Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

Verrin read it out standing up, because there were four of them in the room and it would have been strange to sit down for eleven lines.

It had taken three days. Kalen had worked all three of them and had been at the tea shop door at the second bell of the third one, which was an hour early, and had gone and stood at the end of Fetter Street instead of going up.

FINDING OF THE SITTING

Ward Nine. Petition of Ashgrove, K., Bonded.

The facts stated are found proved in every particular.

No fact stated is contested by any party.

The conduct of the Assessor is referred.

The balance of the petition stands over.

The room smelled of scalded milk, the same as it had on the eleventh. Somebody downstairs was moving chairs about.

"Proved in every particular," Kalen said.

"In every particular. That is not a form of words. I have struck out two of your paragraphs and put them back in because I wanted them in the record twice." Verrin folded his copy. "Nobody has done that in front of me before."

"Thank you."

"You should have the finding on paper inside three days and the ward office will hold it."

"And the rate."

"The balance of the petition stands over."

"That is not an answer to what I asked," Kalen said, and Vessel Marn, in his chair against the wall, made a small noise that was not a laugh.

"No," Verrin said. "It is the answer I have got. The finding on the facts goes up. The prayer for the correction goes with it. It is not for me to strike a ward rate and I have never once had that in my hand."

"Then who has?"

"That is a very good question and I have been sitting here for two days looking at the schedule for the answer to it." He said it plainly, without embarrassment, which Kalen was going to think about for a long time. "There is a second matter."

The second matter took four minutes.

The office of the Assessor of Ward Nine kept a fee book. In the fee book, in the Assessor's own hand, going back a very long way, were entries for a mark taken on a certified copy where the schedule allows nothing to be taken.

About eleven a week, for thirty years.

The conduct was referred, and the office was vacated at the close of the sitting, and Verrin read that part in exactly the voice he had read the other part in, because it was the same document and there is only one voice for a document.

Marn did not move in his chair, and he had plainly known before he came up the stairs, which took Kalen about two seconds to see and a good deal longer to put down.

Kalen sat with his hands on the table.

"I did not put that in my petition," he said.

"No."

"I did not know about it. It is not in my case anywhere. I would not have put it in if I had known, because it has got nothing to do with the rate."

"It came out of the file," Verrin said.

"Whose file?"

"The office's file. It was already in it." He put the papers into the case and shut it. "Mr Ashgrove, I am not going to pretend to you that I am pleased about the shape of this."

* * *

He walked back into the ward because there was no cart going that way and because he did not want one.

Forty minutes. Past the rope-walk, past the tally shop, past a door on Cinder Row with a chalk mark on the frame at about the height of a man's hand, which had not been there on the eleventh.

The board by the gate had four people in front of it and Kalen made five.

WARD NINE: STANDING NOTICE

Levy assessed ................ 17.6

Assessment of N. Ashgrove in .. 203 days

Seventeen point six.

He stood there with a finding in his coat that said every fact he had stated was proved in every particular.

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Then he looked at the number all those facts were about. It had not moved a hair. It was not going to move when the paper came, either.

The old man from the cooperage was at the far end of the board, where he always was, in front of a notice he had never been able to read. He came on the first of the month and he stood there for a while and then he went home. Nobody had ever established what he thought was on it.

Marra Sull was at his elbow with her hands in her sleeves.

"Was that today?" she said.

"That was today."

"Did you win?"

Kalen looked at the board.

"Yes," he said.

* * *

The Assessor's office had two men in it carrying a press down the stairs.

Kalen went up past them with the box of schedules on his shoulder. Marn had come out of the tea shop with it under one arm and had got about eighty yards up Fetter Street, and had then stopped and put it down on a wall, and had not said anything when Kalen picked it up.

It weighed about forty pounds. A hundred and twenty-four quarters of a ward, in foolscap, four columns, the fourth one empty.

Marn was packing the bad bag.

He did it the way he did everything, one thing at a time and in an order.

The inkwell. The pen. The stamp went into a cloth first and then into the bag. He took the good coat off the back of the door, folded it along the shoulder seam, and put that in on top.

Kalen had watched him pack that bag once before, in a cold canteen, in front of forty children and a folding table. It had taken the same length of time.

"You will want the fee book," he said.

"They have got the fee book."

"They have had the fee book since Thursday." Marn put his gloves in his pocket. "It has been on that shelf for thirty years. Every line in it is in my hand and there is not one of them that is not the truth. I never wrote a false entry in my life."

"You wrote all of them."

"I wrote all of them," Marn said.

Kalen put the box down on the desk that was not Marn's any more.

"Eleven a week," he said.

"About eleven. It was a mark for a certified copy out of hours, and the schedule does not allow it, and I took it, and every man who came to that door out of hours knew he was paying it and paid it and went home with his copy." He looked round the room once. "Do not do the sum in front of me."

Kalen had already done it. He put it down and did not look at it again.

"Nine years," Marn said. "That book has been sitting where anybody could pick it up for nine years, and it has been picked up, and read, and put back. I know that because the spine is broken at the year I was written to about a different thing entirely, and I did not break it there."

"They kept it."

"They kept it. It cost them nothing to keep." He tried the bag's buckle and it did not go, the way it never went, and he left it. "That is not a complaint, Ashgrove. I earned it a mark at a time and I have no argument to make about the removal. I am telling you the shape of the thing because you are the only person who has come into this office in thirty years who is going to want the shape of it."

He stood in the middle of the floor for a moment with the bag in one hand, and looked round the room, and did not appear to find anything in it that was his.

"You have a pan at that house," he said.

"We have got a pan."

"It runs heavy."

"Four in a hundred."

"Four in a hundred. And everybody corrects for it."

"Everybody corrects for it," Kalen said.

"By feel. Without discussing it. A hand comes into that yard at fourteen and watches the man in front of him slide the weight a hair to the left, and he does it too, and in a fortnight he is not doing it on purpose any more." Marn said it without any heat at all, in the voice he used for the schedule. "And every figure comes out right at the bottom of the column. That is the part nobody says out loud. The figures are right. They have been right for two hundred years. You could take that pan apart and find the fault in an afternoon, and nobody would thank you, because there is nothing wrong with the numbers."

"That is a scale."

"That is a ward," Marn said. "Nine thousand people correcting all their lives for a thing that runs heavy, and calling that working."

Kalen stood in an office with a box on the desk and did not have anything to put next to that.

"They are not removing me because the pan runs heavy," Marn said. "They are removing me because I put a thumb on it for a mark."

He picked the bag up properly and went to the door and stopped.

"You asked me who strikes it," he said. "I have thought about that since. I have been in the ward service thirty-one years, and I have never met one person who could tell me, and I have never once met anybody who thought that was strange."

Then he went out, and down the stairs past the two men with the press, and Kalen heard him say something courteous to them on the landing.

* * *

There was somebody at the desk.

He had come in behind Kalen at some point without making any noise about it. He was going through the shelf with the schedules on it, taking each one down, looking at the head of it, and putting it back in the same place, which almost nobody does.

Forties, in a grey coat that was plain and good, with a case on the floor beside him and the strap done up.

He had been in the room an hour and there was nothing on the desk, which was the thing Kalen noticed first and then could not stop noticing. A man takes a room by putting something on the desk. There was a blotter and an empty tray and nothing else on it at all.

"Ashgrove," he said. "The reclamation house. You catalogued the back room."

"That was done."

"Eight hundred and forty articles against a certificate for six hundred." He put a schedule back. "Your figure is the right one. I counted the second shelf this morning."

"Nobody has ever counted it."

"Somebody has now." He came round the desk and put his hand out and Kalen took it. "Ilve Karrow. I am the Assessor of Ward Nine from this afternoon and I have been here about an hour, and I am going to be a nuisance to everybody for a fortnight, and then I am going to be useful."

"You have got a certified copy of mine on that shelf."

"It is held. It is out of date as of the close of the sitting, because the office that issued it is vacated, and it will be re-issued for you this week." Karrow wrote something on a slip without sitting down. "There is no fee. There has never been a fee for that and there is not going to be one now."

Kalen stood in the middle of the office and looked at the case on the floor with the strap on it, and at the stamp in the wax on the flap of it, and read it, because he could not stop reading things.

"Where have you come from?" he said.

"The Counting House," said Ilve Karrow. "Sedge."

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