Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The clerk read it out to him, because he had asked, and because the clerk was the sort of man who would rather read a thing out than watch somebody read it.

It was early, and there were two other people at the counter and a boy asleep on the bench under the window.

DISPOSITION OF PETITION

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

The party corrected has been removed from office.

The matter is therefore closed.

No further step lies.

"The party corrected," Kalen said.

"Yes."

"I did not correct a party. I corrected a rate."

"You petitioned touching the assessed rate," the clerk said. "It is in the head of it. I have got the head of it here." He turned the sheet round to show him, which was courteous, and it did say that, and it was in Kalen's own words. "The office was the office complained of. The office has been vacated. There is nothing to answer, so it is closed."

"The rate is still seventeen point six."

"Yes."

"Nobody has said the rate is right."

"No," the clerk said. "It says here that your facts were proved in every particular. That is a good finding. I have not seen one like it."

He said it kindly and he meant it.

That was the thing about the whole morning, because nobody in that room was rude to him at any point.

The clerk found him a chair, and explained what "no further step lies" meant, twice, in two different ways, and did not once suggest that Kalen was being slow. When Kalen asked to see the schedule the clerk turned it round on the counter so that it faced him, and put a finger under the line, and left the finger there while Kalen read it.

Kalen had been braced for nine days. He had gone through the shapes of it on the walk over, the way he went through anything: the man who would not look up, the man who would be sorry, the man who would say it was above him.

There was none of that, and there was a counter, and a chair, and a clerk being careful with him.

"Is there an appeal?"

"There is no appeal from a matter that is closed. There is nothing to appeal against. That is what closed means." He thought about it properly, which was worse. "You could petition again."

"On what?"

"On the rate."

"That is what I petitioned on."

"Yes," the clerk said, and looked at the paper, and had the grace to stop there.

Then he opened his drawer and got out a docket book.

"The lodgement," he said. "Twenty-five marks. I will have that back to you inside the fortnight."

"It has been returned."

"Has it?"

"It came with the costs on Thursday."

"Ah." The clerk turned two pages of the docket book and found nothing, and turned them back. "That will be off the other sheet. Then I will note it. Thank you for saying, a great many people would not have."

"A great many people would not have."

"No," said the clerk. "Some would take it twice and I would not find out until the quarter."

Kalen stood at the counter with the disposition in one hand and a man being decent to him about twenty-five marks.

This was going to be the whole of it, and there was not going to be a room where somebody said no to him, and there was not going to be a face anywhere in it.

He had been ready for a face since the second of the month, which was a hundred and fourteen days ago, and he had never once been able to picture it, and now he understood why.

Emmer Loy was at the far end of the counter with the thin grey book open in front of him.

He did not look up and he wrote nothing in it. There was nothing to write. A name goes in a book like that once and it does not come out again, because there is no procedure for taking a name out of a book, and there never has been in the history of Kentra.

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* * *

Sabra had the house book turned round on the desk when he came in, which she had never done.

"Sit down," she said.

"I have got the disposition."

"I know what you have got," she said. "Hesper came through at noon. She tells me things she cannot charge me for." She put the pipe down. "First Hand."

Kalen looked at the book.

"Say that again."

"First Hand," Sabra said. "From today." Sabra took her time about the rest of it. "Two marks a week." Sabra waited. "Your name goes in the book. No ceremony. I want you clear about why, because you will go away and make it into something."

"Go on."

"Karrow has written to every reclamation house in the ward," Sabra said. "Every unclaimed article in this yard is lodged with an office that has no Assessor." Sabra stopped there for a moment. "All of them re-lodged inside thirty days, on a form nobody here has filled in. Forty-one of them." She turned the book round the rest of the way. "Doss cannot read. Brem reads a docket and nothing else. I have the yard. I am not doing forty-one forms."

"So it is the paperwork."

"It is the paperwork."

"That is the whole of it."

"The whole of it," Sabra said. "You have been a First Hand at that bench about a year." Sabra took her time about the rest of it. "I did not pay you because you did not ask." Sabra took her time about the rest of it. "I am not paying you now for being right about the ward. I am paying you because Vessel Marn took a mark for a certified copy and I have forty-one forms."

Kalen sat down in front of the book.

It was the two column book. He had looked at it across that desk for four years and had never once been on the near side of it.

From the near side the second column was in the same hand and the same ink and had no heading, and it was full, and it went back further up the page than he could see without turning it.

He did not ask, which was four years of practice and took about as much effort out of him as breathing.

"You told me they would not say I was wrong," he said.

"I did."

"They did not say I was wrong. They wrote down that every fact was proved in every particular and then they closed it because there was nobody left to be complained about."

"Yes," Sabra said.

"You knew it would be that."

"I knew it would be something. I did not know it would be that." She got the pipe going again. "Rule the day off and sign under it. First Hand rules the day off. That is the job."

He ruled the day off with the edge of the paper, because a knife edge gives a straighter line than a rule does when the paper is bad, and signed under it, and it took about four seconds and looked exactly like every other line on the page.

* * *

The Sedge Counting House has forty-one steps and a door that two men hold open.

Kalen went the forty minutes across the ward in the late afternoon with the disposition folded in his coat.

He counted four doors with chalk on the frame between the house yard and the ward gate. He counted eleven more on the road out. He noticed at about the ninth that he was counting, and did not stop, because there did not seem to be any reason to stop.

The chalk went as far as the ward boundary and no further. He looked for it on the other side for the whole of the last twenty minutes and there was not one mark on one door.

He had not planned it, and he had come out of the yard meaning only to walk, and the walking had gone north and west.

He stood at the bottom of the steps for a while, and then went up eleven of them and sat down on the twelfth.

Nothing happened.

That was the whole of the hour. People went in and out. A boy came down with a tray. One of the men on the door held it a little longer for a woman with a case, and nodded at Kalen on his way back, and said that it was a fine evening, and it was. Nobody asked him what he was doing there. There was no rule against sitting on the steps, and if there had been, somebody would have come out and told him about it politely and given him a copy.

There was no ash on any of the stone.

He opened his Assessment once a night, alone, in a cold shed, and had done since he was fifteen. He had made himself a rule about it and had kept the rule for four years, and he broke it on a stranger's steps in the late afternoon, with a boy carrying a tea tray past his shoulder.

He put his back against the balustrade and let the sheet come up.

ASSESSMENT: Kalen Ashgrove

Ward Nine (Ashfall), Kentra

Line ..................... 1,340

Balance .................. -96

Standing ................. Bonded

Craft .................... Reclamation, First Hand

FACULTY draw yield

Force ............... 10 1.0

Quicken .............. 9 1.0

Ward ................ 12 1.1

Read ................. 3 1.6

Bind ................ 20 0.8

Patterns ................. 6 / 8

Next collection .......... none assessed

One thousand three hundred and forty.

He had been three hundred and forty on the night the hammer went under a porter's boot.

Four times that now. A Craft row with a new word in it. Fourteen seconds of wall over an eight foot opening, where a year ago he had nine. A matched set of his father's hooks. A house that had put his name in its own book that afternoon and charged him nothing for it.

Standing. Bonded.

The same word. In the same place. In the same flat little hand.

He read the line four times, which was three more than it needed.

There is no row on that sheet for what a man has proved. He had looked for one, in a general way, the first week he had understood what he was carrying, and had found out that the Accord does not keep a column for it, and had put that down as a thing about paperwork rather than a thing about the world.

He put the sheet away.

Kalen took the disposition out of his coat and folded it into three and put it in his shirt with his sister's rate sheet and a dock receipt from the spring, because he kept everything and had never once been able to explain to anybody, including himself, what it was he thought he was keeping it for.

Then he got the pencil out to put it on the list of things he did not understand.

He sat on a stranger's steps with the pencil over the page for a long time. There was nothing to write. He had understood every part of it while it was happening, every step, in order, from the counter to the finding to the fee book to the bar across the shelf, and not one person had lied to him anywhere along it, and he could have drawn the whole thing as a diagram.

He put the pencil away.

The sixth bell went somewhere behind him, off in the ward, thin at that distance.

He got up and brushed the stone off the back of his coat and went down the forty-one steps.

The man on the door said good evening. Kalen said good evening back, because there was nothing wrong with the man on the door, and because there was nothing wrong with the clerk, or the hearing officer, or the deputy who had dated a certificate a day early to save him a day.

Every single one of them had done the job properly.

Nobody had said he was wrong.

They had closed the file.

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