Frank's first custodian-grade pay packet arrived in an envelope thick enough to suggest somebody had finally noticed he was employed. By the time he'd opened it, most of the thickness had turned out to be explanations for why his pay was smaller than it looked.
The envelope had been delivered to the maintenance depot with a stack of work orders. Moss had kept it aside rather than let the runner slide it into the heap marked MISCELLANEOUS LOSSES, which was where the depot's incoming correspondence tended to end up when nobody felt like arguing about whose business it was.
The wage packet included a sheet headed EMPLOYMENT BENEFITS. Frank read it twice. Communal meals, heating and a subsidized bed were listed as generous provisions, with a cheerful check mark beside each. He could not eat, had no need of warmth and kept towels on the mattress. None of that had troubled whoever calculated the deductions.
"Congratulations," she told him. "You're earning enough now to get a proper deduction statement."
Frank settled on the low stool beside her desk. He unfolded two sheets and a stiff card. His new rate was there, printed in cheerful green, followed by lines for housing, equipment maintenance, access licensing, sanitation facilities, common-lighting usage, and a payroll administration fee.
"I don't use the sanitation facilities," he said.
"Nobody said you did."
"Then why am I paying for them?"
Moss took the page, read the heading, and gave it back. "It says staff welfare provision. I pay for the infirmary whether I go in there or not. Apparently you pay for the toilets whether you can use them or not."
"The toilet facilities are usually where they send me to work."
Moss tapped the line with her nail. "You can challenge the deduction, if you want. It'll go through Personnel, and they'll ask for proof that you don't use the toilets. I'm curious what they'd accept."
Frank read the footnote. "It says there's a processing charge. They'd make me pay to prove I can't take a piss."
Moss tried not to laugh and failed, though it was only a brief sound. She turned the paper over and pointed to a small box marked DISPUTES. "Keep that statement. If they ever dock you twice for the same service, I want to see it."
Ollo was at the next bench sorting bucket handles into a crate. He'd been assigned the task after putting three different-sized threads into one bin, which he maintained had happened because the labels were wrong. When he heard the word wages, he lifted his head.
"Did you get a raise?"
"That's what the top line says."
"What about the bottom line?"
Frank held up the statement. Ollo read the deductions once, frowned, then turned the page as though the money might be hiding behind it.
"They take a little for my bunk," Ollo said after a while. "And there's a uniform charge. Mine's secondhand. Do they charge the first person too?"
Moss looked up from her rota. "Probably. Keep the receipt if you have it."
"I don't have a receipt. They handed it to me on the stairs."
Ollo pulled his own wage slip from his apron pocket and set it beside Frank's. The headings were identical, right down to a uniform-maintenance charge on a secondhand shirt. He kept comparing them until he was satisfied he had not misunderstood the column.
"My meals are included," the young goblin said. "Except I have to pay a kitchen allowance. Is that the same sort of thing?"
"Depends whether they feed you," Moss replied.
"They do. Most days."
"Then yours is at least a better bargain."
The raise looked convincing at the top of the page. After deductions, Frank could perhaps afford a better wrench if nothing else broke before the next pay packet. He wrote the amount beside the date in his own notebook rather than trust the green print as proof the money had reached his account.
Bob came through the depot on his way to orientation, carrying a form he'd already folded into quarters. "Frank, do I have to pay for a bed if I don't sleep?"
"Ask Personnel. You're on a debt contract, not payroll."
"Does that mean I get the bed for free?"
"It means I can't answer it from my wage slip, Bob."
Bob opened his form, found the column for deductions and asked what he was supposed to write if it was empty. Frank turned the sheet right way up and sent him back toward Personnel with the question. He was not authorized to set a bound worker's housing terms just because he had been assigned to train him.
He needed a flexible inspection rod, the kind with a hooked end and a spring sleeve that could snake through an elbow fitting without breaking the packing. His old rod had snapped during the fountain emergency. A new one would save time and prevent him from opening perfectly sound wall panels to find a blocked line.
Harl had his workbench positioned beneath the warmest lamp in Stores, with returns to his left and unissued stock to his right. He was fitting a leather protector around his chipped tusk when Frank entered, and raised one heavy finger for silence until the strap stopped catching his lip.
"Morning," Harl said once his jaw was free. "If you're here for grout, no. If you're here for sealing compound, ask me again after the delivery cart survives the west stairs."
"Inspection rod. Routine requisition."
Harl examined the badge on Frank's apron, then the requisition. "Would you look at that. They finally let you sign your own name."
"Been doing it for twenty years."
"Different thing when they believe it."
A box of inspection rods lay on the upper shelf, plainly visible above the counter. Frank had once tried to reach that shelf with a bent ladder and nearly brought a crate of glass lenses down on himself. Harl kept the expensive stock where impatient people couldn't help themselves.
Frank laid the broken end of his old rod on Harl's desk beside the requisition. "I can get a standard one, I know. But this is the third elbow I've had to inspect since the fountain went. If I use a rigid rod, I'm going to break something I can't afford to replace."
"You can have the standard rod. The sprung-hook model requires a technical work classification, or evidence that a certified technician has turned one down."
"Is there a way to mark the sprung model for an emergency repair?" Frank asked. He wasn't trying to get Harl in trouble; the ogre was the one who had to account for the stock when a supervisor came counting. "If not, tell me what I can repair from the old one."
"If I sign it out on your badge, the auditors will take the cost out of the quartermaster budget. That's me, Frank, not some fine department with an office upstairs."
Frank appreciated the distinction more than he liked it. There was an old inspection rod on the maintenance shelf with a broken grip and a sound spring head. He asked whether he could combine the parts.
"If they're released for salvage and you make the repair under your approved duties," Harl said. "But you'll need the property tags first. Otherwise somebody will call it unauthorized fabrication, and I'll be the one explaining why the inventory lost two rods and gained half of one."
RB had been examining a spool of cord while they talked. He leaned toward the edge, ears twitching, and opened his mouth around a little brass eyelet lying beside the register. Frank put two fingers near the rat without touching him.
"Leave that," he said. "Harl's counting those."
RB returned the eyelet with elaborate reluctance and kept one paw on it until Harl finished counting. The ogre wrote down the number without comment. Frank was grateful; a quartermaster who treated every rat-borne washer as a lost shipment could keep them all there until winter.
"Could use a clerk who puts things back where he finds them."
"You'd have to pay him."
"At least he wouldn't ask for hazard compensation."
RB squeaked, apparently objecting to the terms of employment.
RB'S THOUGHTS
(ಠ_ಠ) (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
From Harl's store Frank went down to Lost Property, where Latch had arranged three trays of recovered fittings according to ownership, material, and whether the source room had been formally declared destroyed. Frank had never understood why a completely vanished room could keep owning its fixtures, but Latch took an interest in distinctions like that.
"I want to reclaim a hinge," Frank said, showing him an old record. "From the store door we replaced last month. It was broken and marked for disposal."
Latch found the entry almost at once. He kept his pencils in one coat pocket, his stamps in another, and his approvals in a small leather book chained to his wrist. The chain was short enough to annoy him whenever he reached across the counter.
"It was marked for disposal by Maintenance," he said. "Disposal doesn't automatically make an item unowned."
"Does anything?"
"Release into the general salvage pool. But that requires an item inspection, then a salvage determination, then an authorization tag. And if the hinge is part of an assembly, the other pieces have to be accounted for."
"It's half a hinge. The top leaf cracked."
"Then I need to record where the top leaf went."
"How long does that take?" Frank asked.
"If the forms agree with each other, I can do it this afternoon. If they don't, I have to ask the department that filed the disposal notice."
"That department was mine."
"Good. You'll know where to ask."
Latch said it without malice. There were days when Frank suspected clerks survived by finding amusement in how thoroughly the dungeon had arranged its own difficulties.
The clerk reached to straighten the disposal slip and winced as the chain at his wrist snagged beneath the tray. He turned the leather book over, freed the links, and went on reading. Frank had never asked why he wore the approvals chained to himself. Once, during a reset, an entire shelf of unsigned forms had been swept away with the false floor. Latch had waited three days for anyone to admit the loss. Now he kept what he could physically hold onto.
"I don't need that hinge today," Frank said. "I need to know whether anyone else can use it before I do."
"That's an easier question to answer," Latch said, looking relieved that someone had finally asked it.
While they worked through the paperwork, another goblin brought in an old copper drinking cup found beneath a bench. He wanted it for a child who'd started collecting odd things. Latch explained that nobody had reported the cup missing and the bench's owner was listed as an inactive office. The cup could be released after one signed receipt. The goblin thanked him and left smiling, carrying a small thing nobody had thought worth stealing.
"You could've made him fill out three forms," Frank said when the goblin left.
"I could," Latch said. "But the cup isn't dangerous and there isn't anybody to contest it. The rules let me do that. They don't let me pretend a hinge from an active service door has no mechanical use."
Frank looked from the released copper cup to the tagged hinge. Latch had made one choice easy because it was harmless and made the other difficult because somebody might someday hang a heavy door from it. For once, the clerk was being less foolish than the form.
They found the broken hinge in a crate behind the counter. Its top leaf had indeed cracked, but the lower barrel and pin were sound. Frank signed a condition report, recorded where the discarded piece had gone, and accepted a temporary hold tag while Latch requested a formal release. The delay was real; so was the care that kept a dangerous fitting from being passed off as a usable one.
On his way home Frank passed the dormitory common room. Three goblins were playing cards around a chipped table, and somebody had left a small kettle steaming on a warming stone. One of the players had tied a scarf around his forehead and was arguing that the deck was missing a queen. His companions accused him of having misplaced the queen during the last hand.
Frank recognized the runner from the banquet hall. He'd spent yesterday retching outside the room with two handkerchiefs over his nose. He noticed Frank in the doorway and straightened.
"Sorry about the mess yesterday," he said. "I tried to finish the outside hall."
"You did finish what you could."
"Moss sent me off sick before the end of the shift. Said I wasn't helping anybody by standing around turning green."
"Moss was right."
The runner smiled at that, and one of his friends offered Frank a chair.
The friend drew the chair back with her foot and waited, leaving an empty space in their card game. Frank could see that somebody had dealt him a hand from the battered deck. He hadn't been invited into many games as an indentured worker, even when he'd been fixing the table under the players. The small courtesy caught him off guard longer than the wage packet had.
"Appreciate it," he said. "Another night."
"That's what you said last time," the runner replied, his scarf slipping over one eye.
"Last time I meant it too."
The others laughed, and Frank managed to get away before they found him another chair.
RB waited until they were alone before climbing out of the toolbox. He went directly to his collection box, where he checked the bent nail, blue ribbon, glass shard, and the washer from the mimic closet. He picked up the washer, carried it to Frank, and placed it beside the pay envelope.
"You want your cut?" Frank asked.
The rat squeaked twice and pushed the washer an inch closer.
He tried to work out how much of the pay would remain by the time he bought a new retaining pin and put something aside against the next broken tool. The calculation did not improve when RB climbed onto the statement and sat squarely on the housing deduction.
He set his new badge beside the washer. Twenty years of work had finally earned him a name on the payroll; the first pay packet barely covered the deductions.
"Tell you what," he said to RB. "When they let me take that hinge home, we'll see whether we can make the rod we need."
RB climbed into his box, rearranged the ribbon under his chin, and settled down as if he had heard a satisfactory business proposal.
Frank sharpened the nicked edge of his scraper while the card players downstairs argued over the missing queen. He could have stayed in his quarters and counted deductions again. Instead, he put the whetstone away and went down to see whether they had found a chair for him.
"Still looking for the queen?" Frank asked from the doorway. The runner with the scarf looked up from a hand of cards and grinned. "Still missing. Sit down and help us prove nobody swallowed her." His friend pulled out the chair she had offered earlier. Frank sat before he could talk himself into refusing a second time.
"You ever play?" she asked. "Not for money," Frank said. "That wasn't the question." She dealt him three cards and explained the rules while the runner complained that she was giving away his winning strategy. Frank had repaired that table twice. Until tonight, he had never spent long enough at it to learn what anyone played.
He lost the first hand to the runner, who had been bluffing so badly that even the other goblins laughed. "I thought you were making a mistake," Frank said. "I was," the runner replied. "You were meant to notice after you folded." Frank examined the cards he had surrendered. The runner was already gathering his winnings.
Someone found the disputed queen stuck beneath a cup and accused the whole table of conspiracy. Frank stayed for another hand. This time he watched the runner shuffle.