Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The first barrow came up the ramp at the eighth bell and the last one at the second bell of the afternoon, and in between the yard filled up with six weeks.

Kalen worked the ramp because he had said he would. Doss worked the ramp because Doss on a ramp was worth two of anybody, and Brem and Quist worked the sorting because it was their yard, and by the middle of the morning there was a line of tins along the north shed wall with wired lids and chalked lots, and a rack of frames leaning where the rack of frames goes, and eleven hundred pounds of foundry brass in three heaps by weight.

Every piece of it had come out of a hole two hundred feet under a ward that had forgotten the hole was there.

It took eleven trips. The ramp out of the works runs a hundred and forty feet at about one in four, and a loaded barrow on it is a thing you do not stop halfway up, and by the fourth trip Kalen had worked out that Doss went up it at exactly the same pace loaded and empty, which is either a gift or thirty years of not being able to afford to hurry. Kalen went up it faster and arrived worse.

By the eleventh bell there were nine people at the yard gate who had no business at the yard gate. Ashfall will always come out for a haul. Two of them had worked the foundry, and one of those stood at the gate for the better part of an hour without saying anything to anybody, and went away before the weighing.

Sabra came down at the eighth bell with the pipe going and did not say anything about any of it, which from Sabra was a paragraph.

She weighed it herself. She always did.

The pan sat on its post by the office door with the counterweight on the arm, and she put the first tin on and slid the weight a hair to the left before she read it, and wrote the figure in the left-hand column, and took the tin off.

Kalen put the second tin on. He slid the weight a hair to the left, and read it, and called the figure, and Sabra wrote it down.

Doss put the third tin on. He slid the weight a hair to the left.

Nobody said anything, because there was nothing to say. The pan ran about four percent heavy and had done for as long as anyone in the house could remember, and everybody corrected for it by feel, the way you step over the third stair, and the figures came out right at the bottom because they always had.

Hesper Vane sat on her folding stool in the office doorway with her own lamp on the flags beside her, out of the way of the work, and watched three men in a row do the same thing with the same wrist.

She did not write anything down. She did not say anything either.

"Twelve Common," Sabra said, at the foot of the second column. "Four Fine."

"Four Fine."

"Say the four."

"Order rack, Fine, out of the drowned counting office. Tare, Fine, off a weigh frame in the same room. Even Load off the crucible frame and Bank off the trough plate, both Fine, both on the pour floor, four weeks ago."

"Pulled clean."

"All four."

Sabra took the pipe out of her mouth and looked down the line of tins for a moment, and put it back in.

"Nobody has taken four Fine off one contract here since I have had it," she said, and wrote the figure, and that was the whole of the ceremony.

Doss was paid at the pan, out of the day's coin, in front of the yard and the nine people at the gate, because Kalen had thought about doing it quietly at the end of the road afterward and had worked out that a wage paid round a corner is not a wage, it is a favour with a coin in it. Five weeks behind and one week forward. It was most of what he had in his hand and it went across the post in about four seconds.

Sabra entered the six in the left-hand column without looking up and without asking who he was, which meant she had known for a fortnight.

He had taken the case out over the last two days, tray by tray, up a hundred and forty feet of ramp, and had left two things on the bench. The left-hand pile, which was other wards and was not his. And the near tray, which was this quarter and had room in it, and which he had copied out by hand instead, four tags, an hour of his time, and not one line of it evidence he needed.

He was not going to be able to explain that to anybody who asked him, so he had decided in advance not to be asked.

The tags went on the pan last, in nine sacks, and came off at eleven marks and a half of brass.

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Kalen bought them back at weight against his own credit and Sabra let him, and entered it in her own hand: tags, ward, brass, sold to K. Ashgrove at scrap. Eight hundred and sixty-four tags. Two hundred and seventeen years of a ward's arithmetic, the best single piece of evidence anybody in Ward Nine had ever held in both hands, and the house rate on it was eleven and a half, because brass is brass and a pan does not know what is stamped on a thing.

He had known the figure before she said it. It still went into him sideways.

The last thing out of his coat was the seal.

He had thought about how to do it for eleven days and had come out at the only version that worked, which was to do it in daylight, in the yard, in front of the collector, with everybody watching and nothing in his hands.

"There is one more," he said, and set the lead box on the pan post, and took the oilcloth off it.

Sabra looked at it for four seconds. Then she reached out and turned it over with one finger so that the shank came up, and read the line around it, which Kalen had not been certain she could do until that moment and did not have time to think about.

"Crown," she said.

"Crown. Under Hand. It is intact and it has never been used."

"You are Bonded."

"I am Bonded."

Hesper got up off the folding stool and came four steps into the yard and stood where she could see the pan, the box, and both of their hands.

"House escrow," Sabra said. "Under my warrant." Sabra did not move. "It goes in the press." Sabra stopped there for a moment. "You do not hold it, carry it, or open that press without me in the room. There is a fee."

"How much?"

"Two a month."

"Sabra, it is worth more than this yard."

"There is a fee," Sabra said, "because a favour is a thing you owe and a fee is a thing you pay. You have enough of the first kind."

"You could have carried that up in your coat," Hesper said. "So that it is said once, nobody counted you on the way out."

"Sabra counts everything."

"Yes." Hesper had not moved from where she was standing. "So that you have it from me, write down what it weighed. In a year you will be glad that you wrote it down."

Hesper took a folded sheet out of her satchel and a pencil, and wrote four lines on it standing up, and read them back in the voice of a clerk confirming an appointment.

"Crown grade object, Under Hand, entered to the escrow of a Warranted house, witnessed by a Freehand of the collection service." She looked up. "That makes it lawful. Do you want it lawful?"

Kalen looked at her.

He had been asked easier questions by people who wished him a great deal more harm. Lawful meant a line in a book, and a line in a book meant that a Bonded hand and a Crown grade Pattern were written down on the same page on the same afternoon, and would stay written down for anybody who ever went looking for either of them.

Unlawful meant a lead box in a coat for the rest of his life, and his sister in the room with it.

"Yes," he said.

"Then it is lawful," Hesper said, and signed it, and gave him his copy, and put the original into the compartment of the satchel that she turned away to open.

It cost him nothing at all that afternoon.

Sabra carried the box into the office herself and told him to come, and he came, and she opened the press, and he saw the inside of it for the first time in four years.

It was not full. That was the part he had not been ready for. Three shelves, and a strongbox on the bottom one, and on the middle shelf four boxes about the size of the one in her hand, each with a card wired to it in her writing, and nothing at all on the top shelf except dust in the shape of something that had been taken out of it and not put back.

She set the lead box on the middle shelf and wired a card to it and wrote on the card and shut the doors.

The lock was better than the doors. He had time to notice that much.

The clearance settled at the fourth bell, all six weeks of it at once, the way house credit does. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then the whole thing arriving in a lump while you are standing in a yard with brass dust on your hands and somebody else's barrow across your foot.

NOTICE OF SETTLEMENT

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

Clearance of sealed works, Ashfall, six weeks.

Recoveries entered: 12 Common, 4 Fine.

Materials, labour and service credited.

Settled.

He read the word at the bottom twice. It was the same word they print on a Collection, in the same place, in the same flat little hand, and it meant paid, and it meant finished, and it had never once meant anything else.

Forty-two days under a foundry, eleven hundred pounds of brass, a cough he still had, one hook broken and one in two pieces, and a man on wages who had cost him five weeks of arrears he would be paying off until the autumn. The house took its share off the top and the ward took its share off the house, and what came back to him was a figure he had predicted to within four marks a fortnight ago, and it was still the largest credit of his life.

He bound the order rack's Pattern into himself that evening, on the bench in the strip shed, with the door shut and the lamp turned down.

It cost a full Bind and took eleven seconds, and he had known for four days that he was going to spend it, and had spent two of those four arguing with himself about whether a man with a cap of seven ought to put the last of it into a thing that gives orders rather than a thing that lifts, or holds, or hits.

He had lost that argument in the pump gallery at half past the ninth bell, watching a governor keep four floors dry for a shift that ended two hundred years ago.

PATTERN: Standing Order (Fine)

Held in: Ashgrove, Kalen

Draw: Bind, measured

A thing that has been told what to do goes on doing it, and whatever

hears it knows what it was told.

Forty hooks and one hand to hang them. E. Corr, works clerk

Six of seven, then, and full, and nothing else coming until the Line came up a long way from where it was.

Then he sat on the strip bench with his back against the vise post, in a cold shed, alone, the way he did every night of his life.

He let the sheet come up.

ASSESSMENT: Kalen Ashgrove

Ward Nine (Ashfall), Kentra

Line ..................... 1,020

Balance .................. -18

Standing ................. Bonded

Craft .................... Reclamation, Second Hand

FACULTY draw yield

Force ............... 10 1.0

Quicken .............. 9 1.0

Ward ................ 13 1.1

Read ................. 3 1.6

Bind ................ 20 0.8

Patterns ................. 6 / 8

Next collection .......... none assessed

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