77 - Ward Four

The last item came off the bench four minutes past the eighth bell on the twenty-first day.

Doss took it out of his hands and set it in the tray. Ferrin called the time and wrote it in the column he had kept since the first morning. Wick was asleep sitting up against the wall with the book open on his knee, and nobody woke him.

Then all of it settled at once.

DISCHARGE OF ENGAGEMENT

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Freehand.

Reclamation of receiving stock, Ward Four.

Engaged 21 days. Delivered on the 21st.

Materials, labour and service credited.

Recoveries entered at schedule.

Settled.

SCHEDULE OF RECOVERIES

Ward Four receiving stock.

Item 6 ..... Right of Way ..... Crown

Item 14 .... Fair Copy ....... Crown

Item 23 .... Stand Down ...... Crown

Item 31 .... Good Delivery ... Crown

Entered to the engaging House. Not to the holder.

NOTICE OF SERVICE

Service entered for 4 hands, 21 days,

Chartered engagement, Ward Four.

Credited to Ashgrove, Kalen.

NOTICE OF WITHDRAWAL

Complaint of the Sedge Counting House against

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Freehand.

Withdrawn on the application of the complainant.

Recorded.

Nobody cheered, because there was nobody to cheer. It was somebody else's yard in somebody else's ward. The four of them had worked in it three weeks and had not been asked into a single house on the street.

Ferrin read the last block twice.

"That is it gone," he said.

"That is it gone."

"Four lines."

"Four lines."

"Four lines took a year off you and four lines put it back."

"Yes."

"And in between there was three weeks of the best work anybody in this crew will ever do."

"There was."

"So which of the two did they notice?"

"Say what you think."

"I think they noticed the second one," Ferrin said, "and paid for the first."

Then he ruled a line under his column, which is how he ends a conversation. He had got that off Sabra without ever having worked a day in her house.

Wick came awake against the wall with the book sliding off his knee.

"Is it done?"

"It is done."

"Did we lose anything?"

"We lost nothing."

"Say the whole figure."

"Eleven Crown. Eleven out. None killed."

"Say it to Ward Four," Wick said, and went back to sleep sitting up.

Doss took the tray in and came back and stood in the yard for a moment with his hands hanging.

"Twenty-one days," he said.

"Twenty-one."

"You said twenty-two on the first morning."

"I said twenty-two because I wanted a day in hand."

"You have not had a day in hand since the spring."

"No," Kalen said.

* * *

Eleven Crown-grade bindings in twenty-one days, and he killed none of them.

That is the whole of it and it took three weeks. It very nearly did not happen at all, because a Crown grade is not a Fine one with more in it. It is a different animal and it wants a different hand.

A Fine grade is a sentence written by a good tradesman who wanted the thing to last. It is laid in deep, because a man paid by the piece does not want the work coming back on him in a year.

A Crown grade is a sentence written by somebody with the authority to be obeyed, laid in by a hand that was paid whatever it asked and had all the time it wanted. It is laid in shallow, in a single unbroken run, close under the surface of the thing.

That is the part nobody outside the trade believes and it is the whole reason the House had lost two years on this stock. Any hook that goes under a shallow run takes the whole of it with it. Every strip hand they had put on the work had gone at them with a hook, because a hook is what you use, and because eleven men in a row had been told to be quick.

Kalen did not touch one for four days.

He read them instead, one at a time, in a stranger's yard, in the cold, with the jig standing empty on the bench beside him. He wrote the shape of each one out in full before he put anything at all on the iron.

Eleven pages. He had done exactly that on scrap nobody wanted for four years, for nothing, in a shed, after three separate men told him it was the reason he would never be quick.

PATTERN: Right of Way (Crown)

Held in: brass housing, mint mark, ward stamp of Four

Draw: Force, heavy

What the bearer is carrying is not stopped at any gate.

Issued at the mint in the year 1102 and not to be copied.

PATTERN: Fair Copy (Crown)

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Held in: a clerk's press, iron and boxwood

Draw: Read, measured

What is written twice is written the same both times.

Issued at the mint in the year 1102 and not to be copied.

PATTERN: Stand Down (Crown)

Held in: a gate bar, iron, ward stamp of Four

Draw: Ward, heavy

What is told to stop stops, and does not begin again.

Issued at the mint in the year 1102 and not to be copied.

"Say it in trade," Wick said, on the fifth morning.

"You do not lift a shallow one."

"Then what do you do?"

"You hold the object still."

"Still how?"

"Still enough that the Pattern does not know the object has moved."

"And then?"

"And then you take the object away out from underneath it."

Wick sat with that for a moment.

"That wants a thing that does not move," he said.

"It wants a thing that holds at a fixed relation."

"For how long?"

"For as long as the work takes. Without breathing and without getting tired."

"So not a hand."

"Not a hand."

"Then say the next part. I have been sitting at that bench four days and I have worked it out."

"Go on."

"Nobody here can do it because everybody here has got two of them," Wick said.

"That is the next part."

"It is a stupid reason for a house to lose two years."

"It is the reason."

"Do I write that in the book?"

"Write what we did. Not why nobody else did it."

"Why not?"

"Because a book that explains why other men are worse than you is not a book," Kalen said. "It is a letter about yourself."

"Ferrin will want it in."

"Ferrin can want it in."

* * *

Reva Corse came on the eleventh day and watched him for ten minutes.

He knew who she was before anybody said it. She came into that yard the way a master comes into a yard, which is without looking at one single thing except the work. She stopped about eight feet off the bench, which is exactly the distance at which you can see a man's hands and not put him off them.

She was in her fifties, grey, in a coat better than his and a good deal older.

She watched him set the jig.

Setting the jig takes eleven minutes. It has taken eleven minutes on every piece since the spring and it will take eleven minutes on every piece he ever touches. There is no version of this trade in which that number comes down. He does it now without noticing, the way a man steps over the third stair.

Then he took his hands off the piece and left them off, and worked fifty minutes without holding anything.

"You are not holding it," Reva Corse said.

"No."

"Nobody works like that."

"No."

"Why does nobody work like that?"

"Because everybody has got two hands," Kalen said.

She looked at his left hand, which was flat on the bench because there is nowhere else to put it. The two smallest fingers lay where he had put them, the right colour and warm and doing nothing whatever.

She did not say one word about it in either direction, which he had come to recognise as the thing the good ones do.

"How long on a Crown?"

"Four hours in the first week. About two now."

"How many have you killed?"

"None."

"Say that again."

"None."

"Out of how many?"

"Five so far. There are six left in the shed."

"Who taught you?"

"Nobody taught me. I could not hold a croze and I had a broken clamp."

"That is not an answer to the question I asked, so it does not go down as one."

"It is the only one I have got," Kalen said.

Reva Corse watched him take a Right of Way off a brass housing in the time it takes to eat a meal. Then she straightened up.

"That is Reclaimer's work," she said.

"I am a First Hand."

"I know what you are entered as. I said what it is."

"It is not entered anywhere."

"Then that is a thing you want to see to, because nobody here will see to it for you."

"And after that?"

"When you have got a name, come and talk to me, and bring the paper."

"What would it cost?"

"There will be a price and you will not like it," she said. "I do not do favours and I do not want one."

He had the collar seal in a tin in his coat the entire time she was standing there. Accord grade, off a dead ward's foreman who had been walking for eleven years. Four hours with the jig to take it off him, and three weeks now of not being able to read one word of it.

He did not take it out.

He had learned what a question costs from a woman with a pipe over four years and had paid for the lesson twice. There is a right time to spend one. It is not the first afternoon somebody stands in your yard and calls your work by its proper name.

* * *

The letter came on the twentieth day, by hand, from the House.

It was not a receipt and it was not an instrument. The Accord had not printed one word of it. It was a letter, on good paper, over a Sedge seal.

It said that the bearer had performed Chartered reclamation upon Crown-grade stock to the entire satisfaction of the House, and that the House would engage him again.

Kalen stood in the yard and read it twice.

Entire satisfaction.

There is no way to refuse a letter. He worked that out fast and it did not improve for being worked out.

You cannot hand it back, because handing it back is a discourtesy to a Chartered house, and a discourtesy to a Chartered house goes on paper somewhere and stays there. You cannot burn it, because it exists in their book whether or not it exists in your coat.

There is no counter in Kentra at which a man may ask to be found unsatisfactory.

And it would be shown. Not by him. By them, in Ashfall, at a counter, to somebody, on a morning when it was useful. There would be nothing whatever wrong with the way they did it.

Ferrin read it over his arm without asking, which he has started doing and which Kalen has not stopped.

"That is a good letter."

"It is."

"So what is wrong with it?"

"Nothing is wrong with it. That is the whole of what is wrong with it."

"Say it plainer."

"In three months a clerk in Ashfall is going to show that to somebody who is deciding about me," Kalen said, "and the somebody will read it, and it will do exactly what it says on the paper."

"And you cannot send it back."

"No. And I would not be able to say why."

Doss came past with a tray and looked at it.

"They have thanked you," he said.

"They have."

"Hm," said Doss, and took the tray inside.

* * *

He opened the sheet on the last night, on the step of a hired room, with the door open behind him and the other three asleep on the floor.

He had not opened it since the ninth day, because there is nowhere to be alone on a job away from home, and that is a thing nobody mentions before you go.

On the ninth day it had read two thousand six hundred.

ASSESSMENT: Kalen Ashgrove

Ward Nine (Ashfall), Kentra

Line ..................... 2,760

Balance .................. -110 IN ARREARS, day 136

Standing ................. Freehand

Craft .................... Reclamation, First Hand

Charter .................. Cinder Row gantry line, completed

FACULTY draw yield

Force ............... 10 1.0

Quicken .............. 9 1.0

Ward ................ 11 1.3

Read ................. 2 1.9

Bind ................ 18 0.8

Patterns ................. 8 / 10

Next collection .......... none assessed

A hundred and ten the wrong way.

It had been four hundred on the day he signed, and three weeks at Chartered rates had bought back two hundred and ninety marks of it. He had never seen that row move so far inside one term and had stopped believing it would.

The Charter row still said Cinder Row.

Twenty-one days of the hardest sustained work of his life, at four and a half times ward scale, for a Chartered house, on Crown-grade stock nobody else on the line could touch. The row did not move one letter.

He had been engaged as an officer. An officer is not a holder. It is on page two of the terms in plain words, and he had read page two, and he had signed it.

Eight of ten.

The eighth had come out of the stock on the sixteenth day, below Crown, which made it his under the line on page six that his sister had underlined twice.

PATTERN: Stay of Execution (Sealed)

Held in: Ashgrove, Kalen

Draw: Ward, heavy

An instruction already in motion against the holder is

held over for the length of one breath.

Sealed to the hand that recovers it. Reclamation guild of Kentra

He read that one four times, and then a fifth.

A Pattern that holds an instruction over for one breath is no use at all to a reclamation hand at a bench, where nothing is in motion and nothing is in a hurry and the whole trade is a man looking at an object for an hour.

It is a thing a man needs in a smelt yard.

Craft, Reclamation, First Hand. There is one grade above that in the trade, and he had been looking at the row on and off for a year without letting himself say the word.

Kalen put the sheet away and sat on the step with his crew asleep behind him.

He had come here to buy four lines off a roll.