Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

There were two of them at a door on Fetter Street and they were not doing anything wrong.

Kalen slowed down without deciding to. One had a book open on his forearm and was writing in it, and the other stood back from the step with his hands behind him, and the woman in the doorway was holding the frame with both hands and answering questions, and answering them, and answering them.

The book was a wide one, ruled, with a column down the left about a thumb wide.

It was an inventory. Not a distraint, and not a designation, and nothing at all on the boards at the gate. A man with a list writing down what was in a house.

The one with the book said thank you when it was finished, and meant it.

Kalen stood at the corner and let them come past him.

"Morning," the one with the book said.

"Is that a distraint?"

"Nothing like it." He turned the book round so that Kalen could see the page, which nobody had ever done to Kalen with a book. "An inventory. Fetter and Cinder Row this week, Tallow next week."

"Who is it for?"

"The record."

"Whose record?"

"The House keeps a record," the man said. "That part is above me. I write down what is in the house and I say thank you at the door."

He was about twenty-five, in a good coat and a clean collar, and he had answered every question he had been asked without once looking as though he minded being asked it.

"How long are you in the ward for?"

"As long as it takes," he said, and went four doors along and did the same thing there.

Kalen walked on up to the Assessor's office with four schedules under his arm and a shape in his chest he did not have anywhere to put.

* * *

"You have been in my back room," Marn said.

"I signed for it."

"You signed for it." He was at the desk in the good coat with the bad bag on the floor beside the chair, and he did not look up for a moment, and when he did he looked tired in the particular way of a man who has been being courteous since the fourth bell. "The girl says you took a sheet of stationery."

"I took one form and I have brought it back for you to see."

"I do not want to see it."

"You will want to see this," Kalen said, and put the four schedules on the desk instead, and Marn's hand stopped.

They were his own. That was the whole of it.

The ward's standing schedule is struck once a quarter and copied into the Assessor's book by the Assessor. Vessel Marn had been doing that in his own hand for thirty years.

They were foolscap, folded once, ruled in four columns, and the fourth column was always empty. Kalen had been through a hundred and twenty of them in the back room by candle over three nights and had found nothing anywhere except a man being tidy.

Every copy carried the date at the head of it in the form Marn had been taught by the man before him. The quarter, then the day, then the year with a crossed loop on the last stroke of the figure.

Nobody in Kentra had written a date that way since 987. It was not a cipher and it was not a secret. It was a habit, the way a man goes on saying a street by the name it had before they renamed it.

"That is my hand," Marn said.

"That is your hand three times. 1174, 1189, and this quarter."

"And the fourth."

"The fourth one is not your hand." Kalen turned it round and put one finger under the head of it, which was a thing he had learned off this desk. "That is the quarter before you took the office. Same schedule, same column, same crossed loop, different hand. The man before you wrote it and taught you to write it, and that is how I know what I am looking at."

Then he turned this quarter's copy over, because the ward prints its own line on the back of anything it means to keep.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

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

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

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

W9 / VARIANCE / DISPOSITION .. (blank)

Marn looked at his own handwriting for a while.

"Say what it does," he said.

"It does two things and you are not going to like either of them." Kalen kept his voice where it had been. "The first is that the three and a half was in that schedule on the day you sat down. In another man's hand, dated on your predecessor's calendar, in the ward's own book. You did not strike it. You could not have struck it. Nobody who ever comes at you can say you did."

"And the second."

"You have copied it forward every quarter since."

Marn did not say anything at all for about four seconds. Then he took his gloves out of his pocket and put them on the desk, which was a thing Kalen had seen him do once before, in a cold canteen, in front of forty children.

"A hundred and nineteen," he said.

"What?"

"You will want the figure and you have not got it yet. A hundred and nineteen." He squared the gloves with the edge of the blotter. "This one will be the hundred and twentieth, and I do not think I shall be the one who writes it."

And then, because Kalen had been braced for the other thing since Tallow Street and had built the whole walk up out of it, he watched Vessel Marn's shoulders come down.

He was relieved.

That was worse. There was no version of it Kalen had prepared for and no way to make it into anything else.

The man was sitting in his own office with a hundred and nineteen quarters of his own handwriting in front of him. What had come off him, plainly, was the weight of having carried a thing by himself.

"You are not angry," Kalen said.

"No."

"I have brought your own hand into your own office and put it on your own desk."

"You have. Somebody was going to." Marn put both hands flat on the desk, one either side of the pile. "I have been waiting a long time for somebody to come in here with that."

"To be caught."

"Not to be caught," he said. "Just for somebody to come in with it."

"Thirty years," Marn said.

"Thirty years."

"I have never put my own figure on that line. It arrives struck." He turned one of the schedules a little, squaring it with the edge of the desk. "You will want to hear that I did not know. I did know. I have known since my second year in this chair."

"What happened in your second year?"

"I wrote to the House."

Kalen stood very still.

"On paper," Marn said. "Signed, with the ward stamp on it, through the proper channel. I asked whether the ward's assessment had been struck correctly, because the standard was fourteen and the ward was at seventeen and a half and I was twenty-nine and I had been in the chair fourteen months."

"And they wrote back."

"They wrote back inside a fortnight, which I thought at the time was a mark of respect." Marn got up and went to the shelf and did not take anything off it. "It said the assessment had been correctly struck. It was signed by a man at the sixth desk."

He went to the press behind the desk, unlocked it, and came back with a folded sheet the size of a hand.

"Read it."

Kalen read it. It ran to two sentences. It thanked the Assessor of Ward Nine for his enquiry, stated that the assessment of the ward had been correctly struck and correctly entered, and remained his obedient servant.

"It does not mention the standard," Kalen said.

"No."

"It does not mention the variance either. It does not use the word anywhere on the page."

"It does not use the word." Marn took it back and folded it along its own crease. "It answers what I wrote, and it answers it correctly."

"That is not an answer to what you asked."

"It is an answer to what I wrote," Marn said. "That is the part I have had thirty years to look at."

"Then why did you not write the other question?"

"Because I did not have it." He put the sheet back in the press and turned the key on it. "I had a figure that was high. It took me another eleven years to learn that there was a line under it with nothing on the end of it, and I learned that because a tag came across this desk out of a bin with four lines on it instead of three."

"And you could not read the fourth."

"I have been in the ward service thirty-one years," Marn said, "and I have never been able to read one word of it in my life."

Kalen sat down on the hard chair without being asked, which he had never done in that office.

"You could have written again."

"I could have written again."

"You could have written to the ward. There is a board by the gate and four people in front of it every month."

"And said what?" It was not a challenge. Marn asked it the way you ask the price of a thing you have already decided not to buy. "That the figure is high? They know the figure is high. I had nothing to give them except a worry."

He put the schedule down.

"A man in this chair who hands nine thousand people a worry and no instrument to do anything with has not helped anybody. He has made himself lighter."

"So you carried it."

"I filed it," Marn said. "Which is what carrying is, in an office."

* * *

The rest took an hour and a half and was, in its way, the strangest hour and a half of Kalen's life, because for the whole of it Vessel Marn was on his side and could not have been more useful and did not appear to think it required a decision.

He gave up the schedules. All hundred and twenty, out of the press behind the desk, and the four before them that had come to him with the room. He wrote a note of the office's practice in his own hand and dated it, at the foot, in the old form with the crossed loop, and did it without being asked because he understood inside about a second and a half why that mattered.

He signed a statement of what the Assessor of Ward Nine did and did not do with the figure.

It ran to eleven lines. The office received the struck rate. The office entered it. The office applied it. The office had no instrument by which to alter it, and no Assessor of Ward Nine had ever been given one.

He wrote it in about four minutes and did not need to be told what any of it was for.

"That will cost you," Kalen said.

"It will not cost me anything. It is the truth and it is dull and it is in the schedule."

"It puts your name on a petition against your own office."

"It puts my name on eleven lines about filing," Marn said, and blotted them.

Kalen took the note and folded it into three and put it in his shirt with the rate sheet and the dock receipt and the rest, because he kept everything.

There was one more thing and he had been holding it since the desk.

"You said it arrives struck," he said. "Who strikes it?"

Marn put the pen down in the tray. Outside the window somebody in the street was calling a barrow through, and further off the fifth bell went, and neither of them moved for the length of it.

"I have never once been told," Marn said. "I have never once had to be."

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