Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The croze came off the bench for the second time before the third bell, and this time he let it go.

It fell twice, once off the bench and once off his boot, and finished under the sorting rack with the steel side up. Kalen went down on one knee and got it out and set it in front of him again. Then he looked at his own left hand for a while.

The two smallest fingers were flat on the wood where he had put them an hour ago. They were not swollen and they were not marked and the skin on them was his own skin. He curled them in with his right thumb and they curled, and he took the thumb away and they stayed curled, and after a while he straightened them out again because it was easier to look at.

A hand you have to set is not a hand. It is a fitting.

He could pinch. He had worked that out on the slag and had confirmed it every day since. Thumb to forefinger, thumb to middle finger, both fine, and he could take a nail off a flat board and turn a page and carry a lamp, and none of it was any use to him at a bench.

A Second Hand holds and cuts.

He had been a First Hand for thirty-two days and the trade's own sentence did not care.

* * *

The croze was a cooper's, beech and steel, out of an estate lot that had come in the week he was on his back. It had a Pattern in it and the Pattern was ordinary and the whole job was worth about nine marks, and Kalen had chosen it deliberately on the seventh morning because it was the smallest, dullest, most forgiving piece of work in the shed.

He had got eleven minutes into it in three days.

That was the part he had not let himself put a figure on until this morning. A hook wants a fixed thing to bear against. When the workpiece moves a hair, the hook moves with it, and the shape you had hold of is no longer under the point, and you have to find it again from the start, and finding it again is the hour that pays for the four minutes. He had done the sum standing up, the way he did every sum. Twelve pieces a day before the smelt yard. Four now, on a good day, and none of them clean.

He set the croze against the bench stop and put his left hand over it and leaned, which is not holding, and got two minutes.

Then he got on with it, because there was nothing else in the world to do.

* * *

Nessa came across the yard at the fourth bell with bread in a cloth and found him with the croze wedged under his elbow.

She did not say anything about that. She put the bread on the corner of the bench, and then she went along the strip bench from the vise post to the end and moved the chalk and the tape and the roll of hooks and the four gouges he had left over to the right-hand side, in order, closest to furthest, exactly the way he would have laid them if he had thought about it.

Kalen watched her do it. Then he got up and put them back.

"That took me nine days to lay out," he said.

"It took you nine days to lay out for a hand you have not got."

He said leave it. She sat down on the sorting rack with her arms folded and asked him why, which was the question, and he did not have a good answer for it, so he gave her the true one instead. He said that if the bench was set for a man with eight fingers then that was what he was.

"What you are," Nessa said. "You are down two fingers and a third of your speed, there are a hundred and sixty-eight days, and I can hold a thing still. I am not being kind to you. I have not got time to be kind to you."

He let her hold it.

That was the part he was going to think about for a long time afterward. She put both hands on the beech and set her weight on it the way you set weight on a thing you have been told to hold, and he went in through the steel with the second hook and had the shape under the point in under a minute, and it was there, and it stayed there, and it was so easy that his eyes stung and he had to sit back and pretend to be looking for a mark on the steel.

He got four minutes of clean work out of it. Then he stopped.

"Working," Nessa said.

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"It is working."

"Then what."

"You are twelve, and you have a rate sheet and a hundred and sixty-eight days of your own." He put the hook down on the sacking. "If the way I get through this year is your two hands on my bench, then I have not got a trade. I have got a job that takes two people and pays one."

Nessa took her hands off the croze and looked at him for about four seconds, which from her was a paragraph.

"You have got three hooks that hold a thing still," she said, "and you are using your hand."

Then she took the cloth off the bread and went home, and left him with it.

She did not slam the yard gate. She did not say anything on the way out. She had got what she came for, which was to say the thing and be heard saying it, and Nessa Ashgrove had never in her life stayed in a room to win an argument twice.

He ate the bread standing up. It was good bread. He noted that and put it away with everything else.

* * *

She was wrong, and it took him about a minute to work out how, and the working out was the whole of it.

The three good hooks held a slight Steady between them and the Steady was for the workpiece's Pattern, not for the workpiece. They were the tools. Putting a tool's tip on a job to stop the job moving is like using a lamp for a doorstop: it works, and you have no lamp.

But she had said hold a thing still and had meant something a hand does, and a hand was not the only thing in the shed that could do it.

He went through the scrap that night.

Eleven things did not work. A rag wrap round the wrist, which slipped. A strap to the bench dog, which held the piece and not the angle. Sand in a leather bag, which held the angle and not the piece. Wedges, four ways. A bench dog and his knee together, which lasted about ninety seconds, until his knee moved. A second dog. A cord and a stick. A tinsmith's clamp with the pad gone. Two of those with a shim between them. The strip vise itself, which crushed the beech. And, at about the eleventh bell, his own boot, which he did not enter on the list.

The list was eleven long because he wrote everything down.

The twelfth thing was in the north shed under a heap of collar iron, and it was a gantry clamp with one jaw cracked clean through, off a line that had been condemned before he was born. It was cast, it was heavy, it had a screw with forty years of grease in the thread, and it was worth about a mark and a half as iron.

Kalen stood in the north shed with a lamp in his right hand and looked at the good jaw for a long time.

* * *

He built it over the whole of the next day and most of the night after it.

The clamp body bolted to the bench through the two holes that had held it to a gantry head, which was luck, and he took the luck. He cut the cracked jaw off at the root and squared the stub, and drilled it twice, and that was four hours, because drilling cast iron with one hand to steer and no hand to hold is a thing you do by clamping the clamp.

The fingers came out of the roll.

He had five hooks and two of them were dead. One had snapped at the neck under his own weight on a tray case in the foundry. One had gone soft and cracked in the same moment with twenty-two marks of his in it. He had put both back in the roll with the good ones, which is not a sensible thing to do with a dead tool, and had said nothing about it to himself for eleven weeks.

He took them out now and cut them up.

The ash came off in four minutes. The shanks went into the stub of the jaw at an angle he arrived at by ruining the first one, and the tips came round and down and met about two inches above the bench, and each of them turned on a pin and locked on a wedge, so that a piece could go under them at any angle a man could think of and stay at it.

There was no Pattern in any of it. That was the point and he did not notice it was the point. He had a Bind of twenty at a yield of nought point eight, and everything he had ever made had cost him a day of his life, and the jig cost him a broken clamp, two dead hooks, a day and a half, and nothing at all, ever again, for as long as the iron held.

He set the croze in it at the second bell of the morning and it took him eleven minutes to get the angle right.

Then he did not touch it again.

PATTERN: Bite (Common)

Held in: a cooper's croze, beech and steel

Draw: Force, slight

The cutting edge stays in the cut it started.

Twenty-six years and I never once had to hold it. H. Delve

Fifty-one minutes, from the first bearing to the tin. He timed it on the yard bell because he timed everything now.

He had done that same job in thirty-four in the spring.

Kalen sat on the strip bench with the tin in his lap and did the arithmetic and got a third, which was the figure he had already got standing at this bench on the seventh morning, and it had not improved by being confirmed. Fifty-one against thirty-four. Eleven minutes of setting before he could start, every time, on every piece, for the rest of his working life. He would carry that number into every yard he ever worked in, and it was not going to come down, and no part of it was going to grow back.

Eight pieces a day, then, where there had been twelve. It was better than four.

He would have traded the whole bench for the two fingers before the sentence finished.

He wrote the time in the book anyway, because a thing you have not costed is not a thing you know.

Then he looked at the croze, still sitting in the jig where he had set it fifty-one minutes ago, at the angle he had set it at, having moved not one hair in either direction the whole time he was working.

He noted the time. He did not note the other thing.

* * *

He walked home at the eleventh bell with the tin in his coat and the jig still bolted to the bench, and stopped at the top of Cinder Row where the gantry line starts, and stood there while a cart went by.

Nine marks for the croze. Eight days.

A hundred and forty-eight outstanding on the endorsement, at twelve a week, and Hesper Vane came into the yard on a Thursday to take it off him in person because that was the arrangement and she did not vary arrangements.

He had bought a signature that said a man was worth listening to. He had been worth listening to the whole time. Nobody had asked.

Kalen went up Cinder Row with his left hand in his pocket where it stopped being a thing people looked at.

He wanted to be worth an endorsement, not buy one.

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