Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The pumps should have failed five weeks ago.

Kalen sat in the dark at the top of the intake stair with his lamp shut and his back against the wall and went over it again, because he had been over it eleven times and the answer had not improved.

He knew what the governor drew. He had read it for two nights and could put a figure on it that he would defend in front of anybody. He knew what he had lodged against it in the first week, to the bar, because he had entered every bar on the manifest and had eaten the hole it left in his materials and was eating it still. Three days of cutting stock, brass rod, wire and eleven pints of lamp oil, on the fifth day of the contract.

He had overestimated the burn by a third and had written the correction into his own schedule with a satisfaction he had not examined, which put the works order dry on the ninth day.

It was the forty-first.

So there was a second intake somewhere, or a feed off a live line he had not found, or a Pattern in the sump he had walked past four times. He had spent two evenings on all three and had found nothing, and had arrived at the only answer left at about the eighth bell that evening, standing up, eating bread.

Somebody is feeding it.

He had been sitting there since the eighth bell with nothing to eat and no light, because a lamp at the top of the intake stair can be seen from one end of the gallery to the other. He had spent the first hour listening to the pump and the second hour listening to himself listening to the pump. Cold comes up out of foundry stone in its own particular way. It arrives in the hips.

The gallery ran three hundred feet under all four floors, and at the end of it the governor stood in its housing like a thing built for a bigger world: four intakes, a cast frame twelve feet across, and a stroke you felt in the soles of your boots about once every eleven seconds. It had been making that noise for two hundred years and it was going to go on making it after everybody currently alive had stopped.

He had thought about what the feeding meant and had not liked any of the versions. A ward hand with a reason of his own. A Sedge man with a key. Another house working the same floors from the other end, which would have made the last five weeks a race he did not know he was running. He had gone through the whole list twice and had not once put on it the thing that came down the stair at half past the ninth bell with a slag lamp held low.

The light came down the stair at the pace of a man who has done a thing often enough to have stopped being careful about it. He had a sack over his shoulder with corners in it. He went past the turn without looking up the gallery and he had the sack off his shoulder at the housing before Kalen got his own lamp open.

Doss looked at the light for about a second and a half.

"Ashgrove," he said.

"Doss."

Doss went back to the sack. He got the neck of it open and put a hand in and came out with four inches of stripped collar iron, the sort of thing that comes up out of a night scavenge and goes to a house at eight in the morning for a mark and a half, and laid it against the lodgement plate on the housing.

The casing came up from cold to warm under his hand and the iron went, in one long unhurried pull, the way the wire had gone off Kalen's drum in the first week, and somewhere under both of them a great deal of water went on being held exactly where it was.

"How long," Kalen said.

"Since the pump."

"Since the pump is about a month."

"Thirty-three days," said Doss.

He put another piece against the plate.

NOTICE OF LODGEMENT

Materials lodged against works order 4,

Ashfall foundry, Ward Nine.

Credited to the works. Not to the lodger.

It printed for him the way it had printed for Kalen in the first week. Doss looked at it for about as long as a man looks at weather, and reached into the sack again.

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"That is your stock," Kalen said.

"Yes."

"That is your stock, and there is no wage in it, and there is nobody down here to see you do it."

Doss thought about that for as long as it deserved, which was not long.

"Pumps stop, floors go," he said. "Floors go, you go."

Then the intake fouled, which it did about once a night, and it stopped being a conversation.

They worked it the way two men work a thing neither of them has agreed to work together. The fouling was a wad of two hundred year old sacking that had been going round the sump since before either of them was born, and it had gone into the second intake sideways and jammed the gate at half. The gate was iron and four feet across and the gate wanted to close.

"Hold it," Doss said.

Kalen got the hooks in and set them and drew Ward, and the cold pressure came up across the front of him like standing into wind, and the gate stopped wanting anything at all.

Doss put both arms into the intake to the shoulder.

He did it without hurrying and without saying anything and he did not look at the gate once, which meant he had decided something about Kalen that Kalen had not been asked about. The sacking came out in three pulls. On the third pull the gate moved a finger's width and Kalen took it back and held it and heard himself counting, and got to nine, and Doss's arms came out of the intake at eleven.

The gate went up. The intake took water.

Kalen let go and sat back on his heels on the wet stone and waited for his eyes to stop doing what they were doing.

They stayed on the housing afterward for a while, because neither of them could have got up the stair in the next ten minutes and both of them knew it. Doss got a heel of bread out of the sack and broke it and held half of it out sideways without looking, the way you pass a tool to somebody who is already reaching. Kalen took it. It was bad bread. They ate it looking at four intakes taking water, with the stroke coming round about once every eleven seconds, and neither of them said anything for the length of about forty strokes.

Two draws. Twenty-eight marks. It would sit on his Balance for a week, and it had been the correct call at every point along the way, which is what these sums always look like afterward.

Doss wiped his arms on the sack and shook the last of it out, and there was very little in the bottom of it, and Kalen looked at that and then looked at Doss's boots, which he had been not looking at for about a month.

The house had let him go in the spring. The brace had gone back with the place, because the brace had always belonged to the place. A man off the books does not get a bad rate, he gets no rate, and everything he lifts has to be sold to somebody who knows he cannot complain.

"That happens every night," Kalen said.

"Most nights."

"You have been coming down here most nights for five weeks to keep a two hundred year old pump running on iron you could sell."

Doss put the sack over his shoulder.

"You took the apron off," he said.

That was the whole of it. Kalen stood there with his hands stinging and waited for the rest, and there was no rest, because there had never been any rest with Doss and tonight was not going to be the first time.

Ninety minutes in the cutting shed in the spring. A dead man's bound apron eleven weeks into setting into a live man and drawing against a Balance he did not have. Kalen had taken it off him without killing the Pattern, which was the one thing in the world he was excellent at, and had not reported him for the apron, or the shed, or the four other things in the sack, and had sold the apron into his own settlement three days later, and had never afterward thought about any of it as anything except a thing that had needed doing.

Doss had put a number on it, apparently, and had been paying it off in collar iron at half past the ninth bell.

Kalen did the sum on the walk up. He did it properly, in his head, in the shape his sister ruled onto paper with the edge of a knife: what the clearance paid, what it had cost, what was left over. Eleven marks a week of margin with a materials hole in it three days deep, and a wage, even a bad wage, even the wage a man off the books would take, was six.

He got to the top of the stair and stood in the cold with the lamp out and worked out that he could carry it if he did not eat like a man and did not get the coat repaired.

He had known that before he did the sum. He did the sum anyway, because a decision you have not costed is not a decision, it is a mood.

He had put nothing in it for the case. That was not an oversight and he checked it twice on the way up: a petition is a sheet of paper, a counter, a clerk and a box, and none of those has ever cost anybody a mark in the history of Ward Nine.

There was the other arithmetic as well, which he had been refusing to do since the pour line, and which came out the same way every time he let himself near it. He had worked six weeks alone and had done it well. He had also followed a Rendered clerk around a bench for two days with nobody within two hundred feet of him, and had a broken hook to show for it, and if that gate had come down on his hands tonight he would have been found in the spring, weighed, and entered.

He had been telling himself for six weeks that working alone was a margin decision. It had been a margin decision for about ten days. After that it had been a habit, and then it had been a preference, and a preference is a thing a man pays for every week and never once sees on a bill.

"There are two days left on the contract," he said.

Doss waited.

"After that I have got work and no hands. Six a week from the day it ends, and I will pay you the five weeks behind it as well, and it will take me until the autumn. Bring your own lamp. I am not paying for lamps."

There was a pause that ran a beat longer than Kalen had allowed for.

"All right," Doss said.

Kalen took the contract sheet out of his coat and the pencil out of the roll and turned the sheet over to the blank side, and wrote a name under his own with the figure beside it, and ruled a line under the two of them with the edge of the paper.

The sheet had two names on it now.

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