Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The first word on it was not First.

He held on for four more seconds, because he had not worked out yet that it was over.

COLLECTION: THIRD GRADE

Overdraw of 380 marks assessed against

Ashgrove, Kalen.

Settled.

"Da," he said. "Da. It is me."

There was no heat.

That was the first wrong thing and it went through him ahead of everything else, because he knew what a Collection was. He had had six Firsts and one Second, and he knew the shape of the start of one the way you know the first note of a bell.

A First is heat. It comes from the inside all at once, an enormous unreasonable heat, as though the Accord has taken the difference out in temperature. Then the strength goes out of you in one long slide, so that sitting becomes lying, and you do not decide to lie down.

Nothing came, and he waited for it with his father's coat in both his fists.

What came instead was attention.

It went down him from somewhere above the top of his head, unhurried, the way a man goes down a column with the point of a pen and does not lift the pen off the paper between the entries. It was not painful, and it was not warm, and it was not anything at all.

It was being looked at, from the inside, by something that was reading him.

Kalen knew exactly what that was, because it was his trade. He had done it eleven hundred times to iron and brass and leather, going along a made thing with his eyes to find where the shape sat and where it was thin. He had never once thought about what it would be to be the frame on the bench.

It stopped at his eyes.

It stayed there for a length of time he could not afterward put a number on, and there is a woman on Cinder Row who took a Third at thirty and cannot smell anything. She says that it is the best possible outcome, and she says it in a voice that makes you agree with her quickly and change the subject.

Kalen thought about her with a clarity he did not want.

Then it went on down, and stopped at his throat, and did not take that either.

It went down his left arm at the pace of a man reading: past the elbow, and along the outside of the forearm, and into the hand.

There it stopped, and stayed.

It did not hurt.

That is the thing nobody tells you and there is no way to be told it. There was no pain at any point in the whole of it. There was a decision being made about him, in his own hand, at leisure, by something that has done this four hundred times a year in this ward for nine hundred years and has worked out to the joint how much it can take off a man and still have him at his bench on Monday.

Then it finished, and left, and his hand opened.

It opened by itself, unhurried, the way a hand opens when a man puts something down. The two smallest fingers went out flat and stayed out flat.

His grip was gone. His father's coat came out of it.

Kalen went down on the slag on his side. He got the right hand up and two fingers into the coat again, and was dragged about six feet on his hip with black glass breaking under him. Then that went as well, because you cannot hold a walking man with two fingers and a wrist, and he let go before it took the shoulder out.

He lay on the slag and watched his father finish the pass.

Corun Ashgrove went on down to the gap in the south wall and held the board out at nothing for four seconds, the way he had done at the end of every pass for eight years. Then he took it back and came up the yard and started the next one.

He went past Kalen's head at about four feet and did not look down. He stood at the ladle track and marked the board, and walked the length of the yard to the tipping edge, and marked it again.

Somewhere north of the roofs the sixth bell went over the ward.

Corun Ashgrove came back down the yard and stopped in the gap. He turned round, which he had not done on any of the six passes Kalen had watched from the ramp, and stood there with the board held out at the height of a man's chest for four seconds, at nothing at all, because that was the third part of the instruction and the third part comes at the end.

Then he took the board back under his arm and went out through the wall.

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Kalen counted his father's steps on the slag outside the wall. It is a sound like walking on broken crockery and it carries a long way in cold air. He got to forty-one and lost the count and did not start it again.

He lay there for a while.

The lamp had gone over four feet away and was still burning on its side, throwing the whole yard sideways along the ground: the ramp, and the trough with no water in it, and the cracked plate where his heels had been, and the ash lying over everything.

Nothing moved anywhere in any of it. There was nobody at the gap and nobody on the ramp, and the yard had been empty when he came into it, and it was empty now, and it was going to be empty in the morning.

He got his left hand up in front of his face and looked at it.

The fingers were there.

That was the part he had not been ready for, and he had been told about it his whole life and had still not been ready for it. Nothing was missing. The nails were the right colour and the skin was the right colour, and there was no mark on either of them anywhere, and they were warm.

He told them to close.

There was nothing at the other end of it. Not resistance, and not pain, and not a twitch. It is pulling a bell wire that has been cut somewhere inside the wall. The wire moves. There is no bell.

He put his right hand over them and folded them shut, and they folded, and when he took his hand away they lay where he had put them. He straightened them out with his thumb and they stayed straight.

He did that four times.

Then he stopped, because he could hear himself doing it, and lay on his back with the arm across his chest and looked up at nothing.

A Second Hand holds and cuts. That is the whole trade and it is not a figure of speech.

The right hand takes the hook and does the fine work, and the fine work is nothing, the fine work is a wrist and two knuckles. It is the left hand that holds, and a grip is not made by the thumb and the first two fingers, whatever is believed by people who have never been paid for one.

A grip is made by the last two. The others sit on top of it and take the credit.

He worked the rest of it out lying down, going through it in order the way he would have gone through a damaged frame. He had a pinch. He had a thumb he could hook over an edge, and enough left in the hand to carry a lamp, and about four ounces of closing pressure where there had been sixty pounds that afternoon.

He could not hold anything.

Getting up took some time and he did it in stages: sitting first with the right arm braced behind him, then a knee, then standing with the wall against his shoulder. He stayed against the wall a good while after that, because a yard does the thing rooms do after a Collection.

The roll was on the slag where it had come out of his coat.

He crouched and got the tape undone with his right hand and his teeth, and one of the hooks came out and went onto the slag and rang. He picked it up, and it went onto the slag again.

He got it the third time by putting his palm flat against it and sliding it up his own thigh.

Then he rolled the three good ones and the two ruined ones together and tied the tape one-handed, badly, with a knot that was not a knot. He put the roll in his coat, and picked the lamp up in his right hand, and walked out of the smelt yard.

He did not go up Tallow Street. It was past the ninth bell, and Nessa would be asleep, and he would have had to come up two flights and be looked at.

He went to the shed and sat on the strip bench with his back against the vise post until it got light.

The gantry over him had sixty-six bolts in it where there ought to have been sixty-eight. He did not count them, and knew the number anyway.

He did not sleep. He sat with the roll on the bench beside him and the left hand in his lap, and went over the yard in order, from the ramp to the gap, the way you go over a job that has gone wrong, and got to the same place every time, and went round again.

* * *

The bounty counter opened at the third bell and there was one clerk and no queue.

Kalen put the contract on the counter, and the man read it and looked up.

"Completion or part."

"Part."

"Is the subject settled."

"No."

"Where is the subject now."

"At the gate," Kalen said. "He was there last night at the sixth bell and he will be there tonight."

The clerk wrote that down without any change in his face, because he had written it before, because everybody in Ashfall has written it before.

"Name and Standing for the entry."

"Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded."

"Any ward property taken off the subject."

"No."

"Anything at all off the subject."

"No."

He turned the second sheet round and put his finger on a cross at the foot of it.

"Sign the incompletion," he said. "Do you want the terms read to you."

"No."

He read them himself, standing at the counter, with a hand he could not close laid flat on the paper to keep it from lifting.

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

Kalen looked at that sentence for a good deal longer than the clerk had any patience for.

He had spent two nights on a ramp costing it out, and had got nine draws before the number went past two hundred. He had gone into that yard with the whole of the arithmetic in his head, and had counted out loud in the dark all the way up to three hundred and ninety-nine.

The Accord had taken nineteen off that and assessed him at three hundred and eighty, because a man had been moved off designated ground and the moving was worth nineteen marks. He had known that rule for four years. Knowing it was worse.

Every figure of it had been correct. None of it had made the slightest difference to anything.

It had been a Third from the moment he put the pen down.

It would have been a Third at fifty.

He signed.

The clerk had a wooden stamp and an ink pad in a tin. He inked it twice and struck the foot of both sheets, and put the contract face down on a spike with about forty others on it.

Then he counted twenty-two marks onto the counter in copper and brass, because the Assessor's discretion on a part discharge is twenty and somebody somewhere had put two more on it, and Kalen never did find out who.

The Accord issued the receipt while the coin was still on the wood.

NOTICE OF SERVICE

Designation 117, Ward Nine, part discharged.

Subject moved from the designated ground.

Subject not settled.

Credited to Ashgrove, Kalen ......... 22

Twenty-two on the counter and twenty-two on the notice. The same figure doing both jobs at once, because marks is money and marks is what a thing costs, and nobody alive remembers a time when it was two words.

He put the coin into his coat with his right hand, one piece at a time, and it took a while. The clerk waited, and did not offer to help, which was the single kindest thing anybody did for Kalen Ashgrove that week.

Then he took the notice off the counter.

He put it in his shirt, because he kept everything.

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