Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

He was flat for a day and a half.

The first day he did nothing at all. The second morning he could sit up, and by the afternoon he had got as far as the table with a blanket round him like an old man, and Nessa had gone out to the rope-walk to earn the day, and he was alone in the room with the coat.

He had the plumb out of the pocket by the second bell.

It was a mason's plumb bob, brass, a little bigger than a thumb, and it had been in the dead lining of the coat rather than the pocket, which meant the man had been carrying it somewhere he did not want it found or had simply had a hole in his coat for eleven years. Kalen was inclined to the second. There was nothing furtive about the man's coat. It was a coat that had been repaired eleven times by somebody who loved him.

The plumb had a Pattern in it and the Pattern was ruined.

PATTERN: Steady (Common, degraded)

Held in: mason's plumb, brass, unmarked

Draw: Ward, slight

The held thing does not drift.

Grade reduced. The shape is broken in two places.

Common. Degraded Common. It had been Sound once, he thought, looking at the way the shape sat, and somebody had knocked it or dropped it or simply used it for thirty years, and now it would not hold true for more than about four seconds, which for a plumb bob is the same as being a lump of brass.

It was worth nothing. The house would have given him half a mark for the metal.

Kalen looked at it for two hours.

The thing he wanted to do was rebind it. The thing he could not do was rebind it. Bind, draw twenty-two, yield nought point seven. He had one draw in him at his very best and this was not his best, and a Bind that goes wrong is a Bind that has gone wrong permanently, and at nought point seven yield he would produce, out of the twenty-two marks, a Pattern noticeably worse than the one he started with.

Everybody in Ashfall knew how you fixed a Pattern. You made a new one. You held the shape you wanted in your head, you paid the Bind, and you laid it in over the top. That is what a Binder does. That is what the word means.

Kalen had never once been able to afford to be a Binder.

So he sat at his own kitchen table with a blanket round his shoulders and did the only thing he had ever been able to afford, which was look.

He looked at it for the rest of the afternoon.

It is difficult to describe what reading a Pattern is, and Kalen had given up trying at about seventeen, because the people who could do it did not need it described and the people who could not got impatient. The nearest he had ever got was this: a Pattern is a sentence, and most people can only hear whether it is being said loudly or quietly. He could hear the words. Not all of them, and not in every dialect, and there were makers whose work was as opaque to him as a language he had never met. But on a common brass plumb bob laid in by a jobbing binder half a century ago, he could hear every word, and he could hear which ones were missing.

The shape was broken in two places, not one. That was the first thing, and it took him about forty minutes, and everybody who had ever looked at this plumb had stopped at the first break. The second was not damage. It was the first break settling, the way a wall goes out of true above a bad footing, and it had happened slowly and long afterward and it was the reason the thing would not hold for four seconds.

The second thing took him rather longer. The original had been laid in crudely, by somebody in a hurry, and it was laid in deep, far deeper than a Common needed, the way a man works when he is being paid by the piece and does not want the thing coming back. Ninety percent of the shape was still exactly where he had put it. Sound as the day it was made.

Kalen sat with a cooling cup at his elbow and held the whole of it in his head at once, the true shape and the broken shape together, like two drawings on tracing paper. They differed in two places. Both places were small.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

He did not have to make a Steady.

He had to make the eleven percent of a Steady that was missing.

Kalen sat very still for about a minute with his hands flat on the table.

Then he paid twenty-two marks he did not have, and put it where he was looking, and it took eleven seconds.

PATTERN: Steady (Sound)

Held in: mason's plumb, brass, unmarked

Draw: Ward, slight

The held thing does not drift.

Rebound. The shape is whole.

Sound. Not Common. Sound, which was better than it had been when he found it, which was not supposed to be possible at nought point seven yield, and which had cost him one draw instead of the four he did not have.

Kalen laughed out loud in an empty room, which he had not done in about two years, and then had to put his head down on the table for a while because he was still ill.

When he could sit up again he held the plumb out on its cord at arm's length and watched it not move.

He had five Patterns now. He had had four since he was seventeen. Tally and True came with the Assessment, given to him by a man who had looked at a Read of four and made an entirely reasonable guess about what the boy in front of him was going to be. Purchase he took at sixteen off a dead crane-hand's glove, and Fair Wear at seventeen off a scrapped house apron, and both of them were Common, and both of them were the sort of thing you get when you cannot pay for anything better.

Four Patterns in six years, and now a fifth, on a Tuesday, out of a dead man's coat lining, for one draw.

The thing he kept coming back to, watching the plumb hang dead still off the end of his finger, was not that he had done it. It was that it had never once occurred to him to try, in four years of doing this for a living, because the trade had a word for what he was and the word was reader, and readers found things and Binders fixed them, and nobody in Ashfall had ever suggested that finding a thing precisely enough might be most of fixing it.

When Nessa came in at the seventh bell he was still at the table with the plumb hanging off his finger, watching it not move.

"You are supposed to be lying down."

"I know."

"What is that."

"A mason's plumb."

"Why are you looking at it like that."

"Because," Kalen said, "I did not make it."

* * *

Sabra came at the eighth bell with a bill.

She did that. She had done it when he broke his wrist at sixteen and she did it now, and Kalen had long ago stopped taking it personally, because arriving with a bill was the only way Sabra Quill had ever found of arriving.

"Two days," she said, putting the paper on the table. "Docked. And the barrow you left on the dock, which walked."

"Somebody stole a barrow of collar iron."

"Somebody stole a barrow of collar iron." She sat down without being asked and looked at him. "You are the colour of a fish."

"I have had a First."

"Everyone has had a First." She got the pipe out and did not light it, which in Sabra was a form of politeness. "How much over?"

"Thirty-one."

"For three draws of Ward at fourteen." Sabra did the sum in her head faster than he could have said it out loud. "That is not thirty-one. That is forty-two."

"I know."

"Then why is it thirty-one."

"I do not know," Kalen said. "I have been lying down for a day and a half thinking about why it is thirty-one and I have got nowhere, and I want to ask you, and I have not got two marks."

Sabra put the pipe stem against her lower lip and left it there.

"That one is one mark," she said, "and you can owe me."

"Go on then."

"Because you did not pay for three draws. You paid for what the three draws did." She said it flatly, the way she said everything. "The Accord does not charge you for effort. It has never charged anybody for effort in nine hundred years. It charges you for the service rendered and it decides what the service was worth, and a man came off that dock alive, so it discounted you eleven marks and did not tell you."

Kalen sat with that.

"That is not what anybody says," he said.

"No."

"Everybody says the draw is the draw."

"Everybody in Ashfall says the draw is the draw, because everybody in Ashfall is paid at house rate and at house rate the draw is the draw." Sabra put the pipe away. "The house buys your service off you at a fixed figure and settles with the Accord itself. That is what a house is for. It is why nobody who has ever worked for a reclamation house has netted out of arrears in living memory, and it is why they all think the number is a number."

There was a very long pause. Down through the floor the rope-walk stove ticked.

"The house rate and the ward rate are not the same," Kalen said.

"No."

"They have never been the same."

"No."

"Sabra, how long have you known that."

Sabra Quill stood up, and took her bill back off the table because he had not signed it, and went to the door.

"I have been waiting four years for you to ask me that," she said. "That one is free as well."

She was on the landing before he got up, and by the time he had the door open she was down the first flight and not stopping.

"That is two free ones," Kalen said, over the rail.

"It is," said Sabra, from the dark, "and if you were any good at this you would already be worrying about why."

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