Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

He read the contract standing up at the counter with the pen already in his hand.

The ward clerk had turned it round for him and gone back to the stove, because it was the seventh bell and cold and there is nothing about a bounty contract that requires watching. Kalen had signed nine of them in three weeks and had read every word of every one, which the clerk plainly took for the habit of a slow man.

The ward office at that hour is one room with a counter across it, a stove at the back, four chairs nobody sits in, and a smell of wet coats. There were two other men waiting on nothing in particular and a boy asleep against the wall with a satchel, and nobody looked up, because the ward office at the seventh bell is the least interesting room in Kentra.

The first sheet was the designation and the rates.

WARD NINE: BOUNTY ENGAGEMENT

Designation 117. Rendered, male, about fifty.

Ground: the smelt yard, south of the works wall.

On completion ............ 60

On part discharge ........ 20 [Assessor's discretion]

Ward property to be returned. Nothing to be

taken off the subject that is not entered.

The second sheet was the terms. The terms were four hundred words of standard heads set in a printer's hand, and he read all of them, because he read all of them.

He found it at the foot of the second sheet, in the middle of the paragraph about completion, between a sentence about the delivery of records and a sentence about the return of ward property.

Where the designated work is not completed by the officer engaged, the balance outstanding shall be assessed against him at the Third grade.

Kalen stood at the counter and read it twice.

He had that sentence in his coat. He had copied it word for word in a dry vault two hundred feet under this ward, in pencil, on the back of a schedule. He had dated the copy and put a box round it in two strokes, and he had not been able to say at the time what he wanted it for.

That copy had come off a Sedge instrument dated 1164.

This was ward paper, printed inside the last four years, and it was the same sentence with the same commas in it.

Forty years, he thought, and somebody in this ward has been buying his forms in the same shop as somebody else.

Then he thought about who was going to be standing at this counter in the morning.

There were four bounty-holders in Ward Nine who would take a designation in the smelt yard, and Kalen knew all four of them by name, and two of them were careful men. It is never the careful ones who work a night board in the first week. One of the other two had settled a Rendered off Fetter Street in the spring with four men and a chain and a bar, and had been paid, and had been correct at law from the first minute to the last.

A designation stands until the quarter and it is open to any holder in the ward. Nobody has to tell you it has been taken, and nobody comes and tells you afterward how it went.

He signed it.

"Sixty on completion," the clerk said, from the stove.

"I know what it is."

NOTICE OF ENGAGEMENT

Designation 117, Ward Nine, engaged by

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

Service will be assessed on completion.

He watched the loop for two days before he went in.

The smelt yard lies behind the works wall on the south side and it is about ninety feet by forty. The floor of it is slag, run off two hundred years of pours, cooled in plates and gone black and glassy at the broken edges, so that a man walking on it sounds like a man walking on crockery. There is a tipping ramp at the north end, and a cooling trough down the west side with no water in it, and ash over all of it, the way there is ash over everything.

He lay up on the ramp before the second bell on the first day and did nothing at all, which is the first thing you do in a room with Rendered in it.

It came through the gap at the second bell and he had it inside two seconds, off the coat and the set of the feet, at a distance of about thirty yards, which is a thing he had been telling himself for eight years he would not be able to do.

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He put his face down on the stone and stayed there until his breathing was his own again.

Then he sat up and made himself work, because he had come to work and because there was nothing else in that yard he could do for anybody.

The loop ran forty minutes.

It came in through the gap in the south wall at a walk, and went up the yard to where the ladle track had been, and stood there about a minute and a half, and marked the tally-board. Then it walked the length of the yard to the tipping edge, and stood, and marked the board again.

Then it went back to the gap and stood in it, and held the board out at the height of a man's chest, at nothing, for four seconds.

Then it took the board back and started again.

Kalen lay on the ramp with his face against cold stone and watched that happen six times.

He had read a last instruction off a Rendered before. He had done it in the slag yard at nineteen, off a barrow-man on a fifty minute loop, and it had taken him the better part of a week, and he had got about half of it.

A loop is a sentence you are only allowed one word of at a time. You have to hold every word until the whole thing comes round again. Most men cannot hold nine words for forty minutes, and Kalen had never once in his life had any difficulty holding a thing he had looked at.

He had the whole of this one by the fourth pass. He spent the fifth and the sixth checking it, because a thing a man wants to be certain of is not a thing he is certain of.

Count the pour at the track. Count the pour at the tip. Hand the board to the next hand at the end of the shift.

Three parts, and the first two were being executed exactly as they had been given. The third was not, because there was no next hand, and there had not been one for eight years, and a thing that has been told what to do goes on doing it until somebody comes and takes the telling off it.

He did not go in on the second day either. He stayed on the ramp after the sixth bell with the cold coming up out of the stone into his hips, and worked out what he was going to do and how much of it he could afford, and wrote the figures on the back of the contract with a pencil in the dark, in a hand he could barely read in the morning.

A decision you have not costed is not a decision. It is a mood.

Ward at thirteen. Standing Order at a Bind draw of twenty. Force at ten, and eleven of Force is what a Rendered walks through the way weather walks through a coat, so the Force was not for the man. The Force was for the board.

Under fifty is a First and everybody in Ashfall has had a First. Fifty to a hundred and ninety-nine is a Second, and a Second costs you a week and gives most of it back, and the men who have taken one talk about it constantly and inaccurately.

Two hundred is where the ladder changes.

Thirteen hundred and forty of Line and three hundred marks of arrears standing against it, which in practice meant that he had nothing at all.

He could put about nine draws into it before the number went past two hundred.

He went in on the third day at half past the fifth bell, on the last pass of a shift that had ended eight years ago.

Corun Ashgrove came in through the gap in the south wall at a walk, with a foundry coat on him and grey in the beard. Kalen came down off the ramp and got into the aisle.

That is the one thing you are taught, and it is the first thing anybody says to you in your first month at a reclamation house. It is the last thing you say to a Third Hand who is about to be stupid, and Kalen had said it himself, in a strip shed, in the spring, to a boy with eleven of Ward on him and nineteen days in the trade, and had meant every word of it.

He got into the aisle and he stayed in it.

"Da," he said.

It came on at a walk and did not slow and did not look at him. He drew Ward and took the whole weight of a walking man on the front of him, and it was like standing into wind, and the wind did not stop.

Thirteen. He got a hand in the coat and went four feet backward up the yard with his heels ploughing slag, and drew again.

Twenty-six.

He got the Standing Order up on the third draw, which was Bind, and cost twenty, and made no difference to anything.

You cannot tell a Rendered a new thing.

He understood that at forty-six marks, with his father's shoulder under his chin and his own boots going through black glass, and understanding it did not stop him doing it eleven more times.

"The shift is over," Kalen said. "It is over. Give me the board."

Sixty-six. Eighty-six. A hundred and six.

"I am the next hand. Da. Look at my hand."

He got in front of it at the tipping edge and put his left hand out flat, palm up, at the height of a man's chest, which is where the board goes. He held it there and drew Ward to stay upright and Bind to say it again, and he held it there for longer than he had costed for.

His father stood in front of him for four seconds with the board out at exactly that height, and the two of them stood in the middle of a slag yard in the last of the light holding out a hand and a board at each other, four inches apart, for the whole of the four seconds.

Then he did not give it to him. He took it back under his arm and turned toward the gap in the south wall.

A hundred and forty-six. A hundred and fifty-nine.

He got both arms round the board.

That was the mistake and he knew it while he was doing it. Force at ten against a thing that walks through eleven. He drew Force twice and had the board turned about four inches, and then his father simply kept walking, and the four inches came back, and Kalen went down the yard sideways with his boots off the ground and his cheek against the wool of a coat he had last touched at eleven years old.

A hundred and seventy-nine. A hundred and ninety-nine.

The next one was Bind and it took him past.

"Stop," Kalen said. "Da. Stop. Please stop."

Two hundred and nineteen. Two hundred and thirty-nine.

He was counting out loud by then. He did not know that until afterward, and nobody told him, because there was nobody in the yard.

Three hundred and nine. Three hundred and forty-nine.

At three hundred and ninety-nine his father's coat was in both his fists, and his feet were braced in a slag plate that had cracked under them, and he was still going backward at the pace of a man walking to work.

The block printed while he was still holding on.

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