Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The slate was wet and the beam had gone a hand's width out of true, and the chandler wanted it in and bound by dark.

Kalen lay along the roof pitch with his boots against the batten and read the beam from six inches away.

Doss had the rope round the stack and a turn round his own forearm. He had said one word since the ladder and the word was "Ready."

It was a Hold Fast in a beam over a loading hatch. The beam was sound.

The seating at the wall end was not. Sixty years of rain had come off a bad flashing straight into the pocket, and the pocket had gone to meal, and the Pattern had been holding a beam in a socket that was not there any more.

Take the Hold Fast off in the ordinary way and the beam goes down the hatch with whatever is under it.

"What is under it?" Kalen said.

"Tallow. Forty barrels and a boy counting them."

"Move the boy."

Doss did not answer, because Doss had moved the boy before he went up the ladder.

"Chain," Kalen said.

"It is a rope."

"Rope will do. Put it round the beam and not the stack, and take it up until you feel it, and then stop."

Doss did it. There was a moment when the rope came up and the beam moved half an inch toward them and the whole roof said something under Kalen's chest, and then it was quiet and it was just a beam on a rope on a wet Tuesday.

He got the three hooks set on the slope, which is a thing nobody does.

It is a thing nobody does because a hook wants a bench and a bench is flat. He had the first one wedged against a batten and the second against the stack and the third hanging off its own weight, and the three of them held the shape between them without any part of him in it at all.

Fourteen minutes. Both hands free the whole way, and nothing to pay at the end of it.

He put the Hold Fast in the tin and wired the lid.

Then he lay there for a moment because his hands were shaking and he did not want to go down a ladder with hands that were doing that.

Slate holds water long after the rain has stopped. That is the whole of what there is to know about working on one. Everybody knows it. It kills two men a year in Kentra and always has.

From the roof you could see most of the top end of the ward.

The gate, and the board beside it. The burnt end going away grey. Cinder Row with the gantry line over it, forty heads in a row, about nine of them wanting an afternoon from somebody.

There was a cart in the next street with a Sedge stamp on the tail. A man stood at a door with a book open on his forearm. Further along, on a door frame at about the height of a man's hand, there was a chalk mark.

It was not a designation. Designations go on the board at the gate and they go up in ink.

He counted the doors between the cart and the chalk. Eleven. He noticed he was doing it, and stopped, and came down the ladder.

The chandler paid twenty-eight.

Kalen had asked for thirty and he had asked for thirty because Doss's day had to come out of it, and he had worked that out on the walk over and had still had to make himself say the figure. Six went to Doss at the foot of the ladder in front of the chandler, which is where a wage is paid.

That left twenty-two. The lodgement was twenty-five.

He made it up out of the tin at home. Three marks in copper, counted twice on the table, because Nessa was sitting opposite him and watching him do it and had not said one word about the roof.

* * *

Sabra let him get the whole of it out before she said anything, which should have told him.

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"No," she said.

"Sabra."

"No. Sit down." She took the pipe out and put it on the desk, which she did about four times a year. "You want a Freehand's name on a petition against the ward," Sabra said. "You want mine."

"I want yours because it is worth more than anybody else's I could get."

"It is worth a warrant, a house, a yard, four hands on the books, and a press in that corner with other people's property in it." She said it flatly, the way she said everything. "Do you know what a petition is?"

"A sheet of paper, a counter, a clerk and a box."

"That is what it looks like."

"Then tell me what it is and I will pay for it."

"It is not priced," Sabra said, "and I will give it you anyway. You will not like the shape of it."

She got up and went to the window and stood with her back to him, which he had never once seen her do.

"A petition does not fail," she said. "That is the first thing." Sabra waited. "People say a petition failed." Sabra took her time about the rest of it. "Nothing fails. It is heard, every fact entered, every fact correct, then disposed of on a ground that has nothing to do with the facts. Nobody lies to you. Nobody has to."

"How many have you watched?"

"Enough."

"That is not a number."

"No," Sabra said. "It is not."

"That is not a reason not to file it."

"I have not got to the reason." She turned round. "The second thing is that a petition is not a piece of paper. It is a name. The paper goes in a box and the name goes in a book, and after that the name is a thing that exists, and it exists in offices where you will never stand and cannot answer. And every one of those offices is entitled to have a view about a man who has made himself a petitioner, and none of them has to write to you about it."

"That is the second list."

Sabra stopped.

"Emmer Loy has a thin book under his counter," Kalen said. "Petitioners. My name is the only one in it."

"Then you already know."

"I know there is a book. I do not know what it is for."

"Nobody knows what it is for," said Sabra. "That is what makes it work." Sabra sat down again and put both hands on the desk. "The last of it, and the only part I would put money on." Sabra did not go on straight away. "The rate will not move. Not this year, not for a petition. You will move. You come out with a Line worth something and a name worth nothing, and four years to find out which you carry."

"You have watched this happen."

"Yes."

"To whom?"

"I will not endorse it," Sabra said.

"Sabra."

"I will not endorse it," Sabra said, in exactly the same voice, and picked the pipe back up, and that was the end of it.

* * *

Hesper Vane was on her folding stool in the office doorway with her own lamp on the flags beside her, out of the way of the work, where she had been since the spring.

She let him get halfway across the yard.

"Twenty-five is the lodgement," she said. "For the record, the endorsement is separate and it is a fee, and I will tell you mine before you ask so that we do not do the dance. Forty, on credit, payable when it is determined."

Kalen stood in front of her with the sacking roll under his arm.

"At what rate?"

"At none."

"Everything in this ward runs at four a day."

"Four a day is what the ward charges everybody for everything," Hesper said. "I did not set it and I will not pretend to be embarrassed by it, and I am selling you a name, not lending you money. Do you want the endorsement?"

"You are a collector."

"I am a Freehand collector, which is why my name is worth having on it."

"You work for the people I am petitioning about."

"I work for the collection service of the Accord. The Sedge Counting House holds this ward's paper and I hold a warrant, and those are two different things, and one day you are going to need to know the difference." She got a folded sheet out of the satchel and a pencil and did not open the compartment she never opened in front of him. "Do you want it or not?"

"Why would you sign it?"

Hesper looked up at him with the eye that worked and the one the colour of dishwater.

"Because it is going to fail," she said.

Kalen did not answer that.

"I have read your case. Quill let me read it and I would have read it anyway. It is the best piece of work anybody has put in front of me in nine years and every number in it is right, and it is going to fail, and you are not going to believe that until it has happened to you." She wrote a line and did not look up. "So you can spend twenty-five marks and forty of my fee finding it out this year, in a room with four people in it and a tea shop underneath, or you can find it out in about six years, when you have got something you cannot get back on the table instead."

"That is the reason."

"That is the reason. I would rather you learned it while the price is money." She turned the sheet round. "I am not on your side, Ashgrove. I am going to be standing in that yard with a satchel the day after this goes wrong, the same as always. Sign there, under mine."

He read it. It was four lines and it did what it said. Endorsement by a Freehand of the collection service, on the fee stated, of the petition of a Bonded of Ward Nine.

Her hand was small and level and did not slope. She had written the fee in words and then again in figures, which is what a person does who has been argued with about a number.

He thought about Sabra with her back to the window.

Then he signed it, and the pencil went through the paper a little at the last stroke, because the sheet was on his knee and there was nothing under it.

* * *

He lodged it at the counter at the second bell and paid the twenty-five in coin, twenty-two of it out of a wet roof and three of it out of the tin on the table at home.

Loy counted it, wrote the receipt, entered the form number, and gave him a date.

"The eleventh," he said. "The room above the tea shop on Fetter Street. The third bell."

"That is fourteen days."

"That is twenty days. It is quick, for a hearing."

Kalen came out onto the step with the receipt in his hand.

He had borrowed the fee off a collector to bring a case against the thing the collector was paid to enforce, and there was no version of that he could put to himself in a way that came out clean, and he had done it anyway with his eyes open.

He put the receipt in his shirt with the rest.

A Sedge cart went past the end of the street with two men on the board of it. One of them lifted a hand to somebody in a doorway.

The somebody lifted a hand back.

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