Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

He laid the last of it out on the fourth night and stood at the end of the bench to see whether it read.

The strip shed was the wrong room for it and the only room he had. He had cleared the sorting rack, put two planks across the trestles, and taken the whole of it out of the tins in order, and it ran the length of the shed and turned the corner onto the bench, and he had to walk it to read it, which he had done nine times since the seventh bell.

Left to right, the way a stranger would come at it.

He had spent the whole of the first night on the order and had thrown two versions away. The first had opened with the argument, which is what a man does when he is afraid of not being believed, and he had taken it apart at about the second bell, because an argument at the front of a case is a request to be disagreed with. The second had opened with his own forty pages, which was vanity, and he had known that while he was doing it.

The third opened with brass. Eight hundred and sixty-four objects, in order, that anybody at all could pick up.

The tags first, in bundles by decade, wired, with a strip of his own paper folded under each wire and the decade written on it. Twenty-two bundles across the planks, 987 at the near end under the lamp and this year at the far end where the light went bad, and two hundred and seventeen years of a ward taking up eleven feet of plank and weighing rather less than a sack of coal.

Then the four he had pulled out and set on their own: one from 987, one from 1102, one from the year the foundry shut, and his own out of the scrap bin with the brass gone smooth on one face. The first of the four and the last of them read like this.

W9 / LEVY / STANDARD ........ 14.0

W9 / LEVY / ASSESSED ........ 17.5

W9 / LEVY / VARIANCE ......... 3.5 [carried, 987]

W9 / VARIANCE / DISPOSITION .. (blank)

W9 / LEVY / STANDARD ........ 14.0

W9 / LEVY / ASSESSED ........ 17.6

W9 / LEVY / VARIANCE ......... 3.5 [carried, 987]

W9 / VARIANCE / DISPOSITION .. (blank)

Then the forty pages out of Marn's back room: nine nights of transcription in his own hand, half of it worked out off maker's marks and context because he had not had the vocabulary and had refused to wait until he did.

Then the standard rate table, copied off the tags themselves, because the tags carry it, because the Accord prints the standard next to the assessment on every tag it has ever struck. Which is either a courtesy or the flattest joke in Kentra.

Then the index, which was the part he was proud of, and which had taken the whole of the third night.

Days down the left. Three columns across the top: what the ward was assessed, what the standard was, and the difference. He had ruled it with the edge of a knife, because a knife gives a straighter line than a rule does when the paper is bad.

He had got to the foot of the second page before he noticed whose sheet he was copying.

Kalen stood there a moment with the pencil in his hand and thought about a twelve year old at a kitchen table putting a difference column in afterward, in a different pencil, because she had gone back and added it later. Then he ruled the third page the same way and got on with it, because it was the right shape and it did not matter where he had got it.

Sabra came in at the ninth bell, which was two hours after she usually went home, and Kalen understood that she had been waiting to be asked.

"Show me."

"Have you got an hour in you?"

"An hour in me," Sabra said, and took the lamp off the bench hook and carried it to the near end of the planks and started at 987.

It took an hour and eleven minutes.

Kalen sat on the strip bench with his hands on his knees and let her, because the work was either finished or it was not, and a man who talks over his own case has stopped believing in it.

The shed did what the shed does at that hour, which is nothing. The gantry ticked twice as the cold came into it.

He counted the bolts in the gantry twice. Sixty-six both times, where there ought to have been sixty-eight, and he thought about the missing two the way he always did. Then he counted the bundles she had left, which was worse, because that number went down. He got through the last decade before he noticed he had stopped breathing properly, and made himself stop that, and counted the boards in the shed door instead.

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Sabra read every one of the forty pages. She read the index for a long time and went back to it twice. She walked up to the near end again and looked at the 987 bundle, and once she picked up the tag from 1102 and held it under the lamp and set it down again exactly where it had been, which is a thing people do not do unless they have handled a great many small objects that mattered.

At the end she came back down the shed and put the lamp on the bench and took the pipe out of her mouth.

"Whose hand is the sort."

"A clerk's, for the first sixty years."

"And after."

"Nobody's. The bands are blank from 1047 and the order does not break." He put his hand flat on the plank. "Something went on doing it."

Sabra looked at the planks for a while.

"Is it complete."

"It is complete from 987 to this quarter. Eight hundred and sixty-eight in the case and eight hundred and sixty-four on that plank."

"And the four."

"I left the near tray where it was and copied them out." He did not look up from the planks. "There is room in that tray and you told me not to settle anything down there."

Sabra did not say anything to that either.

"And the four hundred you have not used."

"They are on the last plank. Other wards, at standard, no fourth line on any of them. They are in it because a man who shows you only the pages that help him is not showing you a case."

"What does it ask for."

"Three things."

Kalen came off the bench and went down the planks to the covering sheet and turned it round so that it faced her.

"That the assessed rate be corrected to standard. That the variance carried since 987 be disposed on the face of the ledger, in writing, whatever the answer turns out to be. And that the correction run from the day it is granted."

"Not from 987."

"No."

"Why not."

"Because a ward cannot be given back two hundred and seventeen years," Kalen said, "and because a thing that asks for the impossible gets refused on the impossible and never on the possible."

"Who is it addressed to."

"The ward filing office. There is a counter and a clerk and a box."

"What Standing are you on the day you put it in the box."

"Bonded."

Sabra did not say anything.

"It is a petition and not a testimony," Kalen said. "A petition is a thing anybody may make. I have read the schedule twice and there is no floor on it."

"You have read the schedule twice."

"I have."

She put the pipe back in her mouth and did not say anything at all about counters, or clerks, or boxes, or schedules.

"It is very good work," Sabra said.

Kalen did not answer that, because there was nothing to answer, and because Sabra Quill had told him his work was good exactly twice in four years and had charged him for one of them.

Then she said the other thing.

"They will not say you are wrong."

He turned it over. He turned it over the way you turn a coin you have decided not to spend, and what he heard in it was what a man hears at the end of four nights: that the case would hold, that nobody was going to knock a hole in it, that the arithmetic was sound and the objects were real and the years were the years.

"No," he said. "They will not."

"No," said Sabra.

"There is a thing you are not saying."

"Yes."

"How much is it?"

"It is not priced," Sabra said, and looked at him for a second longer than she needed to, and went out across the yard to the office with her own lamp, and did not turn round, and left him the one on the bench hook.

Kalen walked the planks once more after she had gone, from 987 to this year and back again with the lamp in his hand, and stopped at the far end where the light went bad.

It had been two hundred and fifty-nine days when he sat at his own table with a barrow outside the door and told his sister about brass tags. It was two hundred and twenty-seven now. That is what six weeks of the best work of his life had cost on the only clock in the ward that mattered, and the case on the planks was what he had bought with it, and he stood there and made himself hold both of those in the same hand at the same time for a while.

He was going to file it himself, in the morning, in his own name.

He had thought about the other way and had got rid of it on the second night. A case with two names on it is a case that can be answered by taking something off the second name, and there was nobody in the ward he could ask to stand next to him who was not already carrying something. Sabra had a house. Tam had a mother in arrears and a promotion track. He had a Line that had gone past a thousand, a Standing that could not be reduced any further than it already was, and nothing whatever anybody could take off him that they were not already entitled to take.

That is not courage. It is a very specific kind of poverty, and Kalen knew the difference and was going to use it anyway.

He stayed with it until the eleventh bell.

He put the bundles back into the tins in order and the pages into oilcloth, and the four loose tags into a tobacco tin with sacking round them so that they would not ring against each other in a coat. Then he took his own one out of the tin again and put it back in his pocket, because it had lived there since the winter and he was not going to change that tonight.

Then he took the covering sheet off the end of the plank and read it through once more, standing up, using the vise post the way he had once used the ward board.

It said what it was. It said what the standard was, and what the assessment was, and what the difference had been in every one of two hundred and seventeen years, and it said that the disposition line had never been filled in, not once, in eight hundred and sixty-eight consecutive quarters, in a hand that stopped in 1047 and in no hand at all afterward.

It did not say that anybody had stolen anything. He had taken that sentence out on the second night, because it was not true, and because he was not going to put a thing in a case that he could not stand behind in a room.

At the bottom he wrote his name, and under the name he wrote the only Standing he had.

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

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