Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The gantry head was eleven feet above Cinder Row and the pin was the wrong pin.

Kalen had one boot on the cross-brace and one arm through it, and the length of the Row going about its morning underneath him, and Doss on the ladder below with the tin. It was a Sound grade Carry in the head, slipped about a third, and the pin holding the sheave was a farrier's pin somebody had put in during the winter because the right one had gone.

"It will hold," Doss said.

"It will hold for me. It will not hold for a load."

"Whose is it?"

"The ward's."

"Then nobody will pay for it."

"No."

"Then write it on the ticket and come down."

"I am writing it on the ticket."

"You have written it on four tickets."

"I have written it on nine," Kalen said. "Somebody keeps the tickets."

He wrote it with the pencil in his teeth, took the Carry out clean in seven minutes with the three hooks set, and came down the ladder with brick dust in his collar.

Forty gantry heads on that line.

He had looked up at nine of them since the spring. Every one of them had something in it that a man with an afternoon could put right. Nobody had an afternoon.

The chain that let go under this line in the spring had come down onto a Sedge clerk's back, and Kalen had held it off him for three draws and paid thirty-one marks for the privilege, and the man had gone out of the back of Ovel's without leaving a name.

* * *

It all settled in the yard at the fourth bell, the way house credit does. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then the whole of it arriving while you are standing with a tin under your arm.

NOTICE OF AWARD

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

Costs of the petitioner allowed at 111.

Lodgement of 25 returned.

NOTICE OF SETTLEMENT

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

House service, four weeks, credited.

Settled.

Then a third one, which he had not expected and did not understand until he had read the head of it twice.

The audit of the vacated office had gone through the fee book. It had also gone through everything else, because that is what an audit is.

It had found that the catalogue of the back room was certified at nine marks a night where the ward schedule allows eleven. Nine nights. Two a night. Eighteen marks, paid out without anybody being asked for it.

Kalen stood in the yard with three notices and worked out, in about four seconds, that the only figure in the whole of Ward Nine that his petition had actually corrected was his own wage for the spring.

He laughed once, badly, and Brem looked round at him from the sorting rack.

"What," Brem said.

"Nothing."

"You have been standing there four minutes."

"They have paid me eighteen marks for the spring."

"That is good."

"It is very good," Kalen said, and put the notices in his coat.

His sheet had said one thousand two hundred and fifty on the night the finding came. It said one thousand three hundred and twenty when he opened it in the shed that night, which was the largest week his Line had ever had, and which had been earned two thirds on a gantry and a roof and a hill and one third in a room above a tea shop.

A hundred and fifty-four marks in coin.

He was, standing in that yard with brick dust in his collar, the richest he had been in his adult life, and he knew it while it was happening, which almost never happens to anybody.

Forty went to Hesper across the office counter in front of Sabra, and Hesper counted it twice because the procedure says count it where the debtor can see, and entered it, and gave him the endorsement receipt back with paid on it in her own hand.

"That was quick," she said.

"It was awarded."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"It was awarded because you were right." She put the satchel strap over her shoulder. "Do not spend the rest of it on me. I do not want it and it will not buy you anything."

"I was not going to."

"So that it is said once, you were going to offer me something for the eighteen days and call it interest, and I would have had to take it, because I put a figure in front of you and you signed it." Hesper wrote the last line of the entry. "Taking it in order, forty was the fee. Forty is what I have had."

"Is that the rule?"

"It is my rule," she said. "The ward has not got one."

Ovel's took eleven and a half. Mata Ovel would not take the rest, and said the sign was still in the window, and that it did not apply to Nessa and never had.

"You could give me the money," Nessa said, at the table.

"I am giving you the money."

"You are giving me a tin with money in it. That is not the same as the money."

"What is the difference?"

"The difference: I have to ask you for the tin," she said, and he thought about that for a while and then put the whole of it on the table in front of her and did not say anything clever about it.

Doss got a week forward and did not say anything about it.

Kalen kept twenty-two, which was the most he had ever carried in his coat at once, and it felt like carrying somebody else's.

* * *

The ward archive is at the back of the filing office, two rooms with shelving up both long walls, and everything lodged at a sitting goes into it the same afternoon and stays there.

He went across an hour later to collect his exhibits.

There was a bar across the front of the case shelves. Iron, flat, run through the standards and padlocked at both ends, and a paper wafered to the middle of it at the height of a man's eye, and the wafer was still soft.

WARD NINE: ORDER OF SEALING

The historical tag record of the ward, and all

copies, transcriptions and indexes thereof, being

commercially sensitive to the paper-holder, is

sealed from inspection until further order.

For the Sedge Counting House

T. Oduya, clerk of the second desk

Kalen read it four times.

Then he read the shelf behind the bar, because he could see it perfectly well through the standards. Twenty-two bundles by decade, wired, with a strip of his own paper folded under each wire and the decade written on it in his own hand. The tin with the three loose tags in it. A hundred and twenty-four schedules in a box with the lid on. Forty pages of transcription in oilcloth. The index, ruled with the edge of a knife.

Two hundred and seventeen years of a ward's arithmetic, eleven feet away, behind an iron bar, lawfully.

He had his own tag in his pocket. That was the whole of what was left outside the shelving, one piece of brass out of eight hundred and sixty-five, and it was in his pocket only because it had lived there since the winter and he had never once got round to putting it with the others.

"Kalen."

Tam was standing at the end of the shelving with a satchel and a fold of paper in his hand, and he had been standing there for some time.

"Tam."

"I didn't know you'd be in this morning. I'd have." He stopped. There was no end to that sentence and he had walked into it at speed the way he walked into everything. "I'm collecting the House copy. That's why I'm here. That's the only reason I'm here."

"You are collecting the House copy."

"They're entitled to it. It's their paper, it goes to the fourth desk, I carry things, Kalen, that's what I do." He came four steps closer and then did not come any further. "Have you read it?"

"I have read it."

"Right."

"It has got your name at the bottom of it."

"Yes, Kalen," Tam said.

The room did what rooms like that do, which is nothing at all.

"Did you read it before you signed it?" Kalen said.

"Yes."

"All of it."

"All of it. I read the whole thing twice, standing at the second desk, and then I signed it and put it in the tray, Kalen." Tam's voice had gone somewhere Kalen had not heard it go before, which was flat. "I'm not going to tell you they slipped it past me. They didn't. It was on the top of eleven other things and I read it and I knew what it did, Kalen."

"Then say what it does."

"It seals the tags. Nobody can look at them without an order and nobody's going to ask for an order, because there's nobody left who wants to look at them except you." He held the fold of paper in both hands. "It doesn't destroy anything. I want you to know that. Not one tag gets thrown away. They'll be on that shelf in a hundred years, Kalen."

"They will be on that shelf in a hundred years," Kalen said, "and no one alive will be able to read them."

Tam looked at the floor.

"They gave me the grade," he said.

"I know."

"You don't know. I haven't told anybody."

"You have got a new coat and you are standing in a ward archive at nine in the morning collecting a House copy," Kalen said. "A runner does not collect."

Tam looked down at his own coat.

"When?"

"Tuesday. Clerk of the second desk. It isn't the autumn any more, they brought it forward, and it takes a third off my mother in one go." He said the last part fast, the way you say a thing you have practised. "A third. She's fifty-one. She works six days. She's on a four year schedule and Tuesday took a third off it. I haven't told her yet because I cannot work out how to say it without saying the rest of it."

Kalen stood with an iron bar between himself and four nights of his own handwriting.

"Is there an order that unseals it?"

"There is. It goes to the paper-holder."

"Which is the House."

"Which is the House," Tam said. "I'm not going to tell you it's a good system. I carry things across a room, Kalen, I don't know how it was built."

"Who asked for it?"

"It came down as a schedule item with a number on it. There was no name on the front of it and I have never once seen a name on the front of one."

He had been going to say something. He had built it on the way over without noticing he was building it, the way he built everything, and it was clean and it was true and it would have taken about nine words.

He did not say it.

He looked at a seventeen year old holding a fold of paper with both hands, whose mother worked six days, who had bought the beer since they were eleven, and who had done the only sum available to him and got the right answer.

"Does she know what the second desk does?" Kalen said.

"She knows it's more money."

"Then tell her that part."

Tam's face did something and he got it back under control, and then he did not say anything for a while, and neither of them was going to be the one who left first.

"The tea's still good, Kalen," Tam said, at last.

"I know."

"I'm allowed to bring you in. I'm allowed to take a person up to the counter. I'm not going to stop being allowed. I'll do it any day you want, Kalen. Any day."

"I know."

Kalen put his thumb against the wafer on the order and read the head of it again, because there was one thing about it he had not looked at.

Under the ward's device, at the top, in the small print where a ward puts a date, it was dated.

The tenth.

The sitting had been at the third bell on the eleventh. Verrin had put a jug of water on the table and apologised for the room and said he had it until the sixth bell.

"Tam," he said. "When did they give you this to sign?"

"The tenth. In the morning."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!