Overdrawn [Progression LitRPG]

The lamp was his own and the room was six feet by fourteen, and by the third night he had stopped noticing the smell.

It had not been built as a store. It had been an office, and somebody had put shelving up the long wall in a hurry and never taken the picture hooks out, and the ward had been filling it since before Marn. Six hundred articles was Marn's figure. Kalen had made it eight hundred and forty on the first night and had not corrected him, because a man being paid nine a night does not go looking for the other two hundred and forty for free.

Every article had a tag on it. That was the whole of the ward's system and, as systems go, it was a good one: when a thing came in a tag went on it, and the tag carried the ward's assessment at that date, because the ward had to know what it was holding and against whose account.

Brass, thumb-sized, three lines and a fourth.

He had one in his hand at that moment, off a stripped hoist collar, and the stamp was filled solid with two hundred years of grease, and nobody had touched it since the clerk who hung it there. He had it clean and read in eleven minutes. In the spring it would have taken him an hour and he would have got two of the four lines.

The work itself was simple and it was not quick. Article, condition, grade, tag, one row a night, left to right. Every so often something interesting: a Fine-grade Purchase in a glove that had been in a bin for nineteen years, a Sound Carry in a school satchel, a chandler's scoop with nothing in it at all.

He found the first full line at about the second bell.

It was on a tag off a mason's frame dated 1188, and where three lines had gone furred and shallow on every other tag in the row, this one had come out of the die deep and had spent its whole life in a dry room.

W9 / LEVY / STANDARD ........ 14.0

W9 / LEVY / ASSESSED ........ 17.5

W9 / LEVY / VARIANCE ......... 3.5 [carried, 987]

W9 / VARIANCE / DISPOSITION .. (blank)

Kalen sat down on the step stool with the tag in his hand.

He had this. He had had it for six days, off a filed scrap-bin tag that was in his coat pocket at that moment, and he had put it on his own kitchen table in front of his sister and said the word blank out loud. Seeing it twice told him nothing.

Then he thought: 1188.

He got up and went along the shelf.

The second one took him forty minutes. It was off a set of dock hooks, it was dated 1119, and it was not the same.

W9 / LEVY / STANDARD ........ 12.6

W9 / LEVY / ASSESSED ........ 16.1

W9 / LEVY / VARIANCE ......... 3.5 [carried, 987]

W9 / VARIANCE / DISPOSITION .. (blank)

Twelve point six. Not fourteen. The standard had been twelve point six in 1119 and it was fourteen now, and it had come up over eighty-five years the way everything comes up, in quarters, by committee, in a room in another ward.

The variance had not moved.

Three and a half in 1119 against a standard of twelve point six, and three and a half in 1188 against a standard of fourteen, and both times the assessed figure carried up to match, to the tenth, in the same quarter. And both times a fourth line with nothing after the dots.

He stopped cataloguing then. That was theft, and he knew it was theft, and he did it anyway.

By the fourth bell he had eleven. By the fifth he had twenty-six. He found one off a hoist chain dated 1044 with a standard of eleven point nought, and one off a foundry apron dated 1201 that read fourteen point nought and seventeen point five and might have been stamped that morning. He laid them out along the shelf in the order of their years, on his knees on the boards, in the light of his own lamp, in a room he was being paid nine a night to count.

Forty tags. A hundred and fifty-seven years of them.

One tag is an error. A man in an office puts a figure in the wrong column, and somebody copies him, and nobody checks, and that happens in every ward in Kentra about four times a year, and there is a form for it.

Forty tags across a hundred and fifty-seven years, every one carrying the same three and a half, every one carrying it forward against a standard that moved underneath it, every one with a blank where the money went, is not an error.

Stolen story; please report.

It is a working part.

Somebody had built it and somebody else had maintained it, in quarters, correctly, on time, for two hundred and seventeen years, and every one of them had been paid to do it.

He sat on the boards with forty tags laid out in front of him in the order of their years and tried to make himself feel the appropriate thing about that, and could not, and gave it up. What he had instead was the thing he always had, which was a column that would not add and a very strong wish to know where the missing figure had gone.

Kalen went through his pockets. He had the ward-tag, a pencil stub with no point on it, a knife, four marks in copper, a dock receipt he had been carrying since the afternoon under the gantry, and no paper of any kind, because Marn's one condition had been that nothing left the room and Kalen had agreed to it in front of a stamp.

He took a lump of charcoal out of the office brazier, sat down on the floor, pushed his left sleeve up over the elbow, and copied all four lines onto the inside of his forearm.

It took two goes. The first time he wrote left to right out of habit and had to take it off on his knee.

* * *

Sabra's gate was open at first light, the way it always was, and there was a woman standing beside it who had not been standing beside it on any other morning of Kalen's life.

She was thirty or thereabouts, in a plain grey coat with brass at the cuff, one band, and she was not leaning on anything. She had a satchel on a long strap and a card file open along her forearm and she was reading it the way you read a thing you have read already.

One of her eyes was the colour of dishwater. The other one was brown.

"Ashgrove, Kalen," she said. "Ward Nine. Bonded."

"Yes."

"You are three minutes early. That is unusual, and I have written it down, so you may as well go on doing it." She closed the file over one finger. "Hesper Vane. Freehand. I hold your account."

Kalen had known this was coming for nine days and had built about nine versions of it, and in all nine the collector had come to the tenement in the evening with two men.

"You are early as well," he said.

"I am on time. The Notice was served on the second, the second was nine days ago, and the next step is a visit." She said it the way a clerk says a date back to you to be certain you have got it. "This is the visit."

"I have not got four hundred marks."

"No."

"I have not got forty."

"No. Neither of those is what I came for. I came to look at you, to say three things, and to arrange to come back."

"Go on, then."

"One. I have checked your Notice against the ward book and against the House copy, and it is correct in every particular, which I am obliged to tell you and which nobody ever believes." She turned a card over with one finger. "You may put in for a review. It costs eleven marks and it takes nine weeks."

"I have got twenty-one days."

"You have got twenty-one days."

"Two?"

"Two. From this evening I sit in Master Quill's office from the sixth bell to the eighth, every day, until the account is settled or collected." Hesper looked past him into the yard, at the strip shed and the sorting racks and the gantry, without any particular interest in any of it. "That is the procedure for a Bonded account inside thirty days. It is not a punishment and it is not a watch being set on you. It is where I am required to be."

"Does she know?"

"She has known since Tuesday. She has put a stool out."

Kalen thought about Sabra Quill putting a stool out, and did not enjoy the thought.

"The sixth to the eighth," he said. "That is when the gate is shut."

"Yes."

"So you will be sitting in an office two streets from forty of them, every evening, for twenty-one days."

"I have sat closer. Three."

"Three."

"Three is the one people forget. If you leave Ward Nine your Standing goes to Debtor within the hour, and a Debtor's account is not collected by me." She put the card back into the file. "It is sold. I say that to everybody, including the ones who are plainly going to stay, because the ones who are going to run do not tell you first."

"Sold to who."

"Whoever is buying that week."

"That is not an answer."

"No," Hesper said. "If you are asking me to say it, it is a market. I do not know what is standing in it on any particular Tuesday and neither does the House, and that is not me being careful with you, it is the shape of the thing."

The morning was cold and his coat was over his arm because he had walked fast, and his left sleeve was still rolled to the elbow, and he had washed his hands at the pump on Cinder Row and nothing else.

Hesper Vane looked at his forearm.

She looked at it the way Kalen looked at a maker's mark, which is to say with nothing on her face at all, and her eyes went along it right to left, twice.

"Three and a half," she said.

Kalen did not move.

"That is Accord script on your arm."

"Yes."

"You wrote it yourself. It is backwards at the start and then it is not." She had the pencil out of the seam of the file. "How much of it can you read?"

There were four answers to that and three of them were sensible.

"Can I ask you one first."

"You can ask."

"The Notice moved me from nineteen days to thirty and from a Second grade to a Third, on the same morning. That is somebody opening my file and doing two things to it."

"Yes."

"Which one of them was the favour?"

Hesper Vane put the pencil back into the seam of the file and left it there for a moment. There was a pause about the length of a breath, in which nothing happened that anybody in the yard could see. He had watched that pause forty times in a cold canteen four days ago from behind the table, and he did not care for meeting it from this side.

"That is a good question," she said, "and I am not going to answer it, and you should write down somewhere that I did not. Now answer mine."

"All of it," Kalen said.

Hesper Vane wrote that down and did not stop writing.

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