Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

He put the empty holding tin on the bench at the second bell and did not touch it for an hour.

That was procedure and he kept to procedure. An hour on a recovery before you go in, every time, whatever you think you know, because the man who knows the shape is the man who takes the wrong thing out of it. He had said that to Brem twice.

So he sat with his back against the vise post and looked at a tin the size of his palm. He knew exactly what was going to happen at the end of the hour. He kept to procedure anyway.

The hour went by.

The shed was empty. Doss was on the night board, Brem and Quist had gone at the seventh bell, and Sabra had crossed the yard to the office at eight and had not put a lamp on.

Nobody was coming. He had chosen the night for that.

He had made the Steady at his own kitchen table in the winter, out of a dead man's plumb bob, with a blanket round his shoulders and the heat of a First still going out of him. Four hours of looking and eleven seconds of work. He had laughed out loud in an empty room, which he had not done in about two years, and then had put his head down on the table because he was still ill.

It had gone into him in the yard on the day the Second settled, and it had been in him ever since, and it was the only thing he had ever made.

The rule was the rule. Aro Belk had said it to him in the spring in a mason's yard with three of his hands standing round, and had said it the way a man says a thing everybody knows. What comes out comes out a grade down. If you are unlucky it comes out two. Nobody in the trade has ever got one back whole.

Kalen had known that for four days. He had spent all four of them at this bench with the tin in front of him and his hands in his lap.

There were three other ways to raise eighty-eight marks by the end of the month and he had costed every one of them twice. Two of them were slower than the calendar. The third was the hooks.

At the third bell he opened his coat and went in.

* * *

Taking a Pattern out of a person is the same work as taking one out of a frame, and it is not, and the difference is that the frame does not flinch.

He set the three hooks first, on the bench, in the shape they went in, which was habit and did nothing at all, and then he sat with his back to the post and his boots flat on the floor and found the shape of the Steady where it sat.

It sat further in than he had expected. Seventeen weeks of living in him had let it down into places he had not put it, the way water gets into brick, and the parts of it that had settled were the parts he was going to have to cut. He read it for the length of a bell and did not touch it. Then he read it again from the other end, right to left, which is the way you read Accord script and the way he had never been able to unlearn, and found the two places where it had grown into him and one more where it had not.

Three joins. He had budgeted for two.

The first came away in about forty minutes and cost him nothing except the forty minutes. It was clean where he had laid it clean. He took it back through his own work in reverse, one bearing at a time, the way you take a wall down when you want the bricks.

He had laid that part in eleven seconds at a kitchen table. It took him forty minutes to undo and he was better at this now than he had been then.

The second was in his hands.

Not in the fingers. Under them, in the flat of the palm and up the wrist, where a man's holding goes when he has been holding for six years, and the Steady had gone into that and made itself at home there because that was the part of him that had wanted it. He found the edge of it at about the fifth bell and sat with his forehead against the post for a while.

He took it out slowly. It came out badly. He had known both of those things before he started.

There is no pain in it. That is the thing nobody says. A Pattern coming out of a man does not hurt him, it simply stops being there, and the stopping arrives in pieces over about a minute, so that he put his hand on the bench at one point to steady himself and found that the bench was steady and he was not, and understood that he had been carrying a floor under himself for seventeen weeks without once being told he was standing on it.

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The third join was the one he had not budgeted for. It was in the wrong place entirely.

It was in the eleven seconds. It was the join between the shape he had rebuilt and the shape that was already in the plumb: the old jobbing binder's ninety percent, laid in deep by a man working by the piece half a century ago.

Kalen had put back the eleven percent that was missing. He had thought of the two as one thing ever since.

They were not one thing. They never had been. The Accord had let him believe it for six years, because the Accord does not correct anybody about anything, ever, at any price.

He sat in a cold shed at the sixth bell with a dead man's work in one hand and his own in the other and could not tell, for about four minutes, which of them was which.

Then he could, and he cut his own out, and put it in the tin.

* * *

Six hours and eleven minutes.

He had done everything correctly. He could have shown the working to anybody. There was not one bearing in the whole of it that he would take back.

It came out Sound.

He had known it would. He had said the word out loud to himself four days ago at this bench and had said it again on the stairs and had written it on the top of the sheet he kept his workings on, and none of that made the smallest difference at three minutes past the sixth bell with the lid in his hand.

Sound. Not Fine. One grade, gone, in the correct manner, at the correct cost, exactly as the rule said in the spring in a mason's yard.

The tin weighed about as much as a spoon.

It had also cost him a full Bind to take it out, twenty marks at a yield of nought point eight, which meant that the Accord had charged him for making himself worse and had settled the charge against a Balance that was already four hundred under. He had budgeted for that too. Budgeting for a thing is not the same as watching it happen.

It had been in him through a Second grade Collection, six weeks under a foundry, a hearing, a smelt yard and a night board. It went into a tin the size of his palm and the tin weighed about as much as a spoon.

He put the lid on and wired it and chalked the lot number.

Then he took the house book off the shelf, and opened it at the left-hand column, and entered the tin in his own hand at house rate, because he was First Hand now and the paperwork was his, and there was nobody in the room to do it for him or to him.

He wrote the grade down before he wrote the mark down, which was the right way round, and which he had never once managed in his life until tonight.

Fifty-three.

A Fine grade Steady was ninety-four at house rate and a hundred and sixty in the ward, and there had never been the smallest chance of him getting the ward figure, because a Bonded hand selling a personal Pattern sells to the house he is bonded to and everybody in Ashfall knows what that costs and nobody has ever written it down.

He took fifty-three out of the box against the entry, and put the box back, and locked it.

Then he sat down on the floor with his back against the bench leg for a while. There was nobody to see it. That was the only reason he did it.

* * *

The rest of it was on the shelf over the vise in a tobacco tin, and had been since the smelt yard.

Thirteen marks left out of the tools. He had sold them in the order he had decided on with Hesper's list on the bench in front of him, and the order had been the wrong one on purpose, and the hooks were still in the roll.

And twenty-two marks in copper and brass, counted onto a bounty counter by a clerk who did not offer to help him pick them up.

He had put the coin in the tin the same morning with the receipt folded round it and had not had the lid off since. The receipt was the reduced figure on an incomplete designation, in the same flat hand everything comes in, with the name of the designated party on the top line, and he had read it once at the counter and never again.

He took the lid off now.

Kalen stood at the bench in a cold shed at the seventh bell and read the whole of it through, top to bottom, the way you read a thing you are going to act on. Then he folded it into three and put it in his coat with the coin and the fifty-three and the thirteen, and went out across the yard, and did not look at the office window.

Eighty-eight marks.

The ward office opened at the eighth bell and the counter had two people at it. He stood in the line. A man ahead of him argued about a cart licence for eleven minutes and Kalen did not hear a word of it.

He had walked past this counter twice a week for four years. It was the counter with the box on it. He had put a case in that box in the spring, eight hundred and sixty-four objects and forty pages and an index ruled with a knife, and had stood exactly here while a clerk gave him a number.

The form was the pre-registration deferral, which is a quarter sheet, and he had filled it in three nights ago and had checked it four times. He slid it across with the coin on top of it. The clerk counted the coin twice, the way they do, and put the stamp on the copy and turned it round and pushed it back, and Kalen picked it up and said nothing and neither did the clerk, and the whole of it took about ninety seconds.

Eleven weeks.

He stood on the step outside the ward office with his sister's name on a stamped paper in his hand and did the last piece of arithmetic, which he had been carrying since the fourth bell and had refused to do at the bench.

Eighty-eight marks against the arrears would have bought him twenty-two days of interest and nothing else. Eighty-eight marks against the pre-registration bought eleven weeks before anybody's factor could put a hand on Nessa's paper.

He had known which one it was going to be before he took the lid off the tin.

His father's bounty had paid for a third of his sister's deferral, and there was nobody in Ashfall he could ever say that sentence to.

Eleven weeks, and nothing at all against the arrears.

Kalen put the copy inside his shirt with the rate sheet.

Then he went to work.

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