth. He had handled them. They came into the house maybe twice a year, off an estate or a bad debt, and they crossed the yard and went into the locked press in Sabra's office and he never saw them again. He had asked her about it once, at seventeen, with a Crown grade brace going past him in a box.

"What happens to those?"

"They go in the press."

"And then."

"Then they go to somebody allowed to have them," Sabra said.

"Allowed by who?"

"By the paper."

"And if nobody comes for it."

"Somebody always comes for it." She had gone back to the book then, and said the rest of it to the book. "That press is not about theft."

It was not an answer, and he had thought at the time that she meant fire.

The line around the shank said what a crown mark always says. It gave the grade, and the issuing office, and then, in four words, the Standing at which a man is permitted to hold the thing.

"Warranted," Kalen said. "And above. Which I am not."

He read it twice more to be certain. He had been certain the first time.

So he could not bind it. A Bonded who binds Crown grade is not fined, because the Accord has never fined anybody in nine hundred years. It assesses, and it assesses on the value of what was held, and the value of this was more than his Line and his arrears and his sister's coming Assessment laid end to end.

He could not sell it either. A lawful sale wants a Standing on both sides of it and he had the wrong one, and the other kind of sale wanted a kind of man he had spent nineteen years not being, and would in any case have paid him about a fortieth of the figure, because that is what the other kind of buyer pays and everybody knows it.

He could not leave it. His contract said everything on the floors came up and everything that came up got weighed, and a clearance hand who leaves a Crown grade on a shelf has not made a decision, he has made an entry that does not match the room. And under that there was the thing he could not have argued in front of anybody, which was that his hands would not put it back in the dark for somebody else to find in a hundred years.

And he could not tell anybody, which was the part he sat with longest, because he went through the list twice and there was nobody on it.

Nessa would have it in four seconds and would then have to carry it, at twelve, with a rate sheet and two hundred and thirty-six days. Tam worked for the House and was seventeen and was owed better than being asked. Sabra would have to do something about it the moment she heard, because that is what a warrant is for. Doss would say four words and one of them would be sell.

He turned the seal over on the desk and put his thumb on the chip in the rim.

Then he wrapped it in the oilcloth out of his own roll, which was the only oilcloth in that room still worth the name, and put it back in the lead box, and shut the lid, and sat with his hand flat on top of it for a while in a room that had been waiting two hundred years for somebody to come and be no use to it.

A hundred and eleven tally weights at scrap. Eleven Common Patterns in wired tins. A Fine Tare, a Fine order rack, and four Fine grade recoveries across the six weeks, which was better than any hand in Ward Nine had managed in a year and better than anyone had managed out of that house in longer than that.

And this, which was worth more than the whole of the rest of it put together, and which was worth nothing at all to him.

He put it in his coat with the tag.

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