55 - The Price of a Sponsor

The schedule of Standing was one sheet of ward paper and Kalen had read it nine times before he found the word.

Continuous.

Not clean. Continuous. Two years of continuous service in a registered craft was what the Accord asked for, and it was not what anybody in Ward Nine said. Everybody in Ward Nine said clean. They had been saying it since before he was born, in the yards and on the stairs and at the gate, the way a ward says a thing that nobody has been back to check.

He had two years and four months of continuous service. He had a guild entry at First Hand at the end of it. He also had a Third Collection in the middle of it, a run of arrears going into its seventh week, and a petition dismissed for want of anybody left to dismiss it to, and the schedule asked about none of that.

The schedule asked about service.

He took it to the counter before the second bell and put his thumb on the line.

"Continuous," he said.

Sabra read it in about as long as it takes to look at a hand of cards.

"So it does," she said.

"Everybody says clean."

"Everybody says a great many things." She gave the sheet back. "That is one of three and it was the cheap one. Ask me about the other two."

"Three hundred marks. And a sponsor at Warranted or above."

"Three hundred marks," Sabra said, "and you have not got four."

He put the sheet down and squared it with the heel of his left hand. The two smallest fingers of that hand would not hold paper and had not since the smelt yard. He had stopped noticing when he did it. Nessa had not stopped noticing, and had said nothing about it for a month, which was worse.

"There is a Warranted in front of me," he said.

"There is."

"Sabra."

She took the pipe out, and looked at it, and put it back in. Then she told him, which he had not expected, and it took the better part of ten minutes.

"A sponsor's name goes on the paper under the man's," she said. "Not beside it. Under it. The whole of what sponsoring is."

"I know what it is."

"Then you know what it does." She turned a page in the left-hand column and did not look up. "There are eleven people on the books of this house. Brem is on that page. Quist is on that page."

"You are saying the house carries it."

"I am saying the house is the collateral. The house is eleven wages." She wrote a figure and blotted it. "I put my name at the top of a piece of paper about this ward once. There were four names on it. You know where the other three are."

He did know. He had known for a fortnight, and he had been sleeping about four hours a night since, and she had watched him not sleep across a yard for fourteen days without mentioning it once.

"I would sign it," Sabra said. "Ask me a fourth time and I will sign it." Sabra let that sit. "Eleven people will pay for it."

"No."

"No," said Sabra, and went back to the book.

He did not ask a fourth time. He asked a cheaper question instead, which was where the ward kept its register of Standing, and she told him. The filing office. Public, free, and nobody had called for it in nine years, because there had never been a reason to know who in Ashfall was allowed to say a thing and be believed.

* * *

Hesper came on the Tuesday, because the arrangement was weekly and in person, and she did not vary arrangements.

She set the instalment out on the bench in her own hand. Then she turned it round so that he could read it, which she did not have to do, and waited while he read it, which she also did not have to do.

"Would you sponsor me," Kalen said.

"No."

"Because of what I would do with it."

"Because I am a Freehand." She capped the pen. "A Freehand may not sponsor. If I could, I would want a reason, and you would give me a good one, and one of us would be sorry inside the year."

"You could have let me get further into it."

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"I could have." She put the pen away. "There are five Warranted within a morning of this yard. One of them is through that wall and has already said no to you this week."

"Four, then."

"Four." She looked up with the eye that worked and the one the colour of dishwater. "Three of them will not see you. I am not guessing at that. I collect from two of the three and I have stood in their hallways."

"And the fourth."

"If that is right, the fourth is the Assessor of this ward," Hesper said, "and I would rather you spent nine days finding that out than have it from me. A thing you are told is a thing you argue with. A thing you find is a thing you have."

* * *

It took nine days.

He worked the house by day and walked the ward in the evenings and lost a day and a half of paid work to it, which he did not have and spent anyway. It was the first week of the year he had gone out of the yard with clean hands. He found that he did not care for it.

He walked it after the yard shut, along Cinder Row and up Fetter Street and back down Tallow with the ash coming off the burnt end the way it does when the wind sits in the north, and he learned inside three days that a man asking for a thing stands differently in a doorway from a man delivering one, and that everybody in Ashfall can tell the two apart at forty feet.

The register itself took an hour to copy and was the shortest important document he had ever handled. Ward Nine held a shade over nine thousand Assessed. Of those, four hundred and sixty were Freehand or above, and almost all of the four hundred and sixty were Freehand and worked for somebody. Above that line the ward thinned out like the top of a stair.

Five Warranted. One Chartered seat, held, and not in the ward, and not held by anybody who had ever been in it.

He wrote the permissions out on the back of the copy, because he had never in his life seen them set down in one place, and because a man about to spend nine days buying a thing ought to be able to say what the thing does. A Freehand may hold a Charter. A Freehand may sign for materials at ward cost, and stand as the party to a contract instead of as the servant of one, and take hands on and enter them on a book in his own name, and endorse another man's petition, and refuse a job without it being an offence against his house. A Bonded may do none of that. Every one of the four hundred and sixty above the line could do all of it, and that was the entire difference between them and him, and not one word of it had anything to do with what any of them could lift.

Ossel Vurn had the cooperage at the top of Fetter Street and a gate with a wicket in it. The man who came to the wicket had a card in his hand with a line printed on it, which meant the line got said often enough to be worth the printing.

"Mr Vurn does not sponsor."

"I have not asked him yet."

"Mr Vurn does not sponsor," the man said, and shut the wicket.

Kalen stood in the road for a moment. Then he found that he had counted the staves in the rack against the wall while he waited. Four hundred and eleven. He had not decided to do that, and he did not work out that he had done it until he was most of the way down the hill.

Roe kept the tally shop on Cinder Row and saw him. That made two of the three going the way Hesper had said and one going another way entirely.

The shop was warm and narrow and had a counter worn into a dip where hands go. Roe was sixty and dry as a docket. He counted a man's change out while Kalen stood there, and he counted it with the last two joints missing off three fingers, and he was quicker with the four he had than most men are with ten.

"Ashgrove," he said. "The sister is at four a day and I did not set it."

"I did not come about that."

"Everybody comes about that." Roe swept the coin off with the flat of his hand. "Say it, then."

Kalen said it in about forty words, because Roe was not a man you decorated anything for.

"No," Roe said.

"Will you tell me why?"

"I will, because you got Marn off that folding table, and I owe you a quarter of an hour for it." He put both hands on the counter, flat, palms down. "Eleven years ago I put my name under a man's. He was good for it. He was good for it the way a roof is good for it, which is right up until the morning it is not."

"He went under."

"By four hundred and eleven. A name under a name is a name they can come to." Roe lifted the hand an inch off the wood and put it back down. "That is the fee. Nineteen years Warranted and one man sponsored, and there will not be a second."

"No," Kalen said. "I would not either."

"You would," said Roe. "That is the trouble with you. Everybody in this ward has worked out that you would."

Norra Chelt held the rope-walk on Tallow Street. She held the drying stove that was the only warm thing in the Ashgrove rooms, and she met him in the yard among the tarred hanks with forty hands working behind her, and did not ask him inside.

"You were right," she said.

"That is not what I came for."

"You were right, and the notice is on my office wall, and I have read it." She folded her arms. "It went up two tenths because a ward that loses an officer to a finding pays for the next one. Forty hands. Work it out and say it to me."

"Eleven marks a month off this yard. Two hundred and thirty-two off the ward."

"You did that fast."

"I have done it before."

"Every night, I should think." She was not unkind about it, which was the part he carried home. "I would put my name under yours. And then I would be a woman who paid two tenths to be right, in front of forty people who were not asked."

* * *

He drew the map on the fourth night and finished it on the ninth.

He did it at the kitchen table, in pencil, ruled with the edge of a knife, because a knife gives a straighter line than a rule when the paper is bad. He had got that off his sister and had stopped pretending otherwise.

Names down the left. Standing across the top. What each one held, what the holding was pledged against, and which office the paper for it sat in. He put in the four hundred and sixty as a figure and the five as names. He put the Chartered seat at the bottom of the page with nothing next to it, because there was nothing to put.

It came to a page and a half.

Nine thousand people, and everybody in the ward who could say a thing and be believed fitted on a page and a half with room at the foot of it. As far as he could establish, nobody in the history of Ashfall had ever bothered to write it down. You do not write down weather.

He took it to the house on the ninth evening and put it on the counter. Sabra read the whole of it standing up, front and back, and did not say it was good work.

"There is one name left," Kalen said.

"Yes."

"You knew that on the first morning."

"I knew it on the first morning." She turned the sheet round. "Said then, you would have walked up that afternoon and signed whatever was put in front of you, and thought yourself lucky." Sabra did not move. "Now you have nine days of knowing what it is worth."

"And I will still sign it."

"And you will still sign it," Sabra said.

Kalen looked at the page and a half, and the five names, and the one that was left.

"I want a Standing that nobody holds the other end of."

"No such thing."

"I know," Kalen said. "I am going to go and ask for it anyway."

Sabra Quill put the pipe back in her mouth and did not pick the sheet up.

"No such thing," she said.