56 - Karrow's Terms

Ilve Karrow said yes in under ten minutes and then spent an hour and a half telling him what it was going to cost.

The office was Marn's office and was not. The folding table had gone. The good coat had gone with the man who wore it, and the bad bag with it, and what had come in behind them was a room with nothing on the walls except the ward seal.

Kalen did not look at the ward seal. He had not looked at it once in three visits. That was a kind of looking and he knew it while he was doing it.

Karrow was somewhere in his forties and dressed like a man who does not want to be remembered for his coat. He had the house inventory open on the desk with a strip of paper already in it at the page he wanted, which meant he had put it there before Kalen came in. Nothing on that desk was where it was by accident.

Everything about the man was correct in a way that did not ask to be admired. His cuffs were brass and plain and had been polished by somebody who was not paid to do it. His pen had been mended at the collar with wire, neatly, by a hand that could have afforded a new pen and had not wanted one, and he set it down parallel to the edge of the blotter every time he stopped writing, and every time he picked it up again the blotter had not moved.

"You took four Fine grade recoveries off a six week clearance in the spring," he said. "Quill's book has it at four. The guild book has it at four. I checked them against one another, because books disagree."

"They would not. She keeps them properly."

"She does. It is the only house in this ward that did not have to be corrected." Karrow turned the page. "You pulled all four clean. Two of them out of standing water. Nobody in Ward Nine has done that in nine years, and the two men who could have are in Ward Four and are both past sixty."

"You have read a great deal about me."

"I have read the inventory. All of it." He said it the way another man says he has eaten breakfast. "Sit down. You will want to be sitting for the terms, and not for the reason you are expecting."

Kalen sat down.

"The house will sponsor you," Karrow said. "The office advances the three hundred, because you have not got it and we both know you have not got it. It is repaid out of contract rates. That is the ordinary term and every Freehand in this kingdom is standing on one."

"And the second."

"For two years you take ward reclamation work at rates this office sets. The office has first refusal on your hands." He squared the paper. "You may cross a ward line with a countersign. You will get the countersign, because there is nothing incorrect about a man working in Ward Four. But you will ask."

Kalen read it once through without saying anything.

Then he read it again, slower, the way he read a maker's mark. Not at the sense of it. Along the grain, letter by letter, going after the places where the hand changes and the words get careful, because a man drafting a clause he is proud of writes it differently from the ones he copied.

Karrow let him. He did not fill the silence. He used it to write something in a book that had nothing to do with either of them, and he wrote about a page and a half of it, and he did not hurry that either.

"You understand what the house is buying," Karrow said, when the pen stopped.

"Two years."

"Two years of the only pair of hands in this ward that can take a Crown grade off a frame without killing it. At a rate set here. In a ward whose paper the house holds." He capped the ink. "I am saying that out loud because it is true, and because you would have it worked out by Thursday, and I would sooner not spend two years being thought a fool."

"You are not a fool."

"No. And I am not doing you a kindness, and if anybody in that yard tells you I was, correct them." He put the pen down. "Freehand is not a reward. It is a permission. Permissions are issued by people who want something done."

"Say what you want done."

"The ward's bound gear cleared by somebody competent, at a price, on a schedule, by a man who will not steal it." Karrow looked at him without any particular expression. "That is the whole of it. It is not a trick. The trap in this instrument is that every line of it means exactly what it says."

* * *

Kalen went through the arithmetic while he was reading and did not write any of it down.

Stolen story; please report.

Ward rate on a clearance was one figure. House rate was another, and he had spent four years watching the second one get paid out of the first. Sedge-set was going to be a third figure and it was going to sit under both of them, and two years of the difference was a number he could not put a bottom on, because the office would be setting it fresh every quarter for eight quarters and there was no floor written anywhere in the instrument.

He looked for a floor twice. There was not one, and there had not been one in the drowned strongbox contract out of the sump either. He understood standing there that a rate with no floor under it is not an oversight. Men who draft these do not put a floor in, for the same reason a shop does not put a chair by the counter.

Two years was also Nessa Assessed, and Nessa's first year of arrears, and the whole of the run he had left.

He went on reading.

The clause was on the second page and it took him most of a minute to be certain of it.

The term binds the hands of the Freehand.

He put his finger on it and did not lift the finger.

"Hands," he said.

"Go on."

"You have used that word four times in this instrument. Three of them mean my two." He turned the sheet round on the desk. "This one does not. This one is the trade word. In a clearance contract a hand is a man you are paying."

"Say the rest of it."

"If I take on three men next spring, this line gives the office first refusal on their work as well, at your rate. I would be paying three wages out of a margin you set, and every hour they worked would be an hour I had sold you." Kalen kept his finger where it was. "That is not a term on me. That is a term on anybody I ever hire."

Karrow read his own clause. He took his time about it. He did not look annoyed, and he did not look pleased either, and Kalen would think about that afterward for longer than he thought about the rest of the afternoon.

"You are right," he said.

"I am."

"Write it."

Kalen wrote it in the margin in his own hand. It took longer than it should have. The pen sat badly now, and he had learned to brace the paper with the heel of his left hand, and the paper still slid on him twice. Karrow watched the hand do it and did not say anything about the hand, then or ever.

Work performed by persons employed by the Freehand is not work of the Freehand within the meaning of this term.

"That is worth money to you," Karrow said.

"Yes."

"Say how much."

"I do not know yet. In two years it might be all of it."

"It might." Karrow signed it. "The reason will be given once, and then it will not be discussed again. It is correct. A term binds the party to it and not his household. If this instrument had gone in front of a hearing, that line would have been struck by the first honest clerk who read it, and it is better struck at this desk than on instruction."

He turned the paper round.

"There is a second reason and it is less flattering," he said. "A man who hires is a man who spends, and a man who spends comes back. Nobody at this desk has ever been paid for a ward that starved."

* * *

The three hundred came off a printed schedule and the schedule said three hundred and eleven.

Karrow read it, struck the eleven through with one line, and wrote filing charge does not lie against a sponsored entry in the margin. He initialled it. He did not look up while he did it and he did not mention it afterward.

"That is eleven marks," Kalen said.

"It is eleven marks that were not owed."

"Most men would have let it stand."

"It is provided for that most men would not have seen it," Karrow said. "You saw it. It would have been struck either way."

Kalen turned that over for a long time and never got to the bottom of it, which was the thing about the man. Nothing he did was ever the wrong thing. Every single one of them left you a little further into his hand.

"The seal," Kalen said.

"Still impounded."

"I am about to be Freehand."

"They will take the view that Crown grade is Warranted and above. You read the shank yourself, in a drowned room, and you said what it read in Quill's own yard in front of a collector." Karrow gathered the sheets and knocked them square. "Freehand is not the grade. It is the grade under the grade. This is not difficulty. The line is where it is, and it will not be pretended anywhere else."

"No."

"When you are Warranted it comes out of the box the same hour, and it will be brought across the yard from this desk." He said it as a fact about the future, the way he said everything. "That is not encouragement. It is the procedure."

He signed the sponsorship at the foot of the sheet. Kalen signed under it.

Nine days, a page and a half of names, three doors, and every favour he had left in the ward. The signing took about four seconds and made no sound at all.

He had come up that hill wanting a Standing that nobody held the other end of, and he had walked out of the shop on Cinder Row and the yard on Tallow Street being told in two different registers that there was no such thing, and here it was on a desk with a term on the back of it and a man's name under his own. He had read every line. He had found the one line worth arguing and had argued it and won it. And the instrument he was signing was still, at the bottom of all of it, an instrument that put two years of his hands into the account of the people who held his sister's paper.

NOTICE OF STANDING

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine.

Bonded to Freehand, on the sponsorship of

Karrow, Ilve (Warranted).

Entered against a service term of 2 years.

Recorded.

He stood in the anteroom afterward for longer than he needed to, next to a wall he was not looking at.

The ward seal was cut into a brass plate about the width of two hands, mounted square on the plaster at the height of a standing man's eye, where every person who ever waited in that room would have it in front of them for as long as they waited. He had waited three days under it in the spring. He had not needed to look at it then, either, because he had it, whole, the way he had four hundred maker's marks and one he knew better than his own handwriting, and there was no unlearning any of them.

The clerk at the outer desk turned the day book round and gave him the pen without asking who was endorsing him. That had never once happened to him in his life. Under the line for the name there was a line for the Standing of the signer.

He had written one word on that line every time he had ever signed anything.

He wrote the other one.