Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The gantry chain on the Cinder Row loading dock let go at twenty past two in the afternoon, and Kalen was forty feet away with a barrow of stripped collar iron, which is why he was the one who got there.

He heard it before he saw it. A chain going is not a dramatic sound. It is a short flat crack and then a lot of ordinary noise happening faster than ordinary noise should.

The loading frame came down on its side across the dock. It was bound gear, a big double-jawed thing for bundling rope, and the man underneath it was face down with the near jaw across his back below the shoulder blades, and he was alive, and the frame was still trying to close.

That was the part. The frame did not know it had fallen. Somebody had bound Bind Fast into it forty years ago and the Pattern had one instruction and it was executing it, slowly, the way a screw turns, with about four hundredweight of iron behind it.

Kalen put the barrow down.

There were nine people on the dock. Two of them were running for the ward watch, which was correct and which would take eleven minutes. The rest were standing.

"Is he breathing?"

"He is breathing."

"Then leave him. You move a man with a back like that and you finish him."

That was a carter, and the carter was right, and the carter was working from a rule that had been made for men trapped under things that had stopped moving.

"It is closing," Kalen said.

"What?"

"The frame. It is closing. It has a Hold Fast in it and it is halfway through the instruction." He was already moving. "It has been closing since it came down."

Somebody said, "How do you know that," and nobody answered, and by then he was at the jaw.

He got his shoulder under the upper arm of it and set his feet and did the arithmetic, because he could not stop doing the arithmetic, and the arithmetic said no.

Ward, draw fourteen. Yield one. Against four hundredweight of closing iron he would get maybe six seconds a draw, and he would need three draws to hold the jaw open long enough for two men to pull the man clear, and he had, at that precise moment, a Balance of minus four hundred and sixteen.

He was already past. Everything he spent from here was Overdraw. Three draws was forty-two marks over.

Under fifty was a First. Everyone had had a First.

"You," Kalen said, to a carter he had never met. "And you. When it lifts, take his coat, not his arms."

"It is not going to lift."

"When it lifts."

He drew.

Ward came up the way Ward always came up, a hard cold pressure across the front of him like standing into wind, and the jaw stopped, and Kalen felt the whole weight of it arrive on his shoulders and hold there, and something behind his eyes went white at the edges.

He said, "Now," and the carter did not move, and then the carter moved.

They got the man's coat. They got the man about six inches. The jaw came down on Kalen's Ward and the Ward held and he burned the second draw and the third and got his heels back and the man came out the rest of the way with his boots dragging, and Kalen let go, and four hundredweight of iron closed on nothing at all with a sound like a door.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

He sat down on the dock.

COLLECTION: FIRST GRADE

Overdraw of 31 marks assessed against

Ashgrove, Kalen.

Settled.

Thirty-one, not forty-two. He noticed that, sitting on the boards with his head down between his knees and blood coming out of his nose onto the wood in fat separate drops, and he could not think of a single reason why.

Then it hit him properly.

A First Collection is not pain. That is the thing nobody tells you the first time. It is heat, an enormous unreasonable heat that arrives from the inside all at once, as though the Accord has taken the difference out in temperature, and then it is the strength going out of you in one long slide, so that sitting becomes lying, and you do not decide to lie down, you simply notice at some point that you have.

Kalen lay on the boards of the Cinder Row loading dock and looked at the underside of the gantry.

He counted the bolts. Twenty-two on the cross-span. He got to twenty-two twice and could not remember whether it was the same twenty-two.

And then, somewhere in the third or fourth minute, while the heat was going out of him and the ward watch was still four streets away, he noticed a thing that made no sense.

He could read the frame.

Not could-have-read. Was reading. Lying flat on his back eleven feet from it with his eyes half shut, he could see the shape of the Pattern in the double-jawed frame the way he normally saw a maker's mark after an hour on a bench: where it sat, how it had been laid in, the place where somebody had repaired it in a hurry about twenty years ago and left the join proud. He could see it the way you see a word.

He had never in his life read a bound object at eleven feet.

He turned his head. There was a bound handcart on the far side of the dock and he read that too, in about a second and a half, and a strapped crate with a Sound grade Carry in it, and the watchman's baton coming up the road, all of it laid out and legible and slightly too bright, like a page held closer to a lamp than you would hold it.

Then it faded, over about a minute, the way the heat faded, and by the time the watch got to him the frame across the dock was just a frame again.

Kalen lay on the boards and thought about that for a long time.

The Accord had charged him thirty-one marks and shown him something, and he could not work out whether that was a mistake, a mercy, or a price list.

The watch arrived at eleven minutes, which was creditable, and a watchman crouched down by his head and said, "Can you hear me."

"Yes."

"What is your name."

"Ashgrove. Kalen. Ward Nine, Bonded."

"You have had a Collection."

"A First."

"Right." The watchman wrote it down, because it went in the book, because everything went in the book. "You want to be more careful. That is four hundredweight."

"It was three."

"What?"

"Three hundredweight," Kalen said, to the underside of the gantry. "The jaws are hollow above the pin. You can see it from here."

The watchman looked at him for a second, and then stood up and went to deal with the other man, who was the one with the actual injury, which was correct.

* * *

They put him on a cart with the other man and took them both up Cinder Row, and Nessa came out to the step and looked at the two of them lying side by side under the same blanket and said, "Which one is my brother," in a completely level voice, and the carter laughed and then stopped laughing.

The man's name was never established. He was carried into Ovel's shop and given brandy and a chair, and his wife came, and at some point in the evening the two of them left by the back way to avoid the ward watch, because a man crushed by a bound frame on a Sedge dock is a claim, and a claim is an inquiry, and an inquiry is thirty days of not working.

He did not thank Kalen. There was no moment in which he could have. That is how it goes on a Tuesday.

What he left, in the pocket of the coat they had cut off him and which ended up in a heap by the shop door and then, because nobody wanted it, in Kalen's arms, was eleven marks in copper, a pipe, a key, and a Sedge Counting House receipt.

Kalen sat on the step with the coat across his knees and could not stand up, and read the receipt because it was the only thing to do that did not require standing up.

It was a nothing. A dock receipt for four bales of cord, stamped, signed, dated a fortnight ago. In the top corner it carried a serial in a running series, the way Sedge stamped everything, seven digits and a ward letter.

He put it in his shirt with his sister's rate sheet, because he kept everything.

Then he lay on the step with his head against the door frame and let Nessa be furious at him.

"Thirty-one marks," she said.

"Yes."

"On top of four hundred and twelve, at four a day, with nineteen days on the sheet and thirty on the notice."

"Yes."

"Do you want to know what that is?"

"No."

"It is a day and a half," Nessa said. "You bought that man a day and a half of my brother, and he has gone out the back of Ovel's to avoid the watch, and he does not know your name."

"No."

She sat down on the step next to him. Up the road somebody was putting the loading frame back on its feet, badly, with a lot of shouting.

"Would you do it again," she said.

"Yes."

"I know," said Nessa. "I was not asking. I was checking whether you would lie to me about it."

She did it efficiently and at length and never once told him he had been wrong.

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