Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

Hesper came on the Thursday because the arrangement said Thursday.

She came at the eighth bell with the folding stool over her arm, and put it down at the end of the strip bench where it had stood every Thursday since the spring, and sat on it, and got the file out.

Kalen kept working for about four minutes. She had never once minded that, and in seven months he had not worked out whether the not minding was policy or whether it was her.

"Sit down," she said. "If you want it in order, I am going to put the whole of it on the bench."

He put the punch down and sat.

She laid the sheet on the plank and turned it round. It was the same printed form she had turned round on Sabra's desk in the winter, with the same three rules on it and the same box at the foot.

He had the whole of it read before her hand was off the paper.

STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

Balance -95 on the twenty-second. 4 per day.

Endorsement, outstanding: 148.

Instalment, weekly: 12.

Cleared at present rate of service:

The last line was blank, because the last line is always blank.

She uncapped her pen and wrote one word into it in her own hand, and then turned the sheet back round on the plank so that he could see what she had written.

The word was never.

"Not a threat," she said.

"No."

"It is the answer to the question the form asks." She capped the pen. "I fill it in the same way on every sheet I carry. Twice this year it has said a month and a day."

"Twelve a week."

"Twelve a week for thirteen weeks and then eleven. In coin, and not in kind." She squared the sheet against the plank. "Kind is how a collector ends up owning a man's tools. I have watched that happen and I did not care for it."

"And the four a day."

"The four a day is not mine. It does not stop for me, or for you, or for a good week."

Kalen looked at the sheet and did not say anything, and she let him. She was better at that than anybody he had ever met.

"Do you want the picture," she said. "Or shall I leave you the sheet and go."

"The picture."

"Then get a pencil. You will want to check it, and I would sooner you checked it in front of me."

He got a pencil.

She did it in eleven minutes on the back of a house docket, and she did not hurry one figure of it, and she did not say a number twice.

What came in went down the left: house wage at First Hand rate, and the night bounties in the weeks there were night bounties, and the two marks a month that no longer went on the escrow fee, because the escrow no longer held anything.

What went out went down the right: the twelve, and the four a day, and the rent, and the rope-walk, and the tally at Ovel's that his sister still would not let him pay off in front of the woman.

He put the lamp oil in himself, and she let it stand, and wrote it where it went.

That was the difference between her arithmetic and everybody else's. Nobody who had ever quoted Kalen Ashgrove a figure had put the oil in.

She had eleven of these arrangements running in the ward, and he had worked out four of the eleven simply by noticing which way she turned out of the yard gate. There was a cooper off Fetter Street who paid her in a sealed envelope at the door and would not have her inside the house. There was a woman off Cinder Row who had her in at the table and gave her tea, which Hesper could not taste and drank anyway.

He had never once asked her about any of them. She had never volunteered a name. Both of those were decisions and not manners.

At the foot she drew a line with the edge of the file, and wrote two figures under the line, and turned the docket round.

"So that nothing is missed, five hundred at the turn of the quarter," she said. "Eight hundred by the spring."

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"Eight hundred is a Fourth."

"Eight hundred is a Fourth," Hesper said, and let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to sit.

A Fourth takes a Pattern. It does not take the one you can spare, and it does not tell you which one it is going to be, and it does not give it back afterward. There was a man in Ward Six who had carried a Sealed grade Bearing for eleven years and came out of a Fourth without it, and did not find out which one had gone until he reached for it two days later, and he was working still, and everybody agreed that he had been lucky.

Everybody in Ashfall had had a First. Nobody in Ashfall talked about a Fourth.

Kalen looked at the two figures.

He had done most of this himself, in pieces, at two in the morning, over about a fortnight. He had never once had the whole of it on one side of one docket in one hand. There was a reason for that and the reason was not arithmetic.

That was the part he had not expected. It was better to see it. It was not better in any way that helped him, and it was still better, the way a fault in a beam is better found than not found.

"You are going to sell tools," she said. "Everybody sells tools."

"I know."

"Tools go first because tools are worth the most. Then it is the coat, and after the coat there is nothing left worth a collector's afternoon."

"You are telling me the order."

"I am telling you that there is one." She got up and folded the stool. "I am not going to write it down for you. You will do that on this bench, and bring me twelve on Thursday, and what you sold to get it is not on my paper."

Then she went, and the yard gate shut behind her.

Kalen sat with a lamp and a docket with somebody else's handwriting all over the back of it.

He laid the roll out on the sacking that evening and went along it the way he went along anything.

A nine-piece punch set, bought one punch at a time out of four years of half days. Eleven marks to a house. Nine to a man in the street, who would take the set apart in front of him and price the two he had worn.

He knew which two. The three and the five had gone soft at the shoulder across two winters of cold iron, and a man buying a set puts his thumbnail on every shoulder in it before he says a figure, and the figure he says is worked off the worst one. Kalen had done exactly that to other men's punches for four years and had never once thought about it as a thing that would be done back to him.

A glass, four. He had used it every working day for three years and would read about a fifth worse without it, and that does not appear on anybody's paper anywhere as a cost.

A hand vise, six, and a good lamp with a tall chimney at three and a half, and a case of brass cutting stock at five, which was better stock than five, and there was nobody left in Ward Nine who would pay what it was worth.

Two ruined draw-hooks, one snapped clean at the tang and one in two pieces. Worth nothing at all to anybody in Kentra.

And three matched hooks, ash and iron, marks filed flat, holding a slight Steady across all three.

They were worth more than everything else on the sacking put together.

Any house in the ward would have taken them at the door and asked no questions about where they came from. A matched set is not three tools with the same Pattern in them. It is one shape lying across three pieces of iron, and there was not another set like it in Ward Nine, and Kalen knew that because he had made it. Nine days at a bench two hundred feet under the ward, and two hooks ruined learning how.

What they had bought him since was not a Pattern and it was not a wage. It was both his hands. Every read he had done in nine months had been done with the work held for him by three tools that did not get tired and did not have to be paid, and the whole of the difference between an hour and a quarter of an hour was lying on that sacking in a roll of oilcloth with a tape round it.

He sat back on his heels and did the honest version of the sum. The honest version is the one where you keep going after you have got the answer you wanted.

The punches, the glass, the vise, the lamp and the stock came to about thirty-one at a house. Closer to forty in the street, if he walked all five of them round the ward on his own feet and lied about nothing. Forty was three weeks of Thursdays and a little over.

The hooks on their own were sixty at a door, or seventy if he was patient, and sixty was five weeks.

So the order she had not written down was hooks first.

Sell the sixty, keep the forty, go on working with the forty while the sixty pays her down, and come out of it in five weeks with something still in the roll. Any collector in Kentra would have said that in four words and been right, and any master of any house in the ward would have said the same four words and been right as well.

Kalen sat on the shed floor with his hands hanging over his knees.

He thought about a shape lying across three pieces of iron. He thought about a man who had filed a maker's mark off five tools and never once said why, and about what a bench with a lamp on it is actually for.

He could work without the punches, slower. He could work without the glass and be slower still, and without the lamp, and he could beg stock off Sabra in half-mark lots at a rate that would have insulted a child.

He could not work without the hooks. Not slower. Not at all.

Everything he had been for nine months was three tools holding a shape steady so that his hands were free. A reader with his hands full is a man reading a book in a wind.

He rolled them back into the oilcloth and tied the tape.

Then he wrote the other order out on the back of the same docket. Punches, glass, vise, lamp, stock. He ruled a line under the five of them with the edge of the pencil and looked at it for a while.

Forty marks, and then nothing left in the world to sell, and eight hundred by the spring.

He knew exactly what it was going to cost him and he wrote it anyway.

She had put the signed instalment slip away before she left, and he had watched her do it, because he watched everything. She turned a quarter away from him, the way she always did and the way she had done in this yard on the day of the haul. She opened the compartment on the far side of the satchel, and put the slip in, and closed it, and turned back. The whole thing took about two seconds and she had plainly done it forty thousand times.

Whatever lived in that compartment was not paper. You do not turn away from paper.

He had watched her put paper away four hundred times. Paper goes into the flat pocket at the front, face down, without any ceremony at all, usually while she is saying something to you about the weather. The far compartment was a different thing entirely, and she used a different set of movements for it, and a man who has spent four years reading how objects have been handled can tell you a great deal about a satchel and nothing whatever about what is inside one.

Coin, Kalen thought, and put it down, and was wrong about that for five months.

He put the hooks back in the roll.

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