Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The pipe gallery job went eleven minutes and he sat down on the wet stone afterward and could not remember climbing down to it.

That was the sixth night in a row and he had worked all six of the days as well. The arithmetic on it was simple enough by then that he had stopped writing it down.

House wage by day. Ward bounty by night. Four hours on the strip bench with his coat over him and his boots on. The walk up Tallow Street at the fifth bell to change his shirt, and the walk back down again in the dark.

The eleven minutes were the thing, though, and he held onto that on the climb out.

A designated bound thing on a stair in the dark, with a lamp on the tread below it and one man to do the whole of it, would have been an hour of his life last spring. An hour, and a torn Pattern at the end of the hour.

He set the three hooks on the frame and let the Steady hold them. He went in through the heel of the shape, which nobody does. He had it out clean in under a quarter of an hour with both hands free the whole time.

PATTERN: Purchase (Sound)

Held in: rigger's belt, leather, brass at the buckle

Draw: Force, slight

The holder's grip on a bound object does not slip while he is

taking it apart.

Nine years on this gallery and I never dropped one. H. Ferris

Sound grade, off a dead rigger's belt. A Sound Purchase is eighteen marks at a house and twenty-four in the street if you carry it there yourself.

He entered it, and carried it up, and sold it in the street on the Friday. It went onto the twelve for Hesper and vanished the way water goes into ash.

That was the shape of all of it. Something came in and something larger went out, every day of the week, and the difference was the same difference every time. He checked it against the docket for eleven days running before he accepted that checking it was not going to alter it by a mark.

The days ran together and he could not afterward put them back in order.

There was a bound hoist off Fetter Street that took two nights and paid for one. The Pattern in it had slipped across about a year and had been pulling the drum a finger's width out of true on every lift, and the man who owned it had been correcting for that with his shoulder the whole year and had a shoulder to show for it. Kalen told him so. The man said he would get it seen to.

There was a Common Carry in a barrow frame that was not worth the walk, and he did it anyway, because the walk was already paid for by the job at the other end of it. There was a designation on Cinder Row that he turned down flat, because it wanted three men in the room and the fee would not have paid two.

There was a house day on the Wednesday with three lots on it, and Sabra put him on the returns as well, and he wrote them standing up at the counter with brass dust on both hands.

He got better. That was the part there was nobody in the ward to see.

His reads came down from an hour to forty minutes and then to half an hour on ordinary gear. Twice in the eleven days he named a grade off the wear before he set a single hook, and was right both times, which the trade calls the fourth year and which most men get in their sixth.

He stopped needing to lay a frame flat before he read it. He stopped writing the leader stops down and started keeping them instead, four and five deep, in the place where he kept the maker's marks.

None of that was worth one mark to anybody. All of it was true. He noticed it the way you notice weather through a window while you are doing something else.

Doss said four words in the whole of the first week.

He came anyway. He was in the yard every morning at the sixth bell and he was in it again at the end of the day. Twice Kalen came down a stair at midnight and found him standing at the bottom of it with a lamp held low, two hours after his own shift had finished, with no reason on earth to be there.

On the ninth night he put half a heel of bread on the bench without looking, the way you pass a tool to a man who is already reaching.

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"You are grey," Doss said.

"I am fine."

"That is what grey men say."

Kalen ate the bread, which was bad bread. Doss went out through the gate without saying anything else and was back in the yard at the sixth bell. That was the whole of the conversation and there was not going to be another one.

The ward was being worked while he worked, and he saw it in pieces, because pieces were all he had time for.

There was chalk on eleven doorframes between the tenement and the tally shop on the Monday, and chalk on nineteen of them by the Friday. It was a small mark, low down, on the hinge side, where you would put it if you did not want the householder taking it off with a wet cloth on the same evening.

There was a Sedge man on the top landing of the Cinder Row tenement with a wooden case and a courteous manner, entering a dead man's gear item by item onto a printed form, while the widow stood in her own doorway holding a cloth in both hands and answering everything he asked her.

There was a withdrawal slip up on the ward board on the Tuesday and a second one on the Thursday. Kalen read both of them going past at a walk and could not have told you afterward what either of them said.

Nobody stopped any of it, because nothing that was being done was being done wrong.

He went past the whole of it four days running with a lamp in his hand on his way to somewhere else. He did not have one clear hour in his week to put against any of it. That was the first time in his life that a thing he could see had gone by him because he was too tired to reach out.

The tools went in the order he had written on the back of the docket.

The punches went first. He got eleven for the set from a house rather than the fourteen he would have got walking it, because walking it was two hours he did not have and a house pays you the same afternoon.

The glass went for four to a mason's boy who did not know what he was buying and was very pleased with himself about it.

He kept the good lamp two days longer than he had meant to. Then that went as well. He worked the following night off a bad one and read about a fifth worse in it, and did the job anyway, and took an extra twenty minutes over a thing he could have done in ten the week before.

He did not mention that to anybody. There was nobody to mention it to.

The hand vise went on the Monday. The stock went on the Tuesday in two lots, and the second lot went for less than the first, which is what happens when a man sells the same thing twice in a week in a ward the size of a market square.

By the eleventh day there was the roll, and the coat, and a pencil.

That was the whole of what Kalen Ashgrove owned in the world. He had not moved one figure on any sheet anywhere by getting rid of any of it.

He worked that out on the Wednesday, standing in the yard with the empty sacking hanging off one hand.

Coin is not Balance. Coin comes in and goes out, and Balance does what the Accord says it does. Selling four years of tools had bought him four weeks of Thursdays and nothing whatever on the only page in Kentra that could put him under a gantry.

He had known that. He had known it the way you know the tide. He had done it anyway, because a man who knows the tide still has to get the boat in.

He had gone eleven days without saying a word to his sister and did not notice until the twelfth.

There was no quarrel in it. There was no room in the days for a quarrel. He came in past the ninth bell and she was asleep, and he went out before the fourth and she was asleep. On the two evenings he got back while the rope-walk stove was still going, there was bread out under a plate on the table and her door shut and no light under it.

She was not sulking. He knew the difference and had known it since she was four. A sulk is a thing that is left where you will walk into it, and the plate was not left anywhere, the plate was put where a plate goes, with a cloth over it so the crust would not go hard.

He had made her a partner at that table with a brass tag between the bread and the lamp, and she had asked him what he needed, and she had been asking him ever since, and he had not been in the room to be asked.

The third time he found the plate he sat down opposite it and looked at the doorframe for a while.

The chalk tally was on the latch side, where she had moved it a hundred and thirty-five days ago so that it was harder to see from the stairs. There were a great many more strokes on it than there had been.

He did not count them.

He put the plate in the water and went down the stairs and back to the house, and that was the eleventh day.

The night board at the ward gate is a strip of deal a yard long with a nail at each end. The watch chalk a number at the top of it and pin up whatever they have, and everything on it is either lost property or a designation.

Kalen read it on the way in every night, the way he read anything.

He read it on the twelfth night with a bad lamp in his hand and slag dust in his eyes.

WARD NINE: NIGHT BOARD

Designation 117. Rendered, male, about fifty.

Seen three times this month, the smelt yard.

Foundry coat. Grey in the beard.

Bounty ................... 60

Open to any holder in the ward.

Sixty marks is five weeks of Thursdays. There were men in Ward Nine who would walk from Fetter Street for sixty marks and be glad of the walk, and Tam had told him that too, on a step, cheerfully, a hundred and twenty-four days ago.

The smelt yard is a bad ground for it. It is walled on three sides and the fourth side is the works, and there is one gap in the south wall and a tipping ramp at the north end, and a man who takes a designation in there is taking it in a room with one door.

Kalen stood in front of the board with the lamp down by his knee and read it four times.

There is a line on a designation for distinguishing marks and it is usually empty. The watch write down what they are told, and whoever told them was frightened and running.

This one was not empty.

Carries a foundry tally-board.

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