Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The anteroom had eleven chairs and Kalen took the one nearest the window on the first morning because the light was better and never got it again.

The clerk on the inner door had a list and the list was the whole of him. He came out at the fourth bell, read four names off it, took four people through, and shut the door, and after that nothing whatever happened for two hours.

"Ashgrove," Kalen said, at the eighth bell.

"You are on the list."

"I have been on the list since the fourth bell."

"You are on the list," the clerk said, "and the deputy is engaged, and I will call you."

"Engaged with what?"

"With the office," said the clerk, and went back through the door, and that was the fullest answer Kalen got out of him in three days.

He was not there for the petition. That was the thing that made it worse.

The petition had a date and a room and it was going to happen on the eleventh whatever he did. He was there because a hearing needs the ward's certified copy of its own standing schedule.

The certified copy is issued by the Assessor's office. The Assessor's office was Vessel Marn's. Marn had said yes in an hour and a half, and could not sign it himself while a petition naming his office was open.

So it went to the deputy. The deputy was in the building. The deputy would see him.

He sat down.

There were eleven other people in that room and every one of them had been told the same three things.

He did the arithmetic on the first morning and then wished he had not. Four names at the fourth bell. Four at the eleventh. Four in the afternoon, if the afternoon went well. Twelve a day, against fourteen arriving.

The room was not a queue. It was a level, and it was rising.

* * *

By the middle of the second morning he had the room.

Eleven chairs, nine of them mended, and the mending done by three different hands. A boarded fireplace. A window with the putty gone on the bottom right. Eleven people on the first day, fourteen on the second, and about a third of them holding a wide ruled sheet with a column down the left about a thumb wide.

He looked at the man next to him for a while before he asked, because you do not ask a man about his paper.

"Is that an inventory?"

"It is a list of my own furniture," the man said. "They did it on Thursday. Two of them, very pleasant, and the one with the book asked me if I wanted a copy and I said yes, and he gave me one, and here it is."

"What did they say it was for?"

"For the record."

"Whose record?"

"He said the House keeps a record." The man turned the sheet over and turned it back. "It has got my mother's clock on it. He wrote down my mother's clock and the year on the face of it, and he was polite the whole time, and I said thank you to him at the door."

"Did they take anything?"

"They did not touch a thing. He asked me to open the press and I opened it, and he wrote down what was in it, and he shut it himself."

"Did he ask you your standing?"

"He knew it." The man thought about that for what looked like the first time. "He had it at the head of the page before he came up my step. He read my name back to me to check I spelt it the way he had it."

"Do you know who holds your paper?"

"Who holds my what?"

"Your paper," Kalen said.

"Is that a thing a man gets told?"

"It is printed on the bottom of a slip I saw last week."

"Then whoever had that slip is doing better than I am." The man folded the inventory into three and put it away. "I have been sitting here since Tuesday working out what I have got to complain about, and I will tell you where I have got to. Nowhere. They were kind to me and they wrote down my mother's clock."

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Kalen looked at the wide sheet with the ruled column and did not say anything, because there was nothing on it that was not true and nothing on it that anybody had done wrong.

The woman on the other side of the boarded fireplace had been in the room both days as well.

"How long have you been coming?" Kalen said.

"Since Assessment week."

"That is four months."

"It is four months and I have seen the deputy twice." She had a hand-barrow designated in error, and a docket that said so, and she kept the docket flat between two boards. "He is very good. He agrees with me. Then he writes to the office, and the office writes back to him."

"The office is this office."

"The office is this office," she said. "I put that to him the second time. He said yes, and then he said the letter has to go from the office to the office, and he was not being funny about it. I sat in the trap the whole way home and could not think of one thing to say."

"Ashgrove," the clerk said, at the second bell of the second day.

Kalen was halfway out of the chair before he understood that the clerk was reading his own list to himself.

"You are on it," the clerk said.

"I know I am on it."

"I am telling you because you asked yesterday. You are third."

It was the first useful thing anybody in that room had been told in two days, and eleven heads came up off eleven chairs to hear it.

The ward seal was on the wall over the boarded fireplace, cast in brass on a board, about the size of a dinner plate.

He had been looking at it since the first morning the way you look at anything that is in front of you for two hours at a stretch.

Brass, and the ward number in the middle, and a ring of script round the outside running right to left. Cast off a die, and the die had been sunk twice.

* * *

On the second afternoon he understood what he had been doing and it stopped him in the chair.

He had it. All of it.

The ring of script, right to left. The count of the teeth on the outer edge, which was thirty-one. The place at the eleventh tooth where the caster had let the metal fall short and somebody had dressed it back with a file. The ward number in the middle, sitting a hair off centre, because the die had been sunk twice.

He could have cut it. Not well, and not in brass, and not in a week. But he could have started, and he knew where he would start, and he had known that for about a day and a half without noticing.

He went over it once more to be certain, the way you check a sum you would rather have got wrong.

Thirty-one teeth. The dressed one at eleven. The ring of script, and the four words of it he could not read, which he could nevertheless have cut, because a man who copies maker's marks for four years learns to make a shape a long time before he learns to mean it.

That was the difficulty and it took him about a minute to find. He had spent four years teaching himself to reproduce writing he could not read.

There is one trade that skill belongs to and it is not reclamation.

Nobody had put a pencil to paper. That was the part he sat with. He had not decided to remember it and there was nothing in the room to say he had, and there never would be, because the entire thing had happened inside a head that could not stop reading things.

That is what I am for, apparently.

Kalen got up and went and stood at the window and looked at a yard with four barrels in it until his hands were his own again.

He did not stop being able to see it. It stayed, the way the Steady stayed, whole and available and asking nothing. He had a shed board at the house with eleven hundred maker's marks copied onto the inside of it, and he had told himself for four years that copying marks was a trade skill, and it was, and this was the same skill with the fence taken down.

At the eleventh bell the clerk came out and read four names and none of them was his.

* * *

The deputy saw him on the third afternoon for six minutes and signed the certified copy in four of them.

"Quill's," he said. "How is she?"

"She is well."

"She had a warrant renewal off this office in the spring and it was the cleanest application I have had in a year." He blotted it. "Is this for the petition?"

"It is."

"Then I will date it today and not Monday. Monday would cost you a day at the far end, and there is no reason you should pay for my Sunday." He put the seal to it. "There. That is the whole of it. Three days for four minutes, and I am sorry about the three days, and there is nothing I can do about the three days."

"Why not?"

"Because I see four people at the fourth bell," the deputy said, "and there are fourteen of them on the stairs by the fifth."

Kalen came out into the anteroom with the ward's own schedule certified under the ward's own seal, which was the last thing the petition needed, and stopped two steps into the room.

Nessa was in the chair by the window.

She had her coat done up to the throat and her hands in her lap.

She had been crying at some point in the last hour and had finished doing it, which was worse than finding her in the middle of it.

She was twelve. She had never once come to an office in her life. She did not go north of Cinder Row without saying where she was going, and she had not said, because there had been nobody in the room to say it to.

"How long have you been here?" Kalen said.

"Since the sixth bell."

"Nessa."

"The man on the door would not tell me if you were in the building." She was steady. She had got steady before he came out and he could hear the work in it. "So I sat down, because that is what you do, and I have been watching that clerk take four people through that door for two hours, and I have worked out that he says the same eleven words every time."

"He does."

"I know he does. I counted them."

"Does Ovel's know where you are?"

"Ovel's told me where you were," Nessa said. "She has known for two days. You have been talking about this office to a woman who sells us ham, and you have not once mentioned it upstairs."

"That is not what happened."

"It is what happened from this chair."

"I have been sitting in a room for three days. There has been nothing to say."

"Then say nothing to me and not to her."

She took her hands out of her lap.

There was a slip in them, a small one, printed, about the size of a docket, folded once and gone soft along the fold from being held.

"A man gave me this at the door of Ovel's," she said. "He was very kind about it."

"When?"

"This morning. He had a bag of them. He gave one to Marra Sull's boy and one to the Ferring girl and one to me."

"He knew your name."

"He asked me my name, and then he asked me how I spelt it," Nessa said, "and he wrote it on before he handed it over, so that it would be right."

She held it out.

It had her name on it and a date.

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