78 - Reclaimer

Sabra had the guild book open on the desk when he came in with the invoice, and she did not look up.

"Put that down and do a piece of work in front of me."

"I have got the Ward Four invoice."

"I know what you have got."

"It is nine sheets and it wants doing tonight."

"It came to this house on Tuesday, addressed to this house." Sabra took her time about the rest of it. "We will discuss that," she said.

"Sabra."

"Bench," she said. "I want it witnessed." Sabra took her time about the rest of it. "I am the witness."

Kalen looked at the page she had turned round.

It was the roll of the reclamation guild of Kentra, kept for this house since before she had it. There were nine entries on it and eight of them were in other people's hands.

The ninth was in her own, in the ink she mixes herself, and it was his name at First Hand, written on a day after a smelt yard.

The line under it was blank and she had already ruled it. She had not done that in front of him, which meant she had done it before he came in.

"You are entering me."

"I am entering you if you do it in front of me," Sabra said.

"That is not how you did the last one."

"The last one was a grade a master gives."

"And this one?"

"This one is a grade a man takes," Sabra said. "Four hundred years it has worked that way." Sabra let that sit. "I am not inventing a ceremony for you at my age."

* * *

She put a bearing housing on the bench. Cast, cracked across, in two pieces.

She had chosen it. He knew that inside four seconds and did not say so. There was no dust on it and she had not gone out to the yard for it.

It had been sitting on the shelf behind her desk under a cloth for as long as he had worked in this building. He had assumed for four years that it was stock she had not got round to, and had never once asked.

"Say what it is," she said.

"Halved. Fine or better. Ward."

"Go on."

"The break is old."

"And?"

"Somebody has had a go at the near edge with a hook and made it worse."

"Who had a go at it?"

"I do not know."

"I did," Sabra said.

Kalen looked up.

"In 1191. It took me two days and then I put it on a shelf."

She got the pipe out and did not light it, which in Sabra is a form of politeness.

"Thirteen years on that shelf." Sabra did not go on straight away. "I could not do it," she said. "I have never pretended otherwise to anybody, including myself."

He set the jig.

It takes eleven minutes. It took eleven minutes then, with the master of the house four feet away watching every part of it. There is no shortening it and no hiding it, and he did not try to do either.

Two settings. The wedges. The pins. The tips coming round and down to meet two inches above the bench, in the place where three of his father's hooks used to sit before he cut two of them up.

Then he took his hands off the piece, and left them off, and worked.

He had both edges read inside the hour, which is fast. It was fast because he had spent nine days in a cold shed learning to hold the two ends of a sentence apart at the true span and listen to the part that is written on neither of them.

The near edge had been chewed and told him less than it should have. The far edge was clean and told him more than it should have, because whoever laid it in had been in a hurry and had turned twice where one turn would have done.

At the fourth bell he put in one draw of eighteen marks and it took eleven seconds.

PATTERN: Underset (Fine) Held in: bearing housing, cast iron, reconstructed Draw: Ward, measured

The seated thing does not come up out of its seat. Reconstructed. Neither half was whole.

Sabra Quill got up and came round the desk. She picked up a housing that had lain in two pieces on her shelf for thirteen years, and turned it over twice, and put it down.

Then she went and wrote in the book.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

NOTICE OF ENTRY

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Freehand. Entered to the roll of the reclamation guild of Kentra at the grade of Reclaimer.

On the hand of S. Quill, master of the house.

Recorded.

NOTICE OF SERVICE

Craft grade entered. Sustained service assessed.

Credited to Ashgrove, Kalen.

Two thousand nine hundred, and he did not open the sheet to find that out. Ferrin keeps it in the back of the crew book now, in Nessa's ruled columns, in a hand that is not his, and it is read out at the post on a Friday whether Kalen wants it read out or not.

There are four grades under Master of the House and the last of them is Reclaimer, and Kentra holds about ninety of them across thirty-three wards.

A Reclaimer is not a man who is better at stripping. A First Hand strips. A Reclaimer is the grade the trade gives to somebody who can be sent for, by name, out of his own ward, and be relied on to bring the thing back rather than the metal. It is worth about a hundred and forty marks a year at ward scale and a great deal more than that at any other scale, and the whole of what it actually is, is that a stranger will now open a door.

* * *

"Two years," Kalen said.

"Ask it as a question."

"You could have entered me at Reclaimer two years ago."

"Nearer three."

"Not First Hand. Reclaimer."

"I know which grade you mean."

"The work has been there since the foundry."

"Longer than that."

"Then say why you did not."

She put the pipe stem against her lower lip and left it there.

"You were Bonded. A Bonded Reclaimer is stock."

Stock.

Kalen worked it out standing at the bench. It took about four seconds. She watched him do it and did not help him, which is the only way she has ever taught anybody anything.

A grade on a roll is a figure in somebody else's book. A Bonded man is a thing a house owns the labour of, and the Accord assesses to the mark what that labour is worth.

There is a counter in every ward in Kentra at which a Chartered house may buy the remainder of a Bonded engagement off the holder at assessed value, without asking the man, on a form. He had known that at fifteen. Nobody had ever set the two halves of it side by side in front of him.

At First Hand he had been worth forty marks a year more, and had stayed too cheap to be worth the paperwork.

"They would have bought me," he said.

"Inside a fortnight."

"You would have had a very good afternoon out of it."

"A very good afternoon, and no Second Hand."

"And me?"

"In Ward Four tonight, or somewhere a good deal worse," Sabra said. "Doing this for a house instead of in one."

"You could have told me."

"I could have told you, and you would have gone and found out whether it was true."

"Yes."

"And the way a man finds that out is by standing at a counter and asking."

She turned the book round again and looked at her own writing on it.

"The counter would have told the House inside a week," she said. "The House does not need to be told twice."

"So you sat on it."

"Two years and eleven weeks I have sat on that ruled line."

"And the housing?"

"On the shelf beside it the whole time." Sabra stopped there for a moment. "Not one week of either enjoyed," Sabra said.

"And now."

"Now you are Freehand and nobody buys you." She shut the book. "So it is a grade and not a price."

* * *

The other thing sat between them for most of an hour before either of them touched it, which is how this house does everything.

"No two-handed Reclaimer in Kentra does that," Sabra said.

"I know."

"Not one." Sabra stopped there for a moment. "In the book as a rule that says do not," she said.

"I have read the rule. Wick read it out to me three times."

"Then say why it is a rule."

"Because every man who ever tried it was holding one half in his hand."

"And could not hold the other."

"I know what the jig is."

"Say the whole of it out loud," she said. "I am not having a man on my roll who tells himself a story about his hand."

Kalen stood at the bench with his left hand flat on the wood. The two smallest fingers lay where he had put them, warm, the right colour, doing nothing whatever.

He said it the way he says everything, which is flatly and with slightly too much detail in it.

"It is worth a grade. It is why I can do work nobody else on this receiving line can do," Kalen said.

"Go on."

"It is why the House came to me instead of sending for somebody."

"And the figure."

"My Line has gone up one thousand five hundred and sixty since the smelt yard. I have got the whole of it costed and entered, in the book, in my own hand."

"And."

"And I would give the grade back tonight."

Sabra did not say anything at all.

"I would give the grade back, and the jig with it, and the eight Patterns."

"For what."

"For being a Second Hand who was fast and could hold a croze." He did not raise his voice, because he never does. "I would not have to think about it. There is no version of that arithmetic where it comes out any other way, and I have done it about four hundred times."

"No," Sabra said.

"The trade got something out of the smelt yard."

"Yes."

"I did not."

"No."

She got up and knocked the pipe out against the leg of the desk, which is how she leaves a room.

"The best hand I have ever had in this house," she said. "I would put it in writing and sign it."

"Since Ward Four."

"It was true in the spring as well. It was true in the spring when you could not lift a tin."

Then she went out into the yard and left him with the lamp.

* * *

He did the invoice after she had gone, because the invoice was the reason he had come.

A Chartered engagement settles through the ward and not through the House. Nobody had told him that. He had found it in the third schedule, standing at a counter on the second of four evenings, while a clerk moved a lamp nearer and took it away again at the end.

The settlement wants the whole of the engagement's paper attached. The terms, the delivery, the schedule of recoveries, and the receiving stock's own returns.

The returns are the boring part.

They are four sheets of a ward's assessed figures, printed by the Accord and attached to any engagement on receiving stock so that the ward can see what it has been paying for. Nobody reads them. They are furniture, the way a gantry is furniture.

A thing nobody reads is the safest place in Kentra to leave something. He had said that out loud in a shed in the spring and had not thought about it since.

Kalen read them, because he reads everything, at the end of a fourteen hour day with the lamp turned down and his hand aching from the cold.

Ward Four's figures are not Ward Nine's. He had expected that and it was not interesting. A standard of fourteen and an assessed of fifteen point one, which is a variance of one point one. That is a third of what Ashfall carries, and nobody in Ward Four has complained about it in their lives, and on the whole nobody there has any reason to.

He read the first three sheets in about four minutes, which is faster than he could have read them in the spring, and he noticed that he had noticed it. Then he turned the last sheet over and started at the top of the column, because a man who reads three sheets and skips the fourth has not read anything.

Then he got to the fourth sheet, and the fourth line, and stopped.

Every ward-tag he had ever turned over in four years had carried three lines and then a fourth line with dot leaders running out to nothing at all. The one out of the scrap bin. The forty in Marn's back room that he had copied onto his own forearm in charcoal by candle, decade after decade, every one of them blank in the same place.

W4 / LEVY / STANDARD ........ 14.0 W4 / LEVY / ASSESSED ........ 15.1 W4 / LEVY / VARIANCE ......... 1.1 [carried, 1102] W4 / VARIANCE / DISPOSITION .. RECEIVING 8

Kalen sat in a cold office and read the fourth line eleven times.

It was not blank. It had never been blank.

Somebody had put a destination in that box a hundred and two years ago and gone home to his dinner. It had printed on every return Ward Four had ever been sent, on the fourth sheet, attached to an invoice, for anybody in Kentra at all to read.

Ward Nine's line ran out into nothing.

This one went somewhere, and the somewhere had a name.