Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The door head was carrying the wall and the wall did not know it yet.

Kalen had his shoulder against the jamb at the second bell of the morning, in the burnt end, with the lamp on the step.

Doss was on the other side of the opening. The woman who had knocked at Tallow Street the night before stood in the road behind them in a shawl and did not say anything.

Her house shared the wall. That was the whole of the business. The empty one had been empty eight years and somebody had come on Thursday and written down what was in it, politely, in a wide ruled book, and yesterday two men had come back and taken out the fittings, correctly, with a docket, and the door head had gone into the cart with everything else.

The Hold Fast in it had been holding the head, and the head had been holding four courses of brick over an opening, and the opening had a bearing of about nothing at all because the works had built these to a price in a hurry in the year they went up.

"They will not have known," Kalen said.

"No," Doss said.

"It was on a docket. It was theirs to take."

"Yes."

The prop was a length of gantry iron off the yard and it was four inches short, which they found out in the dark with the lamp on the step.

So Kalen held it.

He set his feet in the doorway of somebody else's house and put his shoulder under the head and drew Ward, and the cold pressure came up across the front of him the way it always came up, like standing into wind, and the four courses stopped moving and sat down on him instead.

Doss worked. Doss did not hurry and did not look up, and he got the packing in on the near side and knocked the prop over onto its foot and drove the folding wedges from underneath, three, four, five, and each one went in with a flat sound that Kalen felt in his teeth.

Kalen counted, because he could not stop counting.

At nine he was still holding. That was the figure he had carried around inside himself since he was fifteen: nine seconds, at three hundred and forty of Line with four hundred marks of arrears on him, and after nine seconds you are somebody's problem. He had said it out loud to a Third Hand in the strip shed on a Tuesday in the spring.

He got to fourteen.

He got to fourteen and let go on his own terms, standing up, with his hands where he wanted them, and stepped back out into the road and put his palms on his knees.

The wall stayed where it was.

"That is a prop and a promise," Doss said. "It wants a mason."

"It wants a mason." Kalen straightened up. "Aro Belk is on Fetter Street and he starts at the fourth bell and he will do it for the ward rate. I will go by on my way."

The woman in the shawl asked what it was going to cost her and Kalen told her, which was the mason's day and nothing else, and she asked twice more in different words because she did not believe him, and then went in and shut her door.

Fourteen. He walked up the road turning that over the way you turn a coin.

Nobody had told him. There was no notice for it and no block and nothing on the sheet, and a man could go a year without finding out that the number he had been running his whole life on was five seconds out of date. He had held four courses of brick over an eight foot opening for as long as it takes to lace a boot, and that morning the same man could not have done it, and there was no line anywhere that said so.

You have to weigh yourself. Nobody weighs you.

* * *

He washed to the elbow at the rope-walk trough, put on the shirt Nessa had done the collar of, and got to Fetter Street at ten past the second bell of the afternoon, with brick dust still in the seam of his shoulder.

The tea shop was a tea shop. There were four tables in it and a woman at the back doing something with a kettle, and the stairs went up along the side wall behind a curtain, and the whole of the staircase smelled of scalded milk.

The room above it had a table, six chairs, and a window that had not been opened since the summer.

Four people. That was the ward's hearing on two hundred and seventeen years.

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A hearing officer out of the district office, a man called Verrin, thin, about fifty, who arrived with a case and put a jug of water on the table and apologised for the room. A clerk of the sitting, who wrote. Hallam Reeve for the Sedge Counting House, thirty, in good grey, who came in exactly on the bell and shook hands with Kalen at the door as though they had been introduced at a supper. And Kalen, with a sacking roll and a tin box and a cardboard case tied with tape.

Vessel Marn sat on a chair against the wall, outside the table, in the good coat.

"This is a petition of a Bonded of Ward Nine, endorsed," Verrin said. "Touching the assessed rate of the ward. Mr Ashgrove, it is your petition and you will put it. Take your time and do not hurry for me. I have got the room until the sixth bell."

"Thank you."

"Do you have an advocate?"

"No."

"Do you wish to have one?"

"I have got the papers," Kalen said, "and nobody else can read them."

He was good.

That was the thing he took away from it, and he was going to be a long time working out what to do with it.

He had been afraid of that room for a fortnight. He stood up in it and was better than he had ever been at anything in his life, and it took an hour and forty minutes.

He put the standard on the table first, because the standard is the only thing in the case that is not an argument.

"Fourteen point nought," he said. "That is on the face of every tag the Accord has ever struck. It prints the standard next to the assessment. It has done that for nine hundred years and nobody has ever had to ask for it."

"And the assessment."

"Seventeen point five in 987. Seventeen point six this quarter."

"And the difference."

"The difference has a line of its own," Kalen said, "and the line under it is where the difference goes, and there is nothing after the dots."

"Nothing at all."

"Nothing at all, in 987, and nothing at all this quarter, and nothing at all in every one of the eight hundred and sixty-eight quarters in between."

He did not say one word about what the blank meant. A man who tells a hearing what a blank means has stopped showing them the blank.

Then he opened the tin and laid out three tags, and Verrin picked up the one from 1102 and held it under the window himself.

"This is brass," Verrin said.

"It is brass. There are eight hundred and sixty-four of them in that case and they run unbroken from 987 to this quarter. Twenty-two bundles by decade. Every one of them carries the same variance figure and every one of them has nothing on the disposition line."

"How did you come by them?"

"Under contract, out of the sealed floors of the Ashfall works, entered on the manifest, weighed at the house, and bought back at scrap by me from my employer. The entry is in the house book in her hand and I have brought a copy."

"That is thorough."

"It is eleven marks and a half of brass," Kalen said, "and I did not want anybody spending an afternoon on how I got it."

Verrin wrote that down as well.

He took them through the schedules after that. All hundred and twenty-four of them, and the crossed loop, and what it proved.

"It proves the figure was in the book before Vessel Marn sat down at the desk," he said. "It does not prove anything else. It does not prove where the money goes. It does not prove that anybody took it. I want that in the record in my own words rather than in somebody's cross-examination."

Verrin's pen stopped for a moment.

"Why?"

"Because I have got eight hundred and sixty-four objects and one clerk's handwriting, and that will carry the date. It will not carry a theft, and I have not alleged one."

He gave them the index last. Days down the left, three columns across the top, ruled with the edge of a knife.

Verrin asked eleven questions and Kalen answered all of them.

Two were hard. One was very hard.

"The Levy went up a tenth in the spring," Verrin said. "Is that tenth wrong as well?"

"No."

"You are certain."

"It is a current adjustment. It is struck every year against the ward's own returns and this year it came in at a tenth, and it is correctly struck, and I can show you the working on it standing up."

"Show me."

He showed him, in four lines, standing up.

"You are telling me against yourself," Verrin said.

"I am telling you the tenth is right so that you will believe me about the three and a half."

At no point in the hour and forty minutes did Hallam Reeve say anything at all.

He did not object. He did not question a document. Verrin put the standard rate table to him.

"The House does not contest the figures," Reeve said.

Verrin asked whether the House wished to be heard on the disposition line.

"Not on this petition."

Both times he was pleasant about it. Both times Kalen felt the floor go a little further away.

And he wrote.

He wrote most of the way through, on good paper, in a small even hand. He turned a page at about the fortieth minute and again at the eightieth.

Once, while Kalen was explaining how he had dated a hand off a crossed loop, Reeve stopped writing and looked up at him for perhaps two seconds. Then he went back down and wrote for a while longer.

Verrin closed it at the fourth bell.

"I will have the finding to the ward office in three days," he said. "Mr Ashgrove, you have put a case better than most people who are paid to. I want that in the record, please."

The clerk wrote it in the record.

* * *

Kalen got the case tied and the tin shut and let Marn go down the stairs ahead of him, and then stood at the top of them with the sacking roll under his arm until Hallam Reeve came out of the room.

"That was very good work," Reeve said.

"You did not contest one number."

Reeve did not treat that as a question, so Kalen waited him out.

"No."

"Not the standard. Not the variance. Not the date on it, and the date is the whole thing, and I brought a hundred and twenty-four schedules up two flights of stairs to prove the date."

"They are all correct," Reeve said. "I read your case on Thursday. It was sent over and I sat with it for an evening, and there is nothing in it I would want to be on the other side of."

He said it the way a man says a thing he has no reason to hide, and put his hat on, and went down two steps and stopped.

"Mr Ashgrove."

"Yes."

"Do get some tea downstairs. It is better than it has any right to be."

Kalen stood at the top of the stairs above a tea shop and listened to a Chartered advocate go down them without hurrying.

Three pages. He had watched the man turn two of them and start a third, and there had been no argument in that room to write down, and no witness worth a note, and no number in dispute anywhere in it.

He wanted to know what was on those pages.

He wanted it more than he wanted the finding.

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