64 - Renewal

Ilve Karrow read all eleven pages before he said a word, and he read them in order, and he did not skip the schedule.

Nessa sat with her hands flat on her knees and did not speak. She had been told in the anteroom that she was not to speak until she was asked a question, and had agreed to it in writing, on the back of the terms, for a further mark a week.

It had taken seven days to get the eleven pages.

Kalen spent the first two of them doing the thing he had promised himself he had stopped doing.

He argued.

He went to the ward office on the Friday morning with the schedule under his arm and asked, politely, for a variation on the materials clause. The clerk was sorry about it. A variation wants the agreement of both parties.

Kalen asked who the other party was. He was given a name, and a building, and a turn of eleven days.

He went back on the Saturday with the same request in writing, which is what you do. He was given the same answer in writing, which is what they do. The second clerk was sorry about it as well, and meant it, and had a queue behind him.

Two days out of twenty-two, spent on a counter, at the wrong end of a term.

On the third night he stopped.

The line he wanted was never going to be in a clerk's mouth. It was going to be in the book. Everything is in the book. Nobody reads the book, and the reason nobody reads the book is that it is chained to a counter at the ward filing office and you have to stand up to do it.

They let you read it for nothing. That is the part that stayed with him afterwards.

Four evenings, from the eighth bell until they put the lamps out. Standing at a counter in a working coat with brick dust in it, turning the pages of a thing that has been available to every Bonded man in Ward Nine since before the foundry shut. Nobody asked him what he wanted. Nobody offered to help him. A clerk brought a lamp nearer on the second night and took it away again at the end of it.

He worked the line by day and the book by night. Four more heads came down in those four days and two of them were live, and he did both pulls himself in the afternoons with his eyes going.

He has never been able to remember one thing about the Wednesday.

A Freehand's Charter has three schedules.

The first is what a Charter is. The second is a Warranted holding works in more than one ward, which was no use to him at all. He read it twice anyway, because he reads everything, and because he had begun to notice how much of that book is about being one grade further up than he was.

The third schedule is bundling. It is eleven lines long.

It says that a Freehand may hold more than one work under a single Charter within his own ward, on one term and one penalty. It says what a Charter carries. One of the things a Charter carries by statute is materials at cost.

He read it four times standing up and then went outside and stood in the road for a minute, which is a thing he does about twice a year.

Nobody had written that line as a trick. Nobody had written it as a kindness either. It had been sitting in a chained book behind a counter for a hundred and forty years, in a ward where about four people can read the ward book, and three of them are paid by the people who wrote it.

He drafted it in two nights. Nessa checked it in one.

She found two errors in his figures and a third in his wording. She was right about all three. She charged him nothing for it, because it was inside the terms, and she pointed that out before he could.

"This is a bundling instrument," Karrow said.

"It is."

"Under the second schedule of a Freehand's Charter."

"Third schedule. The second is a Warranted holding works in more than one ward."

Karrow turned back two pages and checked it. It took him nine seconds and he did not apologise for it, which Kalen respected more than an apology.

The office was a good room kept badly, which is what a room is when the man in it inherited the furniture and has not got an opinion about furniture. There was a stove that had not been lit and a chair nobody used.

The ward seal was in a case on the wall behind the desk.

Kalen had memorised the whole of it in about ninety seconds, sitting in that anteroom for three days waiting on a hearing, without putting a pencil anywhere near a piece of paper.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

He did not look at the case now, which was its own kind of looking.

"You have folded three ward works under one Charter."

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because a Charter runs materials at cost by statute, and a ward contract runs materials at whatever schedule the contracting house sets." Kalen kept his hands still on his knees. "The three works do not change. The rate does not change. The term does not change. What changes is which instrument the materials clause hangs off, and there is nothing in the third schedule that forbids it, and there is a line in it that permits it."

"There is."

"I would not have brought it if there was not."

Karrow read the covering page again.

He had a way of reading a document that Kalen had watched three times now and had not worked out how to acquire. He read every line at the same speed, including the lines that did not matter, and he did not go faster at the end.

"One term and one penalty," Karrow said.

"One term and one penalty."

"That is worse for you."

"Yes."

"Say why, please."

"Because three penalties are three small ones and one penalty is one large one, and if I fail any part of the bundle I fail the whole bundle." Kalen said it flatly. "That is what the materials clause costs. I have costed it and I will take it."

"What is the difference across the year?"

Kalen did not answer. He turned his head slightly instead, which was the whole of the signal they had agreed on in the anteroom, and Karrow, who misses nothing in a room, moved his eyes to the girl in the chair and waited.

"Four hundred and eleven marks," Nessa said.

"Over the year?"

"Over the year, on the three works, at the schedule on page four." She had the sheet up. "It is four hundred and eleven and not four hundred. That is grease."

"Grease."

"Grease is entered by the pot and the pots on their schedule are the small ones."

Karrow put his hand out for the sheet and read her column, which was ruled with the edge of a knife and had three headings across the top and a difference column in a second pencil.

"This is your hand," he said.

"It is."

"How old are you?"

"Twelve until the winter," Nessa said, "and if it is going to be a thing on the form I will get it copied out by somebody with a beard."

Kalen shut his eyes for about a quarter of a second.

"It is not going to be a thing on the form."

Karrow gave the sheet back to her the right way round, held at the corner, the way you hand back a thing that has work in it.

"It is correct," he said. "It has been checked against the schedule and it is correct to the mark."

He signed the instrument. He countersigned the schedule. He took the seal out of the case, and breathed on it, and pressed it into the wax without any ceremony at all.

It took about eleven seconds.

Ten days ago Kalen had spent two hours laying that same shape out in chalk on his own bench, at full size, and had known the whole time exactly what he was doing, and had brushed it off with the side of his fist.

The Accord printed while the wax was still soft.

CHARTER AMENDED

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Freehand.

Three works bundled. One term. One penalty.

Materials at cost.

Countersigned. Ward Nine.

"That will hold," Karrow said. "It will hold if it is challenged, and it will not be challenged, because the house that set the schedule is not going to stand up in a room and say that a statute means something other than what it says."

"No."

"You understand that I would have signed this the first time you asked."

"I understand it now."

Nessa put her paper into her satchel and closed the buckle. She took her time over the buckle, which is a thing she does when she has decided to say something.

"Why did you not tell him?" she said.

Karrow did not take offence.

He did not look at Kalen first to see whether he was permitted to answer, either, which was itself an answer, and which Kalen would think about on and off for a year.

"Because nobody asked me," he said.

* * *

They walked back down through the ward in the middle of the afternoon with the instrument in Kalen's coat.

It should have been a good hour. It was not. He was two streets along before he had it in a shape he could say out loud, and Nessa let him have the two streets, which she is better at than he is.

"Not our enemy," Nessa said.

"No."

Nessa did not let him finish.

"Not our friend."

"No." Kalen put his hands in his pockets. "He is a man who will sign a correct thing and will not tell you which correct thing to bring him."

"He sponsored you."

"On terms that own two years of my labour. Both of those are the same man being entirely straight with everybody in the room, and if he had been anything else I would not have got the seal on Wick's paper either."

"So you won."

"I won inside their paper."

They went past the tally shop.

The man behind that counter is missing the last two joints of three fingers and has become, over eleven years, extremely good at counting coins with the others. Kalen had watched him do it since he was nine.

He had never once thought about it as a thing that had been decided about the man by somebody at a desk, in a morning, on a form, with a figure in a box. He thought about it now, with his own left hand in his coat pocket, and kept walking.

"That is not the same operation as winning," he said. "Everything I have got in four years I have got by finding the line in their instrument that lets me have it. The tag, the petition, this."

"It works."

"It works about a third of the time. And every single time it has worked, somebody has had to show me the instrument first, and not one of them had to."

"Sabra charged you."

"Sabra charged me. Hesper charged me. Karrow answered a question I did not know how to ask."

He walked on a few steps.

"That is three people. There are nine thousand on the roll in this ward and about four of them can read the ward book, and the book is chained to a counter and free to anybody who can stand up in front of it."

"So teach them."

"I have thought about it."

"You have thought about it for a year. What is wrong with it?"

"Nothing is wrong with it and it takes nine years," Kalen said. "You have got a hundred and eleven days."

She did not say anything to that, which was the only correct thing available to her, and they went the length of Cinder Row without either of them starting again.

"You are going to say a thing now," his sister said. "You have got the walk on."

"There is a grade where a man does not have to ask which form it is."

"Say the grade."

"Warranted." He walked on for a moment. "It wants a completed Charter, and a clean record, and two sponsors. I have got nineteen days of a Charter left, a Third on my file, and no sponsors."

"And you want it."

"I want the grade where I can say no."