Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

"I am," Kalen said, and put the tin down.

Marn did not apologise for the question and did not explain it. He got a folded paper out of the bad bag and held it without opening it, which was a thing Sabra did, and which meant the same in both of them.

"You read a maker's mark."

"Yes."

"How many."

"About four hundred."

"Out of."

"Eleven hundred," Kalen said. "I have got them written down."

Marn opened the paper. It was a ward schedule, ruled in columns, with figures in the third column entered in a hand a good deal older than the paper they were on.

"There is a room behind my office," he said. "Unclaimed bound gear. Some of it has been in there thirty years. The ward carries it as stock, I am required to have it catalogued and struck off before the quarter, the ward's own hands cannot tell a Sound from a Common by looking at it, and I am not paying a Binder's rate to have a shelf counted."

"How much of it is there?"

"Six hundred articles. Give or take."

"And the rate?"

Marn turned the paper round on the flat of his hand and put one finger under the line.

"Clerical assistance, reclamation. Nine a night."

Kalen looked at the figure. Then he looked at the head of the column, where somebody had written the year the schedule was last amended, and the year was 1151.

"That rate is fifty-three years old."

"It is the rate."

"At nine a night I would be counting the ward's shelf for less than the house pays me to break up a barrow."

"That is correct," Marn said, "and the ward does not negotiate its own schedule, and if you are going to take a position on it I would rather you took it now than on the fourth night."

There is a thing about being poor that is not much talked about, which is that the price of a thing and the value of a thing come apart very early, and after that you spend your life doing sums in two currencies at once. Nine a night for nine nights was eighty-one marks. Eighty-one marks against four hundred and fifty-two of arrears running at four a day was twenty days of standing perfectly still.

What was on the table was a room with six hundred tags in it.

"I will want the door shut," Kalen said.

"Why."

"Because I will be working at night with a lamp, and I do not want to spend nine evenings explaining myself to the watch through a window."

Marn thought about that for about a second and a half, which was longer than he had thought about any of the forty sheets.

"The ward does not provide a lamp."

"I have got a lamp."

"Then you have got everything you need."

He wrote a line at the foot of the schedule and stamped it, and the stamp came down with the flat wet sound of a thing being settled by a man who would not be there when it mattered. Then he did up the bag, and looked around the canteen once, at the trestles and the cold ovens and the queue's worth of mud on the floor, the way a man looks at a room he is going to have to book a cleaner for.

ENGAGEMENT REGISTERED

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Bonded.

Cataloguing, unclaimed bound gear.

Credited at 9 per night against arrears.

Service is not settlement.

Marn went down the steps to a hired trap at the bottom of them and the trap took him back up the ward, and Kalen stood in the empty canteen for a minute with the tin against his leg.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Forty children. Two cases each. Nineteen of those cases off the dead, and none of that written down anywhere except on the inside of a lid and on a shed board four streets away, in his own hand, because he had decided at fifteen that somebody ought to be keeping the list and nobody had ever told him to stop.

* * *

He came down off the foundry road at the sixth bell, which he had not intended and had also, if he was honest about it, arranged.

The gate was shut. The gate was always shut between the sixth and the seventh, and the ward went about its business on the near side of it, and on the far side the burnt end gave its people up one at a time the way it did every evening, and they came down the road and stood.

The road up to the burnt end is the only road in Ward Nine with nothing on it after the sixth bell. It has been that way for eight years and the ward has rebuilt its whole evening around not using it. Carters go the long way about by the cooperage and lose twenty minutes and do not complain, because complaining would require saying why.

There were about forty. There were always about forty. The woman in the slag apron was at the left end where she was always at the left end. The two men who had worked the same bench for thirty years stood the same distance apart they had stood for thirty years, and the boy with the runner's satchel was behind them with the strap over the wrong shoulder, which Kalen had noticed in the spring and had been unable to stop noticing since.

Kalen went along the front rank once, right to left, which took eleven seconds.

He had done that four thousand times. He had done it at a pace that let him look without being seen to look, and had told himself for eight years that what he was doing was checking, and that a man is allowed to check.

Then he did the thing he had not done in eight years, which was stop.

Corun Ashgrove was in the second rank, three from the left, where he had been every evening Kalen had ever looked.

He had gone grey at the temples the year before the closure and he had not gone any greyer since, which was one of the things nobody warns you about. He had the foundry coat on, the heavy one, with the collar turned up on the left side only, because he had always turned it up on the left side, and had done it in a shed in Ward Nine in front of a boy of eleven about four thousand times. There was ash in the seams that no weather had ever got out of them. His boots were laced the foundry way, wide and loose over the instep, so that a man can get out of them fast if he has to.

He had the tally-board against his chest with both hands on it, face in, the way you hold a board you are going to hand to the next man when the shift changes.

Kalen had never once been able to see the reverse of it.

Further down the rank the woman with the bowl was doing what she did, the same as she had done it in the spring and the spring before that, holding it out where a man could see it and telling him something about a roof.

Kalen walked up to the gate and put both hands on the bar.

"There is a job at the ward office," he said. "Nine a night. It is not about the money."

Nothing happened, which he had known before he opened his mouth.

"Nessa is twelve. She has got three hundred and eight days. She keeps the household book and she is better at it than I am, and she has got your hands, and she has never once seen you."

His father looked at the gate.

That was the whole of it, and it was worse than anything Kalen had built for himself on the way down the road. He looked at the gate the way he had looked at the gate every evening for eight years, patiently, correctly, as a man waits at a place where he is meant to be waiting, and there was nothing behind it at all. Not refusal. Not absence. The thing about the Rendered that Ashfall never says out loud is that they are not empty, they are occupied. There is an instruction in there and it is being carried out, and there is no room in them for anything else, and there has not been for eight years.

"I am going to move the rate," Kalen said.

The seventh bell went.

They turned around, all of them, not together and not raggedly either, the way a shift turns when a shift is over, and went back up the road into the burnt end to wait for tomorrow. His father went with them. He carried the board the way he had carried it out of the door on a morning eight years ago, and he did not hurry, because there was no hurry in any of it and there never had been.

The watch came and unlocked the gate, and a man wheeled a barrow through it, whistling.

* * *

Nessa had the lamp on and the bread out and had eaten hers.

"You are late."

"I was working."

It came out level and it went in the same way, and she nodded and pushed the board across, and that was that, and it was the easiest thing he had done all day.

He had told his sister the truth about nearly everything for four years, on the grounds that the truth was cheaper to keep straight than the other thing, and it had cost him almost nothing, because the truth had almost always been arithmetic. This was the first evening in four years that the truth had been a man standing on a road.

On the doorframe by the latch there were two fresh chalk strokes. He had seen them on the way in and had thought: she has started the birthday count again. He had been quietly pleased about it and had not said anything, in case saying something ruined it.

"Doing what?"

"The ward has taken me on to catalogue a back room. Six hundred articles, nine nights, nine marks a night."

"Nine." Nessa put her chin on her hand. "Eighty-one. Twenty days of the four."

"It is."

"So. Nine nights of work to stand still for twenty days."

"That is one way to put it."

"The only way to put it," his sister said, "and you took it anyway, so what is actually in the room."

"Tags. Six hundred of them. Every article the ward has taken in and not given back for thirty years, and every one carries the ward's own ledger line as it stood on the day it came in."

"And you can read them."

"I can read them."

Nessa cut the last of the bread in half without looking at it and pushed the bigger piece to his side of the board.

"Then say the actual thing," she said.

"I have been reading the house book for four years."

He put his hand flat on the table, which was what their father used to do.

"I want to read the ward book."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!