93 - Suspended

They had the stock coming out onto the flags by the middle of the morning, because a thing that is going to be inspected can be inspected in an hour and not in three days.

Kalen made that decision at first light with the notice still in his hand, and nobody argued with it, and Sabra said one word from the office doorway and it was not the word he expected.

"Rows."

"Rows of what?"

"Rows of like with like." She had the pipe going. "Put it out in the order it came off the racks and you will spend a day answering questions about the order it came off the racks."

So they put it out in rows.

There are four hundred and eleven bound items in that house. Kalen knows the figure because he counted them on the first morning before he touched one of them, and then counted them again at dark and got the same number, which is a thing he does and has stopped apologising for.

Frames, drums, brakes, collars, half a rope-walk press. Eleven barrows. A bundling frame off the rope-walk with a Fine grade in it. Three cart brakes and a rack of foundry iron out of the sealed floors that had not been moved since the spring.

The north shed was the slow end and it stayed the slow end, because the trays are the slow part, and they were still bringing trays out of it at dark on the second day.

It rained on the first afternoon. They put oilcloth over the foundry rack and left the rest of it out, because iron does not mind. The flags ran black. The ash went to paste in the corners and Wick's book took a wave in every page.

Kalen read every item that came onto the flags.

That is what took a day and a half. A man can carry a frame out of a shed in a minute. Putting a hand on it and knowing what is in it, and what grade it is, and which way it faces, is four minutes on a good one and a quarter of an hour on a bad one, and there is no way to do it faster and no way to do it later.

Read draw two, at a yield of one point eight, four hundred and ten times.

He worked out what it came to on the second morning, sitting on the pan post with his hands round a cup and the wind taking the steam off it sideways. He got about eighty marks, and then he did it again and got the same answer, and then he stopped doing it.

By the second afternoon he was reading with his eyes shut. That is not a figure of speech. You put a palm flat on the thing and you stop looking at it, because the looking is the part the eyes do and it is not the part that matters.

Doss brought him a chair at some point. He did not sit in it and did not say so.

Wick took the calling.

He sat on the end of the bench they had dragged into the yard with the book open on his knees and the stump of his right arm holding the page flat, and Kalen said the item and the grade, and Wick wrote it and read it back.

He was faster than Kalen expected by the first afternoon and faster than Ferrin by the end of it, which nobody in that yard remarked on, because remarking on it would have been the same as saying out loud why he was on the bench in the first place.

"Seventeen. Cart brake, iron and strap, dead."

"Dead."

"Eighteen. Cart brake, iron and strap. Live. Sound, Quicken."

"Grade before the faculty. It goes in that order on the form."

"Sound, Quicken," Wick said, and went back and changed it.

* * *

Doss carried and did not talk.

Ferrin did the count at the gate, and the count in the book, and the count of the days, and it was the days that were the problem. He brought it at the eleventh bell of the first day rather than sit on it, which is the whole of why he is worth five a week.

"I have read the works clause."

"Go on."

"A hand with no service entered against him at the week's close is entered idle." He had the page in front of him. "Idle runs at four a day."

"From the close?"

"From the first hour of the suspension. It is backdated. It says so in the clause."

"Say the rest."

"The week closes on Friday. That is three days." Ferrin looked up. "Then the four of us go on the ward's idle roll at four a day, dated to yesterday morning."

Thirty-nine days until his sister sat down in front of a folding table in the old foundry canteen.

Kalen stood in the middle of four hundred items of somebody else's stock and did the arithmetic he cannot stop doing and that has never once helped him.

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Four hands at four a day is sixteen. Sixteen a day, from yesterday, on men who have not been given anything to do, which is the sort of sentence that sounds like nothing until you put it next to a person.

Doss has kept a Balance clean for a year and a half by working like a machine and by taking the jobs nobody else in the yard will stand under. Wick has arrears that Kalen assumed onto his own paper in the summer and has been paying down since, and Wick is fifteen. Ferrin has nothing against him at all, because Ferrin is seventeen and has done every single thing correctly since the day he walked into the yard and said the thing about his mother's ring.

Sixteen a day, on those three and on Brem, is a hundred and twelve a week.

Brem and Quist are the house's and not his, and the suspension takes them the same way. Brem is a year and a half into the trade now and still says the confident thing first. He asked on the second morning whether the ward could be made to pay the idle. Nobody laughed at him. Ferrin looked it up and told him no at the eleventh bell, and Brem took it the way you take a thing you already knew.

"Sabra can pay you off," Kalen said. "The three of you go on the house books as released and the idle does not attach."

"And the wages?"

"There are no wages. That is what released means."

"Then it is not the idle roll we are worried about," Ferrin said. "It is January."

* * *

He tried four things in three days and all four of them were correct and none of them worked.

He went to the ward office and asked, in writing, for the inspection to be appointed, which is what you do. He was given the same answer in writing, which is what they do, and the clerk was sorry about it and had a queue behind him and did not once look up.

He went to Karrow, who read the request and the notice in order at the same speed, including the lines that did not matter, and said that both were correct. Karrow would sign an appointment the hour an inspector was assigned to him. No inspector had been assigned to him. He did not apologise for it, which Kalen respected more than an apology, and he did not pretend that it was weather either.

He came out of the ward office into the middle of the afternoon and stood in the road for a minute. There was nothing left to try that he had not tried. That is a specific feeling and he has had it twice before, and both times it was followed by him doing something that cost him a year.

He looked for lawful work outside the house's warrant and found what he had been told about Standing eleven times by four different people. A Reclaimer trades under a house or under a Charter. He holds no Charter. There is no third thing, and he stood at a counter for two hours finding that out in a form of words a clerk was willing to sign.

And he entered every one of the four hundred and ten items in a fair hand in a book that nobody had asked for.

The Accord credited none of it. Reading stock for a house that cannot trade is not works and is not service and is not anything, and he had known that before he started, and had entered it anyway, and eighty marks came off a Balance that was going the wrong way at four a day without any help from him.

NOTICE OF WORKS

Ashfall reclamation house, Ward Nine.

Works entered this week ............... none

Hands without service at the week's close are

entered idle from the first hour of suspension.

The ward came to the gate three times in those two days, because the ward has been coming to that gate since the summer and does not read the ward gazette.

A woman off Fetter Street with a bound flat-iron that had begun to hold heat when it was put down. A carter with a brake that was letting go in the wet. On the second morning, two boys with a barrow and a strapped crate between them who would not say where they had got it, which Kalen was fairly sure he could have guessed.

The flat-iron was a fortnight from taking that woman's hand off. He told her so in the road, because she had a right to know it, and then he told her the rest.

He read all three at the gate, standing there, for nothing, because reading is free and he was not going to be a man who stopped at a line painted on a flagstone. Then he had to say the same sentence three times, and it is a short sentence, and it does not improve.

The house cannot take it in. Come back when the gate is open.

Nobody argued with him. That was the part he thought about afterwards. They picked the thing up and carried it home again and said they would come back, and one of them thanked him.

Sabra wrote the day up in the office that evening, in two columns, in her own ink, with nothing in either of them.

"There is nothing in it," Kalen said.

"There is nothing in it, and it is written up." She did not look at him. "You have got nineteen years of a column with no heading on your bench. What do you think a column is?"

* * *

Ferrin said his piece on the second afternoon, standing at the pan post with his cap in his hands, and it took him about forty seconds.

"I am not going."

"Nobody has asked you to go. You have been told what the arithmetic is."

"You told me the arithmetic on the first morning, and I have done it twice since, and it comes out the same." He turned the cap over. "The year my father died, the house sent a man round for the gear."

"Ferrin."

"He took the brake off the handcart and the ring off the shed door, and then he wanted my mother's band, and she gave it to him, because he had a paper." He was not looking up. "And a Second Hand of about fifteen put it back in her hand and ate the day's tally for it."

Kalen did not say anything.

"He did not tell anybody, and he took a docking for it that is still in that book." Ferrin put the cap on. "I was nine and I was standing on the step. I am not going to be the one who leaves on the Thursday."

He picked the drum back up.

"That is the whole of my objection and I have not got a second one."

Nobody put it to a vote. There was nothing to vote on.

Doss came past with a collar under his arm and stopped, which he does not do.

"Four of us," he said.

"Doss."

"Four of us on the idle roll." He put the collar down on the flags in its row. "Cheaper than eleven weeks of stock."

That was the longest thing he had said in a fortnight and it was, as usual, the whole of the argument.

* * *

He had spent that evening in the office with Sabra's lamp and the last of the entries. Four hundred and ten. He wrote the last figure at the ninth bell and then sat for a while with the book shut under his hand.

On the second night Kalen came down the yard at the tenth bell with a lamp and the last tray under his arm, because he had entered four hundred and ten items and there was one left and he was not going to leave one.

He had the north shed door open with his shoulder when he looked up the yard.

The gate was standing open.

Not broken. Not hanging. Standing open the width of a cart, with the bar lifted out of the keep and laid against the post, the way a man leaves a gate he means to come back through.

Kalen put the tray down on the flags, in its row, in the order he had entered it.

He did not go up the yard. He listened instead.

The rope-walk stove had gone out an hour ago and the wind was coming off the burnt end the way it does, and under it, up the gate road, there was a sound he had been hearing every evening of his life from the wrong end of a street.

Boots. A great many of them. Unhurried, and not in step.

He heard them on the gate road before he saw them.