Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The bracket was the thing that was wrong, and Kalen had been up the ladder a quarter of an hour without touching it.

Forty feet of tallow works wall. A loading door with no door left in it. A davit arm standing out over the yard on a four pin bracket that somebody had let into the brick about the year he was born.

The works had shut in the spring and the gear was going in nine lots. This was the fourth of them and it was worth eleven marks.

"It is a Purchase," Doss said, from the ladder foot.

"It is a Purchase."

"Then take the arm off the wall and do it on the flags."

"That is what I would do."

"Then do it."

"I said it is what I would do. I did not say I was going to."

The Purchase sat in the arm, where a Purchase sits. Ordinary work, laid in along the top face by a jobbing binder who was being paid by the piece.

What was not ordinary was where the shape went afterward.

It ran down the arm and off the end into the fixing. Running it into the fixing had saved the man a second Bind. It had been holding four pins square in wet brick ever since.

Two of the pins stood proud, and he had been looking at the shadow under the heads for eleven minutes.

"The shape goes into the bracket," Kalen said.

"Patterns do not hold brick."

"This one holds four pins in brick. That is not the same thing and it is enough."

"Say it in the order you would write it."

"The pins have been slack for years. The shape has been taking up the slack. Take the shape out and the pins have got nothing left to be square about."

"And the arm comes off the wall."

"The arm comes off the wall with whoever is under it."

Doss came up the ladder and put his face where Kalen's had been. He went back down without saying anything, which from Doss was agreement in writing.

The works man wanted it off before dinner, and he was small and clean and had a list.

"It is an hour," Kalen said.

"You have had a quarter of an hour already."

"It is an hour, and the hour is a chain and a second man."

"Quill quoted me the morning for nine lots."

"She did. This is the fourth of them and it is the only one that is up a wall."

"And if I tell you to do it the way it is written?"

"Then I come down and you can have the ticket back with the lot unstruck," Kalen said, "and I will put my reason on it in writing, and she will send you the same man tomorrow."

The works man looked at his list, and then at the wall for longer than that.

"An hour," he said.

They chained the arm to the ring plate above the door first. Short, a turn round the head, the chain taken up until it rang.

Then Kalen set the three hooks and went in through the top face and had the Purchase out in nine minutes.

The bracket moved a quarter of an inch.

It moved the way a thing moves when it has been waiting to. All at once, and then not at all. The chain came up hard on the ring plate and held. A wash of brick dust came out of the wall and went down forty feet into the yard, where three men had been standing at half past eleven.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Right," the works man said.

"You will want a mason on that."

"I will want a mason on that." He wrote it on the list. "Was that going to happen anyway?"

"It was going to happen the first time somebody hung a load on it."

"This year?"

"I could not tell you the year," Kalen said. "I can tell you the wall."

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Kalen came down the ladder with his hands stinging. He got eleven marks, and a mark and a half over out of the man's own pocket, unentered.

He took it. A man who refuses a mark and a half to keep his hands clean is spending somebody else's money.

* * *

The ward filing office is one room with a counter across it, and Emmer Loy behind the counter, and a clock that does what clocks do in rooms like that.

"A petition," Loy said.

"A petition."

"Against what?"

"The ward's assessed rate."

Loy did not look up and did not look surprised, because Emmer Loy had spent nine years behind that counter and had long ago stopped keeping a face for things.

"Then you want the long form," he said.

"Is that the number of it?"

"It is what it is called. It has a number." He went along the shelf and came back with a schedule, opened it flat, and turned it round so that it faced Kalen, which was the sort of courtesy that had made Kalen like him from the first afternoon. "There. A petition touching a ward assessment is lodged on the long form, endorsed, with a fee of twenty-five marks."

"Endorsed by whom?"

"By a Freehand."

"I am Bonded."

"You are Bonded," Loy said, "and a Bonded may make a petition. The schedule is clear about that and I have looked at it twice this year for other reasons. A Bonded may not lodge one on his own standing. He lodges it under an endorsement."

"So a man who has a thing to say has to find somebody who is allowed to say it."

"He has to find somebody who is allowed to sign that he said it," Loy said. "That is not the same and I would not want you going out of here thinking it was."

Kalen stood and turned that over and could not find the hole in it.

"Twenty-five marks."

"Twenty-five marks. It is not a charge for reading it. It is lodged with it and it comes back if the petition is allowed."

"And if it is not allowed?"

"Then it does not come back."

The clock went on. Somewhere behind the shelving a kettle was doing something, badly.

"All right," Kalen said. "I would like the long form."

"I have not got one."

"Then I will wait while you find one."

"I have not got one to find." Loy said it without any distress at all, which was the thing about him. "The stock in this office was printed in eighty-one. The long form was not in the printing. I have the schedule that names it and I have the box it would go in and there is nothing in the box."

"Then how does a person file one?"

"Nobody files one."

"Somebody must."

"Nobody has, since I have had this counter," said Emmer Loy, "and I have had this counter nine years, and the man before me had it eleven, and he told me about the box on my first morning because it was the sort of thing he found funny."

Kalen put both hands flat on the counter and looked at the wall.

Then he went along the fence looking for the gap instead of standing in front of the gate.

"If I brought you a copy of it," he said, "would you take it?"

"If it is the same form."

"And if it is old."

"Old is not the difficulty. Repealed is the difficulty." Loy turned the schedule round again and put a finger on the head of the column. "A form that has been repealed is not a form. A form that has not been repealed is a form, and it does not matter what year it was printed in or what it has been sitting under."

"Is there a schedule of repeals?"

"There is a schedule of repeals," Loy said, in the voice of a man who has been waiting all morning for somebody to ask him a question he can answer, and got it down off the shelf.

It took twenty minutes and it was, in the end, a book.

Loy went down the columns with a ruler under the line, which Kalen was going to remember afterward.

"Repealed in 1140," he said. "That is the form for a river toll. There has not been a toll on that river since my grandfather."

"Somebody wrote it down."

"Somebody always writes it down. That is the trade." He turned a page. "Repealed in 1166. Twice, on the same page, by two different orders. I have wondered about that one for nine years."

"Is mine in it?"

"Give me the rest of the century."

Kalen gave him the rest of the century, and the next one after that.

"It is not here," Loy said.

"Then it stands."

"Then it stands. Nobody repeals a thing nobody uses." He shut the book on his thumb. "Bring me one."

* * *

The Assessor's office had a boot scraper by the side door and the key was still under it.

Kalen stood on the step for four seconds with his boot against the iron, and then went round to the front and knocked.

It cost him forty minutes, which he had expected.

The back room had not changed, and six hundred articles was Marn's figure where eight hundred and forty was the true one.

The stationery was under the bench in a three drawer chest with a warped front. He had opened all three drawers in the spring and written ward stationery, three drawers, no bound articles on his own list, because he wrote everything down.

The bottom drawer had a wad of forms in it that had been damp once and had dried stuck together into a single object.

Under the wad, flat on the drawer bottom, there was one sheet.

It was wide. That was the first thing.

It was cut half as wide again as anything else in the drawer and it wanted the whole bench to lie flat on. There was a great deal of blank space on it. It was ruled off in a way he did not recognise, with a column down the left a thumb wide and nothing printed in it.

The number was in the bottom corner. It matched the schedule.

The date was in the top corner in the old form. The quarter, then the day, then the year with a crossed loop on the last stroke.

The year was 1102.

He read the fields. Nine of them. Four he could have filled in from memory, and two he was going to have to ask about.

Three he could not make anything of at all, and he put those down as headings for a schedule that went with the form and had not been in the drawer.

He did not read the head of it.

There were eleven or twelve lines of Accord script across the top, above the rule. He had read the head of a ward form four hundred times, and a man who has read the same eleven words four hundred times does not read them on the four hundred and first.

He looked at the shape of it, which was the shape a preamble is, and went on down the page to the part with the blanks in it, because the blanks were the part that was his.

He rolled it in sacking and signed the book for it on the way out, and the key was still under the boot scraper, and he went past it.

* * *

Loy checked the corner number against the schedule and took eight minutes.

"That is the form," he said.

"Then I will bring it back endorsed."

"Bring it back endorsed and bring the twenty-five." Loy wrote the receipt for the inspection, blotted it, and gave it over. Then he took a second book from under the counter. A thin one, bound in the same grey board as the register and about a fifth the size, and he opened it and wrote.

Kalen watched the pen.

"That is not the register," he said.

"No."

"You put me in the register in the spring. I watched you do it."

"I did." Loy blotted the thin book as well and squared it on the counter. "This is the other one."

"What is the other one?"

"Petitioners."

Kalen looked at the grey board and the clean spine and the way the boards had not been broken back, and did the arithmetic he could not stop doing, which is about thread and hinges.

"How many names are in it?"

"Yours," said Emmer Loy.

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