Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The issue tin came up from the house on a barrow and Kalen carried it up the canteen steps himself, because the last hand who had let one go over on those steps had been made to account for every case in it, out loud, at the yard door, in front of the whole shift.

It weighed forty pounds. It held sixty cases, and it was the entire part the reclamation house played in ward Assessment: twice a year Sabra sold the ward a tin of cleaned Common-grade Patterns at a rate she had not been able to shift in nine years, and twice a year the ward gave them to children.

The old foundry canteen had been built to feed four hundred men in twenty minutes. It was very good at that. It had never been any good at anything else, and with the ovens two centuries cold it held weather the way a bucket holds water.

Forty of them were queued along the outside wall in the wind.

They had been told the third bell. The table was not up until the fourth. Kalen set the tin on the trestle and put the lid underneath it and went down the line once while he waited, right to left, because he had never been able to read a rank of anything any other way. Some of them had a mother. Two had both. Four had nobody at all and were standing the way you stand when you have decided in advance not to mind.

A woman near the door watched him take the lid off.

"Is that them?"

"Yes."

"How many do they get?"

"Two."

"Can you choose?"

"No," Kalen said. "The first one is a Carry. Everybody in a working ward gets a Carry. The Accord takes the second one off the sheet and nobody in this room has any say in it, including him."

"What did you get?"

"A Carry and a Tally."

"Is a Tally good?"

"It is good if you are going to count things."

"Does it hurt?"

"No."

"Marra Sull says it hurts."

"It does not hurt," Kalen said. "He puts his hand flat on the paper and there is a number on the paper. That is the whole of it."

"That is all?"

"That is all."

She looked at him for a second and then went back to watching the door, and Kalen understood that he had been asked all six of those questions in the order somebody asks them when they have been awake since the fourth bell working out which one they are allowed to ask first.

Vessel Marn came in at the fourth bell in a good coat with a bad bag under his arm. He set the folding table up against the serving hatch, got a stool out of the store, and laid out three things on the cloth: an inkwell, a pen, and the ward stamp on its wooden handle. Then he took his gloves off, put them in his pocket, and rubbed his hands together twice.

That was the only human thing Kalen saw him do all morning.

The procedure took four minutes a child and never once took five. The child sat. Marn wrote the head of the sheet, asked for the name and the street, wrote those, and put his hand flat on the paper. Then there was a pause about the length of a breath, in which nothing happened that anybody in the room could see, and then Marn read out two numbers off a page that had been blank when he put his hand on it.

"Name."

"Bevis Sull."

"Street."

"Cinder Row, over the tally shop."

"Line seventy-eight. Balance minus seventy-eight."

"What is the minus for?"

"Entry."

"Is there an arrangement?" the boy's mother said.

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"For what."

"For the seventy-eight."

"There is the tally shop on Cinder Row," Marn said, "and there is the ward's own list, and the ward's own list is closed until the quarter."

"So there is no arrangement."

"So there is the tally shop. Next."

Two cases went across the table with every sheet. Kalen handed them up. Carry, and then whatever the second one was, which the Accord chose and which Marn did not comment on, because commenting on it was not in the schedule.

A boy from the top of Cinder Row got a Tally and asked if he could have a different one.

"The ward does not do exchanges."

"My brother got a Purchase."

"The ward does not do exchanges."

"Can I put it back and have nothing?"

Marn wrote something in the margin and did not answer, and the boy took his two cases and went out past the queue holding them the way you hold a thing you have decided to be pleased about.

What Kalen watched, because he could not stop watching it, was the date.

Marn wrote it at the head of every sheet before he wrote anything else, without looking at what his hand was doing, and he wrote it in the old form: the quarter first, then the day, then the year in a figure with a crossed loop on the last stroke. Kalen had seen that loop twice in his life. Both times it had been on a tag off something older than the closure, out of the bottom of a bin, and both times he had copied it onto the shed board and never found another one.

Forty sheets. Forty dates. A man doing a thing his hand had been taught before Kalen was born and had never once been asked to stop.

He filed it, because he filed everything, and went back to the tin.

He had cleared and read the whole sixty before the fourth bell, out in the yard, in bad light, checking that every Pattern in every case was still doing the work it had been made to do. Nineteen of them had come off the dead. He knew which nineteen because he had written eleven of the marks on the shed board himself, and the other eight were house work from the spring, and the house's own filing was on the inside of the lids where a twelve year old would never think to look.

There is no rule against that. There is no rule about it at all. A Pattern off a dead man is stock, and stock gets cleaned and cased and sold to whoever has a schedule that will bear it, and a ward that would not buy reclaimed stock would have to buy new, and new means a Binder, and a Binder is paid out of the guild's book at guild rates.

A year ago the tin had been a day's job and he had wanted the lamp for it. This morning it had taken him about as long as one quarry hammer.

He did not make anything of that. He noticed it, the way you notice a door swinging easier, and got on.

* * *

She came up at the middle of the morning and she was the same height as Nessa.

That was the first thing, and it was not a coincidence, because she was ten months older and they had sat in the same room at the Fetter Street school until the school stopped. Kalen knew her by the coat. Nessa had described the coat once, at length, and with feeling.

"Name."

"Ilsa Fenn."

"Street."

"Cinder Row. The end by the cooperage."

Her mother stood behind the stool with both hands on the back of it. Marn wrote the date and the name and the street, and put his hand flat on the paper, and there was the pause.

ASSESSED

Fenn, Ilsa. Ward Nine. Bonded.

Line 90. Balance -90.

Entry levied at the ward's assessed rate.

Interest accrues at 4 per day from this date.

"Line ninety," Marn said. "Balance minus ninety."

Kalen had the two cases in his hands and he did the sum standing up, the way he had done it at the board, and it took no time at all because he had been carrying the figures in his coat for six days. Ninety at the ward's assessed rate. At the standard rate it would have been seventy-two. The difference was eighteen, which was four and a half days of his own interest, and the whole of a girl who was ten months older than his sister and had her coat buttoned to the throat because the canteen was cold.

"Thank you for your time," her mother said.

Marn stamped the sheet, turned it over, and put it face down on the pile.

"Next."

Kalen put the two cases into Ilsa Fenn's hands. She took them and looked at them and then up at him, and he understood that she was waiting to be told what they were, because nobody had told her, and it was not going to be the man with the stamp.

"Carry and Fair Wear," he said. "The Carry is the useful one. Do not open the cases in the wet."

"Is ninety a lot?"

"No," Kalen said, which was true, and was not an answer.

"How long does ninety take?"

"Ilsa," her mother said.

"That depends what you do with the Carry," Kalen said. "It is a good one. It came off a carter and he looked after it."

"What do you do?"

"I take things apart."

The mother took the girl by the shoulder and steered her out into the wind, and the next one sat down, and Marn wrote the date.

* * *

It went on until the light started going, and then it stopped, because the schedule allowed for forty and forty had come.

Kalen put the lid on the tin. There were four cases left over, which meant two children had not come, which meant the ward would go and get them, in the way the ward went and got people, over about eleven weeks, by letter.

The four who had come by themselves went out by themselves. Nobody in the queue had said anything about it and nobody was going to, because Ward Nine had a grammar for that as well, and the grammar was to look at the floor.

He had been standing behind that table for six hours. He had come in thinking of Assessment the way he thought of the weather at the gate: a thing that happened to a ward on a date, unpleasantly, and was then over. He had watched forty children be handed a Line and a debt and two cases in four minutes each, by a courteous man who had not once looked at any of them for longer than it took to spell a street.

Nobody had done anything wrong all day. That was the part he could not put down.

Marn folded the table legs in, one and then the other, and set it against the hatch, and put the inkwell in the bad bag, and the pen after it, and the stamp. Then he straightened up and looked at the two of them, Kalen with the tin on his shoulder and the house lad who had brought the barrow up and had been sitting on it for an hour.

"Ashgrove," he said.

Neither of them answered, because the lad's name was not Ashgrove and Kalen had not expected to hear his own.

"Which one of you is Ashgrove?"

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