Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

Ilve Karrow came into the yard at the second bell and asked for the book.

He got it in about four seconds. Sabra had the current quarter up on the counter, squared to the edge, with the three quarters before it stacked at her elbow. Then she went back to her chair, and did not stand over him, and did not offer him anything at all.

Kalen watched four seconds of that from the shed door and made himself go back to the grille. A man who stands in a doorway during a warrant review is a man with something in the book.

There had been four warrant reviews in his four years at the house.

Every one of them had been the same man in a different coat. He read the front page of the day's tally, and looked down the yard at nothing in particular, and said something about the wind off the burnt end, and went away inside twenty minutes with his name on a form and his hat still on. Sabra signed them and filed them and never mentioned any of it afterward.

This was not that.

Karrow read the quarter through page by page. It took him fifty minutes and he did not ask one question while he was doing it. Then he asked for the four quarters before it, and read those, and then he came out into the yard with the tally in his hand and started matching entries to objects.

He worked from the north shed wall rightward, which is the way you read Accord script.

Nobody in Ward Nine had ever done that in front of Kalen in his life.

He set his case on the flags rather than on the counter. It was a clerk's case, re-stitched at both bottom corners by somebody good. A man who puts his case on flags has worked in yards where the counter was not clean.

The grille had come off the tally shop counter on Cinder Row and it had three Patterns in it.

That was the whole of the difficulty. It was a cross-braced frame, iron, four feet by two. The trade rule for a cross-braced frame is that you cut the bracing before you read it, and you accept that cutting the bracing kills the smallest of whatever is in there. Kalen had been taught that at fifteen by a man who was not wrong.

The bracing was on the bench beside him now, uncut. He had taken the pins out instead.

It had cost him an hour and ten minutes and about four hundred small decisions. There were nine pins, and two of them were peened over, and one of them was not a pin at all: it was a nail somebody had put in during the last century and dressed up to look like the others.

He found that one by the sound it made under the punch.

The nail came out in three pieces and he laid the pieces in the saucer in the order they came out. A man who cannot say afterward what he took out of a frame has not stripped it. He has broken it.

Then he set the three hooks in a triangle off the bench dogs and let the Steady hold the frame where it was.

That was the part he still could not get used to. He went along the iron with both hands free and nothing at all to pay, and the three shapes came up under his eyes one after another the way a page comes up when the lamp is trimmed. The Hold Fast was in the long members, and the Tare was under the counter lip where a weigh-pan had once stood, and the Carry was in the hinge and was worth about a mark and a half, and he took that off as well, because it was there and so was he.

Two years ago a job like this had taken him two days.

He had lost the Tare on the second afternoon, and had told himself for a week afterward that it had been in the bracing, when the whole of it had been in his hands.

He wrote the mark down before he wrote the grade down, which was backwards, and which he did every time.

PATTERN: Hold Fast (Fine)

Held in: counter grille, iron, cross-braced

Draw: Force, measured

What the holder closes his hand on stays closed on, whether or not

the hand does.

Forty years on this counter and nobody has been over it. D. Semm

Fine, and a Sound Tare, and a Common Carry, all three off clean by the fourth bell.

Nobody came to look. Doss was at the far end of the yard with a barrow, and Brem was on the sorting and singing something with two lines in it and neither of them the right one, and the yard went on being a yard.

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Kalen sat with three tins in front of him and the pins in a saucer and could not think of one thing to do about any of it.

He was a First Hand. A First Hand at the Ashfall house works the bench, writes the house returns twice a month, and takes four marks a week more than a Second Hand. That was the whole of what the promotion had turned out to be, and he had known it would be on the afternoon he got it.

Thirteen hundred and forty of Line. It had read thirteen hundred and forty on the House steps two days ago, and it was thirteen hundred and forty now, and there was nothing in front of him that was going to move it.

Karrow was in the yard for two hours and found nothing wrong, and watching him do it was worth the afternoon on its own.

He weighed three lots at the pan, and slid the counterweight a hair to the left before he read the first one, without being told, which meant that somebody in some other yard had shown him once and he had kept it. He opened four wired tins and did up all four. He asked what was in the north shed, and was told stock and part-stripped gear, and went in with his lamp, and came out, and wrote nothing down at all.

He asked Brem one question about a lot number.

Brem got it right, which surprised everybody in the yard including Brem.

Kalen worked and listened and did not enjoy any part of it. Two Sedge collectors had been on Cinder Row since the turn of the month, lawfully, working the doors in pairs and being courteous about it. There was chalk on eleven doorframes between the tenement and the tally shop.

Nobody knew what the chalk was for and nobody had asked, because the sort of man who asks a Sedge collector a question is the sort of man who ends up on a second list, and Ward Nine had worked that out a long time before Kalen was born.

Karrow found the press at half past the fourth bell.

He found it because it was in the book. That was the thing Kalen kept coming back to afterward. There was a line in Sabra's own hand on the ninth page of the current quarter, entered on the day of the haul.

Crown grade object, Under Hand, house escrow under warrant, fee 2 monthly.

Under it, a witness line and a signature in a different hand. A Freehand of the collection service had stood in that yard on a bright afternoon in the spring and written four lines standing up, and asked him whether he wanted it lawful.

He had said yes.

It had cost him nothing at all that afternoon.

Sabra opened the press without being asked twice. Three shelves, and a strongbox on the bottom one, and four small boxes on the middle with cards wired to them in her writing, and the top shelf with the dust on it in the shape of something that had gone out of that press and never come back.

Karrow took the lead box down with both hands, and read the card first, which almost nobody does. Then he set the box on the counter and took the lid off, and turned the seal over with one finger so that the shank came up, and read the line around it without moving his lips.

"Whose deposit," he said.

"Mine," Kalen said.

"Standing."

"Bonded."

Karrow put the seal back in the box and closed the lid and did not look at anybody while he wrote.

NOTICE OF IMPOUND

Object: seal, brass, Crown grade, Under Hand.

Deposited to the escrow of a Warranted house.

Holder qualification not evidenced.

Impounded to the Assessor of Ward Nine.

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

There were four arguments and Kalen ran all four of them where he stood, in about the time it takes to write a line.

That the house held it and not him, and the house was Warranted, which failed, because escrow follows the depositor and the depositor was Bonded. That he had declared it, which failed harder, because the declaration was the finding. That he had recovered it out of a sealed floor under a lawful contract, which was true, and was not a Standing, and never had been one.

And that he needed it, which is not an argument. It is a sentence a man thinks in a room by himself.

Karrow signed and dated and turned the paper round so that it faced Kalen. Then he waited, which very few officials do.

"It comes back at Warranted," he said.

"I know what it comes back at."

"Then you know how it is done." Karrow put the box into his case. "Nothing would be spent on the other route. Bonded men who go looking for a way to hold Crown grade find one, and there is a form for what happens next, and it has been filled in twice at this desk."

He did not say it as a threat, which was the difficulty with the man. He said it the way you tell somebody the ninth stair is loose.

The middle shelf had a gap in it now, and the card that had been wired to the box lay loose on the shelf beside the gap.

Kalen looked at both of those for longer than he meant to. That seal was worth more than the yard it had been standing in, and more than his arrears and his sister's Assessment and every tool he owned laid end to end. It went out of the house in a stranger's case because a line in a book was correct, and had been correct on the day it was written, and was going to go on being correct.

Sabra came out at the end of it and stood by the pan post with the pipe going. She said nothing whatever about any of it, which from Sabra was a page and a half.

Karrow wrote at the counter for a while. Then he squared his papers, and picked his case up off the flags, and got his coat straight.

"Full inventory at the turn of the quarter," he said. "A day and a half. The house will send its own man for the weighing."

"The pan is here."

"That is known. It has been used." He put the tally back on the counter and squared that too. "Your stock book is ruled to a second measure. Every page, going back as far as this desk has looked. Is that a house practice."

Sabra took the pipe out of her mouth.

"It is," she said.

Karrow wrote that down as well, and thanked her for the afternoon in the manner of a man thanking a woman for an afternoon, and went out through the gate at a walk with a Crown grade seal in his case and the whole of the house behind him in perfect order.

Sabra shut the book. She did it in the ordinary way and put it back where it went, on the shelf under the counter, with the three quarters before it.

Kalen stood at the counter and looked at the place where the ruling ran off the edge of the page.

Karrow had written down the width of a line.

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