《Fort Administrator》 1. Arrival Being made administrator at Fort Amalveor was a significant and untimely advancement in my career. Two weeks before I''d been a lowly clerk at the Library of Bosleake; not a large town, and not a prestigious institution. Not a position that allowed an employee''s brightness to shine, and mine certainly hadn''t. The letter from the Polity inviting me to be considered for the recently vacated administrator position at the distant outpost of Fort Amalveor was an unlooked-for boon, which I''d put down to the urgency of the opening. It was a chance to leapfrog several stages of my career, and catapult myself directly into a senior position within the Polity hierarchy. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. Or so I''d thought. Now that I stood at the gates, feeling the rain spotting my cloak, smelling damp stone and mildew wafting off the frontier outpost fort in waves, listening as the dense forest around me hummed with insects, with the forlorn cries of unseen birds and animals, I was starting to have my doubts. Fort Amalveor was less than thirty years old, established as part of the quickly aborted Modern Reclamation, and still occupied today for who-knows-what reason. The surrounding lands were barely mapped, and most of the maps that did exist were made by adventurers, whose cartography ¨C unproven and unchecked ¨C was as likely to be drunken conjecture as fact. The local plants and animals were undocumented, save for the notes of the previous chef, which I''d had to go to some lengths to track down in the Polity archive at North Hill on my wagon ride up, and I''d been given only the most meagre information on the other staff. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. As I stood outside the gates, daring myself to unlatch them, I heard a wet splashing sound from behind me. At first I thought it was some monster or wild animal creeping up on me, until I turned and spotted the wagon pulling away, iron-bound wheels sloshing through rain-filled furrows. For a moment I pitied the driver, an old man making a long, cold journey back to civilization alone. Then the wagon passed out of earshot, and I had the good sense to pity myself instead. My only way back had departed, and he at least knew he was heading back towards light and warmth. I was the one staying out here for at least six months, a period of time that seemed short and reasonable on a written contract, but which now seemed interminable. Whatever my reservations, my course was set. I had no way back, but to go forward. I reached up, unlatched the gate, and stepped through. 2. The Mage The outer wall had been unguarded, and the courtyard was similarly empty. Irregular flagstones covered the ground, weeds growing through the cracks ¨C plants with lurid colors that I would have considered beautiful in a Bosleake garden, but here, sagging and sprawling, lent the square a sickly and alien look. There was the remnant of a decorative garden at the center of the courtyard, planters full of dead shrubs which apparently hadn''t liked the climate, and a single dead white tree rising from a circle of exposed earth, its bare branches stabbing up towards the sky like a clawed hand. A stables stood against the wall at the far left of the courtyard, and another outbuilding on the right. Between them, framed by overgrown alleys that hugged the inside of the wall, was the fort. Cut stone, crenellated battlements, wooden shutters framing wide windows that were set with rippled glass. It must have been the picture of Polity orthodoxy when it was first built ¨C an administrative headquarters, and a home to visiting nobles and officials. Now, the stone was smeared with algae and overgrown with creeping vines, and whatever the motive was that had kept it staffed, it hadn''t extended to repairing the cracks that time and plant life had made. A guard on the battlements spotted me as I approached and popped up from behind the crenellations like a leather-armored mole. Finally, a sign of life. He peered down and called to me. "What''s there?" I stopped and waved up to him. "Hello. It''s Sebastian Lewis. Your new administrator. Your captain should be expecting me. Captain Pendarves. He''ll know who I am. Can you hear me?" The guard stood there, expressionless. I kept speaking to fill the silence but nothing I said seemed to enlighten him. He left without a word, abandoning me as I was mid-sentence, and seconds later I heard the slow ringing of a bell ¨C an alarm to announce a visitor, I assumed. I was at a loss for a long minute, until I heard the click of a latch, and the fort''s front door swung wide open. A woman stepped out. She was in her middle years, with brown skin, short brown hair shot through with gray, wearing smart but worn pants and a gray shirt under a long crimson coat that hung open at the front. The coat was all-weather wear, but tailored in a formal cut, and the pockets and patches on the sleeves were embroidered with tiny flowers marked out in silver thread. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. "Sebastian Lewis?" she asked. "Yes. Hello. I think you''re expecting me." "We are." She stepped back to let me enter, then spoke as she latched and barred the door behind me. "I''m Beatrix Kel-Avon." "Call me Bastian," I said. "I''m sorry this isn''t much of a reception. There''s only a handful of us out here, and we''re all stretched a little thin." "Don''t mention it." Beatrix finished barring the door, then began drawing her finger through the air in a series of complex diagrams. I hadn''t made any serious study of magic, and I didn''t know the signs. I thought I saw the faintest glimmer of light in the air where she traced her fingers, like dust caught in a sunbeam. The motes seemed drawn magnetically to the door, where they touched the wood and disappeared. "Are those barriers?" I asked. "Not barriers. Just wards. One for locking, to resist being forced from the outside. One to alert me when it is opened." She led me away from the door, across a tiled entrance hall, to the foot of a curving staircase. "You''re the mage here?" I asked. "The mage, the meteorologist, the zoologist," she said. "And I maintain the technology. Whenever anyone breaks an oil lamp or gate winch, they come running to me to fix it. Sometimes I think that an agile mind can be a terrible curse." "I wouldn''t know," I said. That drew a surprised laugh from her, and we walked the next flight of stairs in silence. "Where were you before here?" she asked. "The Library in Bosleake." I touched at the lapel of my cloak, where my identification scroll sat in an inner pocket. I was somewhat surprised Beatrix hadn''t asked to verify it, but perhaps she had other ways to identify me, a mage-print of me or the like. Perhaps few enough people came out this far that I could be no one else. "I know the town," she said. "The Library has a mage order, doesn''t it? You were never a member?" "They never invited me to join. I think I must not have met their criteria." "A bunch of old men, probably. Recruiting only other old men." I nodded, conceding that it was plausible. "Another bookkeeper and I once tried to learn a spell from a book, but-" "It didn''t work. You need to be inducted to use an order''s spells." I gestured to her in a there you go motion. She continued on, and I followed her up the stairs, deeper into the fort. 3. Fresh Meat The staircase led to a long corridor, bare wooden floors with walls made from stone more roughly cut than the outer walls, with mortar to fill the gaps. Now that I was inside, the mildew odour from the gate was gone, but I was assaulted by other smells. The old wood of the boards, the dry and bitter odour of dirt and dust, and the smell of salt spray, so faint I could believe I was imagining it, as if I were catching the breeze carried from a distant ocean. We stopped briefly at a closed door part way down the hall. "The captain''s office," Beatrix said. "We won''t disturb him." "Will he be upset if I don''t report to him?" Beatrix shook her head, leading me onwards. "How long have you been here?" I asked as we passed out of earshot of the captain''s office. "It feels like forever. Here we are." Seen from outside, the front two corners of the fort were rounded, and now that we were approaching one of them from the inside, I realised they must form internal towers. The door Beatrix stopped at was set into the curved outer wall of a circular room, built into one of the towers. "This is Terrance Huthnance''s room, our healer," she said, knocking on the door. "Quite a name," I said. "Unpronounceable after even a small amount of alcohol," Beatrix confided. There was the sound of a latch and the door swung open, revealing a man only a little older than me, perhaps thirty, with cream-colored skin and short yellow hair. He was wearing a loose white linen shirt that hung down to his knees, belted against his body over tan pants. He wore an amulet around his neck; a silver eye hanging outside his shirt at the end of a long chain. The man''s eyes were wide, the pupils dark and large, giving him an innocent, wondering expression, though there was something worldly about his smile. There was a strong, sweet smell of oranges drifting out of his room, and below that a fainter liquorice odour. "Terrance," Beatrix said. "This is Bastian, our new administrator." "A pleasure," he said, reaching out. He took my hand, holding it for a second in a gentle grip. "Likewise. It''s good to meet you," I said. "Will you come in?" he asked. "I was just about to have an afternoon drink. I could pour you in, if you like. Or would you be interested in some candies?" "Not right now, Terrance," Beatrix said. "I have to introduce Bastian to the commander and then show him his quarters." "Oh." "Another time," I said. "I''ve had a long journey." Terrance seemed slightly crestfallen, but perked up a moment later, smiling in resignation. "Another time then." Beatrix said our goodbyes and Terrance closed the door after us. I had the distinct impression that we hadn''t interrupted him doing any kind of work. I wondered what exactly he was doing to occupy himself in there. As we moved away, Beatrix''s comment to Terrance came back to me. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. "Who is the commander?" I asked. "The captain is in charge of the fort, getting final say in any matter, but the commander covers day-to-day operations for the garrison," Beatrix said as we walked. "We have a handful of soldiers here. They mostly behave." "I think I saw one on my way in," I said. "A man on the battlements." "Crouse, the watchman." Our route took us around the circumference of the fort, the long corridor running around in a square to the next set of stairs at the opposite side of the building. Beatrix pointed out the rooms as we passed, either as the quarters of the other staff, unused dormitories, storage closets, meeting rooms, or rooms reserved for visitors ¨C theoretically, as there hadn''t been any for some time. The narrower stairs at the end of the corridor led up to an open area set up as a combination lounge and dining room. A large rectangular table sat at the center, with couches and low tables to the sides. There were sparsely populated bookcases against two of the walls, and four doors leading off to other halls or rooms. "The kitchens are downstairs, but we often eat in here. The chef serves dinner at evening bell, and there''s usually food and tea set out from morning through noon." We moved through a door and down a long corridor of the same construction as the one directly below it, but here the floor had been recently swept, and the cool air had a cleaner smell, which I felt was fresh air being drawn in from an open window or hatch somewhere. The silence of the hallway was cut through by the thunk of metal striking wood. The sound repeated rhythmically, getting louder as we approached a door set into the side of the passageway. The noise stopped briefly when Beatrix knocked on the door. "It''s open." Beatrix pushed open the door just in time for us to see a woman with black hair flick a sleek knife across the room, landing somewhere out of sight to our left with another thunk. "Commander," Beatrix said, stepping through the door into a spacious office. "This is Sebastian Lewis. Our new administrator." I followed Beatrix inside and saw that to the left there was a wooden mannequin by the far wall, its head bristling with half a dozen slim knives. The commander had four more on the desk in front of her, apparently part of a set. She twisted in her seat, another knife already in her hands. "Ah. Fresh meat," she said, eyeing me from head to toe. She used the tip of the knife to point to herself. "I''m Rosewood. You''ll want to be in the weekly security briefings I suppose." "Yes, I expect I will," I answered. Commander Rosewood turned her attention to Beatrix. "He''s in the north tower?" "Yes," Beatrix said. "Fine." She gestured at the door with her knife. "I''ll let you know about those briefings." "Goodbye Commander," Beatrix said, backing us away and closing the door. She spoke to me as we turned away. "Be careful around her. She gets bored. She might make a project of needling you." "I''m sure I''d take it with good grace," I said. The corridor became darker as we reached a part where the oil lamps dotting the walls weren''t lit, and Beatrix led me towards another curved wall, a tower room that I felt must be directly above Terrance''s on the floor below. "You must be tired," Beatrix said. "It was a long journey." "Well, those are the main introductions out of the way. We have the chef and her assistant, the houseservant, and the garrison, but you''ll meet them as you go about your day." "And the captain," I added. "I didn''t meet him." "And the captain." She stopped us at the tower room door. "Here we are. Your quarters. Take as long as you need to settle in. I''ll have one of the soldiers sent to bring up your things." "I have all of my things right here," I said, turning to show her the bag hanging from my shoulder. "Oh. Well. The last administrator''s clothes and effects might do for you, if you find yourself short of something. It''s right that they go to you." Beatrix opened the door and pushed inside. I paced after her. "The last administrator? Didn''t he take his things?" Beatrix stopped and turned to look at me. "I''d say not. He died a month ago." She opened the door and led me into the room. "We buried him in the road, for want of clear ground. You must have driven over him on the ride in." I was quiet for a moment, words stilling on my tongue, though I may have made a noise of shock or surprise. "How did he die?" I asked. "He fell from the battlements," Beatrix answered. "Right onto that old tree out there. Very sad. Quite messy." She said her goodbyes, which I responded to numbly, and then she left, leaving me alone in a dead man''s office, contemplating collapsing into a dead man''s bed. 4. Book and Dagger to swallow too much and to utter in fear, which would be most accurately translated into modern Morin as gulp. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. wand of identification. I lay it carefully on my desk and flipped the case open, revealing a simple glass rod a little longer than my hand, tapering to a point at one end, and etched with spiral grooves all down its length. teller; a clockwork device similar to a many-handed clock, that when set to a given arrangement of numbers and a switch was pressed, would produce a completely different arrangement according to a set of secret rules embedded within the workings of the machine. I didn''t understand how it worked ¨C likely nobody outside the Bureaucrat''s Guild did ¨C but I understood that it could be used to authenticate official documents. The same drawer also held a wand, this one in the form of a glass disk suspended on a chain, which I recognized as a wand of proving, another authentication tool, this time for magically watermarked documents. 5. Below the Fort was able to unlock. obega, left open to the air on a reed mat, filling the space with a smell that reminded me of onion. There were a few beakers of dried fruit and one of honey, and a single wheel of cheese. No preserved meat. I began taking an inventory in my ledger, my unease growing as I noted the amount of the various foodstuffs. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Amulets of Protection ¨C Second Grade. 6. Green and Black If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it. 7. Through the Cracks Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. But... never know just how deeply in over my head I was. was surprised that nobody else at Fort Amalveor had taken up Wilfram''s duties after he vacated his role. 8. The Ball I called the meeting for two hours past noon bell, in the main area Beatrix had told me served as a dining room and recreational space. The remains of the midday meal lay spread out over the table. There were thick slices of toasted bread drizzled with salted oil, hard cheese biscuits, small crumbly pastries filled with mashed obega and pepper, and thin oily pancakes flavoured with some kind of spice. There had been a bowl of candied fruits, and a plate of omelettes made from wild eggs, but both had been emptied over the last hour. Lunch had been an informal meal, with most of the staff only dropping by to collect food before taking their loaded dishes back to their rooms. The soldiers of the garrison apparently always ate separately in their own small complex on the second floor. I popped one of the pastries into my mouth while I waited, wiping my fingers on a napkin afterwards to avoid getting greasy prints on my ledger. I''d been waiting for fifteen minutes before the other attendees arrived, Beatrix and Commander Rosewood, arriving together. They appeared at one of the room''s side doors before closing it and moving to take seats around the table. I''d invited Beatrix and Rosewood because they were both my most obvious direct peers among the fort staff, and also because I felt they could both have useful information and advice. I''d considered inviting the captain himself, but I''d found myself too nervous to knock on his door, and reasoned that the commander would report anything from the meeting to him that he needed to be aware of. "Flexing already?" Rosewood asked me as she slumped into a chair. She wore an expression like she was annoyed I''d taken her away from knife-throwing practice. She grabbed the plate of pancakes, sliding it in front of her, then rolled one and stuffed it into her mouth. "You''ve been here a day," she said, speaking with her mouth full. "What can we have to talk about?" I waited for Beatrix to sit down on the other side of the table before I began. "Our food will run out in less than two weeks." They were both looking at me, now. Rosewood swallowed the pancake and didn''t take another. "On investigating, it seems that the monthly food deliveries were made in response to monthly food orders placed by your last administrator ¨C I never got his full name by the way." "Wilfram Ged," Beatrix said. I nodded my thanks at her. "But he''s dead," Rosewood said. "And therefore he hasn''t been placing food orders," I said. "We''ve reached a situation where the stockpile, which has lasted since his death, is almost empty." "Why didn''t we hear this from the cook?" Rosewood asked. "She expected someone in North Hill to have taken the initiative in keeping us supplied," I said. "It wasn''t an unreasonable idea, but it may have been too much faith to put in Polity machinery. However it happened, we seem to have slipped through the cracks." I didn''t say the other thing I was thinking ¨C that following the death of my predecessor, it would have been the duty of the captain to, if not completely take over his duties, then to at least take the initiative in identifying immediate problems. I held my tongue for purely political reasons. I didn''t want to lay the blame for a crisis at my superior''s feet, on my first day, and a man I hadn''t met and didn''t know the temperament of besides. "Well, if it comes to the worst, we can always eat the servants," Rosewood said. She leaned back in her chair and put her feet up on the table. "The horses would be before the servants on the list, I think," Beatrix said. Rosewood jerked upright. "Not the horses." "This is quite serious," I said. I opened my ledger to a blank page and checked the carbon in my pencil before continuing. "How do we communicate with North Hill?" I asked the pair of them. It was Rosewood who answered. "A cart comes up every month. They take letters and reports back with them." Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. "Would that be the wagon I arrived on yesterday?" I asked. Beatrix and the commander shared a look. "So we won''t get another opportunity to send an emergency request until next month," I said. I turned to Beatrix. "Is there a spell that could send a message to North Hill?" It took her a few seconds to reply. "I know a communication spell. It travels about as fast as a rider, but it will travel at night as well. It could work, if nothing breaks it on the way." "Does it send a letter?" I asked. "How does it work?" Beatrix sat up in her chair and pushed up her sleeve, then began drawing shapes in the air. I couldn''t see anything happening at first, but after about a minute she stopped, and her hand started to glow with faint golden light. She stopped sketching shapes and began moving her hand up and down, as if she were painting the air. The golden light began to grow, and where her hand swept through the space, it left a gradually brightening sphere, translucent, but glowing like a lantern light. She made a final few sketches in the air, and said the words: "Like this." She lowered her hands, and the golden orb floated slowly over to me. When it was about a foot away, it shimmered and emitted a sound, which sounded very similar to Beatrix''s voice saying the words, ''Like this''. Its voice wasn''t exactly the same; I had the impression more of a bird mimicking human speech than if the magic had somehow captured her words out of the air. After delivering its message to me, the ball floated back through the air to Beatrix, who placed her hand into it and let the magic flow back into her body. "It takes most of my magic," she said. "I wouldn''t be able to do much else here while it travelled. And if anything happened to it on the journey, it would represent a significant loss to me." I didn''t know enough about what Beatrix did here to know if that was a problem, so I turned to the commander to try and gauge her reaction. "It won''t work." The commander looked bored. "North Hill''s not going to do something just because a magic ball tells them. Messages need provenance. Every link of the chain is accounted for." The commander was quiet for half a minute, thinking to herself as she chewed through the food left out on the table. "Here''s what we''re going to do," Rosewood said eventually. "I''m going to send a rider south. Jaquelyn. She could get lost on a straight road, but she''s got principles. If we send her with a letter, she''ll see it delivered. Beatrix will send her ball to North Hill, timed to meet Jaquelyn and check she didn''t get stuck up a tree or fall off her horse, so we''ll know in advance that she''s still on schedule." "Can the ball accept a reply?" I asked, turning to Beatrix. "It''s not called the ball, but yes it can. A short phrase." "And if that fails," Rosewood concluded, "I have rights on Bramn. Lot of fatty muscle on that one." I let that hang in the air for a few seconds, before clearing my throat and asking, "Could we supplement our stocks with hunting? Or fishing?" Rosewood seemed to be thinking about that for a while before she answered. "There''s no water bigger than a pond close by, and nothing you''d want to eat comes nearer than a half day''s walk. There''s game further out, but no paths that deep." She considered for a while then added, "I''ll put Levison on the roof, try to shoot down some birds, and I''ll send Wren and Maypole out hunting. Don''t expect much. They''ll have to carry anything they bag back on their shoulders." "What about rationing what we have?" I asked, not directing the question to any one of them specifically. "Not a good idea," Rosewood said, but didn''t elaborate. "We can wait," Beatrix said. "If there''s no answer when my message spell returns, we can start rationing." "I''ll see about writing out our order," I said. "If anyone has any idea where Wilfram Ged''s documents might be, please let me know, or I''ll be working blind." I looked down at my ledger as we all sat in silent thought. Tidy minutes of the meeting lay on the open page, along with our conclusions and actions. I''d made note of several names I hadn''t known, people whose faces I hadn''t seen. If my predecessor''s documents were really lost, then I had a lot of work ahead of me in creating the kind of system I''d need to keep the fort running. Personnel records, maintenance logs, duty rotas for the civilian staff. I needed to work out the fort''s budget. Our material needs would be requisitioned from military stores in North Hill within reason, but the servants would have to be paid, or at least a tally of their recompense kept. Or perhaps that was the captain''s job? I felt heavy for a moment, and silently resisted the wave of fatigue that threatened to take me. At the Library I''d had a written job description, standardized and press-printed on headed paper. Here... it felt like I had been cast into an organizational wilderness, as well as a literal one. The meeting wrapped up after that, Beatrix heading back towards her rooms, and Rosewood passing behind my chair so that she could lean down and snap her teeth twice sharply next to my ear on her way out. 9. The Visitor at the Door I stayed a while longer, eating another pastry and collecting my thoughts. The Polity bureaucracy must have specific forms and procedures for this kind of requisition, but my training at North Hill had been necessarily brief, and without the former administrator''s documents I had no template to guide me. I would just have to do my best with what I had, and lean on the uniqueness and urgency of the situation to excuse any errors. I left the dining hall and found Iva in the kitchens. Together we started constructing an order. Her container-measurement system was a good basis for calculating our monthly needs, and we put together a list using the standard measurements of the supplies in the cellar. As we worked our roles transformed. She, the more experienced, became the leader in the task, and I, for all that I was the fort''s appointed manager, became her student; in a person''s needs, in the standard weights and units of barrels and casks. At some point she sent Bramn to fetch Aleth, and we discussed the needs of the horses. With every stroke of the pencil I tamed the anxiety that preoccupied me, locking it behind bars of carbon, restraining it with chains of figures. I used the conventions I''d learned at the Library. The form used upon discovering a missing book became a report on the lack of food supplies, the standard order to the Library''s suppliers was repurposed into a list of food and supplies. After I returned to my room I made a copy of my initial inventory, a cover letter describing the situation, and a request for copies of any documents regarding Fort Amalveor that were kept on file in North Hill. With the tip of my dagger I sliced the pages from my journal ¨C ignoring its imagined cries of pain ¨C then took out the prover, altering the dials on the back until the six hands were in a unique arrangement, then pressing the switch to flick them into the new extrapolated positions. As was procedure, I wrote the six numbers I had configured manually, and then three of the new numbers the device had indicated. I labelled each sheet with a page number, one of six, two of six... and tied them into a roll using a piece of waxed cord. I didn''t have a scroll case, but the soldier Rosewood sent would surely have a waterproof bag, and a little crumpling wouldn''t alter the message. I passed the roll of papers off to Commander Rosewood through the door to her office, noticing on my second visit that the room seemed much larger and better furnished than mine. She tossed the roll of papers onto a chair and dismissed me as she pushed the door closed, leaving me in the corridor with no clear tasks to occupy the rest of my day. I used the afternoon to try another search for the last administrator''s documents, searching my rooms for hiding places, even secret compartments. I checked the undercroft again, even using a metal stool leg to pry up the hatch in the floor and check the foundations. All I found was a dark, empty space, just tall enough to stand up in, with a floor made of natural stone. I was late for dinner that evening, arriving to an empty room and making a meal out of what was left; fresh bread and grated cheese, pottage stew, crispy fried obega, and honey scones. I was silently glad the commander had turned down the suggestion of rationing, though I couldn''t endorse it logically. I retired to my room after dinner. I was feeling the weight of my early morning and I allowed myself to slide into bed only a couple of hours after the evening bell, the rain-shrouded sky having already brought dusk down upon us. Once I was in bed, I found that I couldn''t sleep. I couldn''t quiet my mind. Images and worries asserted themself without my control. The bare tree in the courtyard. The view from the parapets. The snapping of the commander''s teeth. The body, faceless for now, of my predecessor, lying in a shallow bed of dirt as my wagon rode above him. My thoughts raced around each other, sliding with nothing to stop them, with no solid surface to grip, becoming untethered from reality and edging into the bizarre. After an hour of lying awake I was broken from the endless circle by a noise from my door ¨C the handle. I felt that it had just turned. I sat up sharply, my heart pounding against my ribs, my eyes fixed on the door, a charcoal slab in the dark. The door was locked, I was certain it was locked. I held my breath, listening, questioning what I''d heard, waiting for some kind of confirmation, or for enough time to pass that I could write it off as nothing. As I waited, body completely still, my imagination churned onwards. I pictured the mangled corpse of my predecessor standing outside, trying to get in. I pictured a bandit or crazed wilder sneaking into the fort to kill and rob. I even imagined one of the other members of staff coming to murder me as part of some plot. The handle rattled again, violently, with the impression of anger behind it. "Who''s there?" I called, my voice cracked and feebly quiet, still not moving out of bed. The door handle went wild, rattling up and down. I got out of bed, my breath shallow and frantic, and walked to the middle of the floor. I glanced around for something I could use to protect myself from all of my half-imagined horrors. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. My eyes caught then settled on the rapier sitting above the fireplace, the bark covering the hilt slick and black in the darkness. I took it by the handle, pausing on my way to the door to shake the scabbard off onto the floor, then approached the entrance. I glanced at the handle ¨C quiet now ¨C then put my ear to the door, listening for any evidence of activity beyond. I could hear something, I thought. A distant sound, an indistinct noise, a low noise like wind or flowing water, or some deep rasping instrument. I swallowed, took a breath that strained my lungs, and in one quick unhesitating motion turned the key and cracked open the door. The darkness of the empty corridor met me. There were lamps lit in the passage, one left burning dimly at each corner and intersection to guide midnight wanderers. There was enough light to see, but I couldn''t see anyone. Nothing that could have tried my door handle. Light glinting from the ground caught my attention, and I noticed there was a smattering of water on the wooden floor, as if someone had walked in from the rain and stood there dripping, but there were no footprints, nothing to indicate it was any more than a leak that had run down the stone wall or dripped from the ceiling. I turned, using the dim light from the hall to inspect my room. All was as it should be. Still feeling the sharp prickle of fear in my extremities, I closed the door, then locked it, then checked the handle twice and twice again to make sure it was secure. I walked to my desk and lit my own lamp, letting warm yellow light spill out across the room. I dropped the rapier ¨C a foolish move to ever have lifted it, I could have cut myself! ¨C and sank onto the chair, resting my elbows on the desk and my chin in my hands. What was that? My mind began to construct stories: of a garrison night-watchman doing their rounds, forgetting or not realizing my room was now occupied, and trying to inspect it; of one of my colleagues returning from the kitchen inebriated, mistaking my door for theirs, and running away in embarrassment when they realized their mistake. Perhaps it hadn''t happened at all, and what I had thought was insomnia had in fact been a half-dreaming state. I bent down and picked the rapier and it''s sheath off the floor. I lined them up on the desk to slide the sword into the sheath, then paused as the blade caught the light. It wasn''t clean. There was something on it. A milky white residue covered the steel, from the tip down to the halfway point of the blade. I ran my thumb across it. The texture was rough, and flakes of white matter came away as I scratched at it. I picked one of them up and rubbed it between my thumb and finger, watching as it crumbled to dust. Some kind of treatment for the steel? A preservative? The scabs of loose matter gave off a foul chemical smell I couldn''t place. I knew of oils that steel could be treated with to prevent rust, but this didn''t feel at all oily. There was a tin cup on the desk, still holding an inch of water, and I dropped several of the flakes into it, swirling it around, then took out the box containing my wand. The Library''s wands of identification had a fair amount of intelligence, and decent memories for such devices. Depending on the method used, they could identify the language of a text, the kind of glue or leather used in a binding, even the title of some books, where the cover had been lost. I knew that the Library only used a fraction of their full ability, as I had seen the same grade of wands used in alchemist shops and perfumers, and it wasn''t beyond the realm of possibility that it could identify the substance coating the blade. I carefully took the wand from its case, flicked the tip several times to wake it up, then stirred it around the inside of the cup. I left the wand to sit in the liquid for a minute, to give it a chance to fully sense whatever it was, before removing it and shaking it off. As I held the wand up to the light I could already see letters forming inside it. Dust-like motes slowly organized themselves into characters within the glass rod, floating around each other like they were swimming through syrup. It took a minute for the word to fully form. The result was stretched and irregular ¨C a flaw of wands held in long storage ¨C but the answer was unmistakable. BLOOD. I stared at it for a moment. How? Was it an old bloodstain, gone white with age? Perhaps there was some local creature which bled white? I shook my head, wiping the wand. For all I knew, someone had used the sword to stir their stew and the wand was misidentifying it. I gave the wand a vigorous shake to dispel the result then placed it back in its case, stowing it in a drawer. I half-closed the shade on the lamp, but didn''t extinguish it, leaving it burning to dimly light the room as I returned to bed. The residue on the sword and the wand''s cryptic analysis hadn''t done anything to settle my thoughts, but I needed to get to sleep. I had more to do tomorrow, a survey of the condition of the grounds, reviewing the maps my predecessor had left behind, and more ¨C the state of Wilfram''s sword had made me uneasy. I wondered if I could find out exactly how my predecessor had died. 10. The Lay of the Land Wilfram, my predecessor, had collected a great number of maps. They ranged from small pencil sketches that could be folded up and kept in a pocket, to huge red-inked scrolls that covered my entire desk when I unfurled them. Some of them looked like they could have been drawn this year, while others were ancient, possibly even pre-Reformation. Many of the maps were of the local area; terrain, topography, resources, including one that I took to be the original survey map from when the fort was built. All of them were significantly more detailed than I believed existed for this region, and certainly better than anything I''d seen in the records at North Hill. Some of the other maps showed regions that I didn''t immediately recognize. There was one of the Northern Polity, including North Hill, though on the map it was called Embrachus, and there were several I took to be maps of the undeveloped land further north into the wilds. There was one large map that showed the entire world, the same design that was familiar to every Polity school graduate. It showed the Polity, a ladle-shaped country roughly two thousand miles from edge to furthest edge, bordered by the sea to the south and east, by the cordial Degreean Empire to the west, and the untapped, largely unmapped, wilds to the north. Internal lines divided the Polity into regions whose cultures had inherited their character from the nations they''d once been, before the Reformation had forged them into a single political entity. Other islands and continents were depicted with their names to the east and west, the coastlines growing more basic and abstract the further from the Polity''s shores they were. There were more maps still, but that was where my familiarity ended. There were maps of towns I''d never heard of, even one showing what seemed to be the lay of a nation I didn''t know to even exist ¨C perhaps some historical kingdom. One map, fairly recent, black ink on linen paper, showed Fort Amalveor and the surrounding lands, but there were several deviations from its companions. This one showed an additional settlement called Hobs Mount in the forest a little way south-west of the fort, and there were also several points of interest to the north and east, marked with small drawings of structures, but otherwise unlabelled. I leaned back from my desk and rubbed my eyes. As far as I knew there weren''t supposed to be any settlements this far north, or any buildings of any size apart from the fort. We were far outside Polity territory. Was Hobs Mount a deserted historic town, no longer relevant to the current maps? Some recluse colony unknown to the Polity hierarchy? A remote monastery? I made a note of the major features of the map, using a ruler and set-angle to make a copy of it in my ledger, not absolutely accurate perhaps, but at least as accurate to the original map as that was likely to the land. I thought perhaps I should arrange a meeting with Rosewood to ask about the town and other marks on the map ¨C as well as several other things that had been bothering me. Eventually hunger started pulling my attention away from my work, and I left my room in search of something to eat. Only Terrance Huthnance, the fort''s healer, was in the common room when I went for breakfast. He was wearing a long bedrobe, muted purple fabric embroidered with white doves. A bell rang overhead as I entered the room. Ten bells. Apparently I''d been working for longer than I realized. "Good morning," he said, raising a cup in greeting. "Good morning, Terrance," I said, seating myself next to him. "Did you sleep well? I thought I heard some movement in the night. Not that it disturbed me ¨C I was awake myself. I almost came up to say hello, but with you only having been here a few days I didn''t want to seem too forward." I looked down at the table, feeling awkward. He''d heard my scrambling around the previous night. His room was directly below mine in the corner tower, so I should have thought about whether my footsteps might carry. At first I felt embarrassed, but perhaps, since he''d brought it up... "Somebody tried my door last night," I said. "What!" "Someone tried to get into my room," I repeated. I''d somehow almost forgotten, or perhaps chosen to put it out of my mind. Sitting there at the breakfast table I wished I could pass it off as a dream, but I knew for certain that I''d been awake. Terrance''s eyebrows had lifted halfway up his forehead. He took a few seconds to digest the information. Then he smirked. "Do you think someone was seeking a liaison?" I took a moment to process his suggestion. My cheeks grew hot as I understood what he was saying. "No! Why would they." "Well I know it''s only been a couple of days, but someone could easily have fallen for your charms." "Whoever it was seemed quite angry they couldn''t get in," I said, choosing to push past the whole innuendo. "They were practically violent about it." Terrance grew serious immediately. "And they didn''t speak?" "No." He went quiet for a minute. I forced myself to focus on assembling breakfast while I let the heat fade from my cheeks. Pickings were somewhat slim in what was left on the table. There were some thin pancakes, and slices of a fruit that I thought was called applesharp. The pot of oatmeal was still half full, and there was still some tea and carafe left over. I pulled the remaining pancakes onto my plate, topping them with a dollop of oatmeal and some wedges of applesharp. I poured myself a cup of carafe, finding at my first bitter sip that it was only lukewarm. "Do you think it could have been someone who got the wrong door?" Terrance asked as I was chewing on pancake-wrapped oatmeal. This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. I finished chewing and swallowed before answering. "I did have that thought." Terrance smiled, apparently satisfied that he''d found the answer. "If they bother you again, just rap on the floor. I''ll come up and see what''s what." "Thank you." He gave me a friendly smile then drained his own cup. He leaned back from the table, stretching in a way that pulled his linen shirt back across his chest. "So, do you have plans for today?" I nodded, holding off taking another mouthful of food as I answered. "I was going to perform a survey of the grounds, but I found something in Wilfram''s things this morning. He had a map that showed a settlement nearby. I thought I should ask the commander about it." "Hobs Mount?" Terrance asked. "Yes, that was it." "It''s not exactly a town any more," he said, lacing his hands behind his head. "It was built around the same time as the fort. I think it was meant to be a base for the timber industry. The local wood was very popular in the Polity. When the reclamation ended, the woodcutters lost the ability to move their product south, and the town died out." "It''s abandoned then?" I asked. Terrance gestured. "A few families decided to stay behind when the main force evacuated. I haven''t heard anything about them for years. Only the gods know what they''re doing out there now." I finally put the next rolled pancake in my mouth, chewing methodically as I thought about the settlement. If there was anyone left alive, then what were they doing out there? Surviving, presumably. Without trade or support they must be living off the land. Hunting, trapping, foraging, perhaps some small-scale farming. "I wonder if they would have food to trade with us," I said. Terrance''s nose wrinkled. "Yes they might sell us rat meat and groundnuts in exchange for soap and clothing." I didn''t know quite what to say to that, and we sat in silence for a minute. My thoughts wandered to the disturbing events of the night, and the stain I''d found on my predecessor''s sword. It occurred to me that as the fort''s healer, Terrance should know the circumstances of his death, if anyone did. "Terrance¨C" I started, having to stop and clear my throat. He turned his attention to me, halfway through refilling his carafe cup, and I felt a sudden anxiety, though my question was a perfectly reasonable one. "I was wondering if you could tell me how Wilfram died." Terrance''s expression became sad. "It was a fatal fall. He was alive briefly, afterwards, but his injuries were too deep." "I mean, what caused him to fall?" The healer put the pitcher down and picked up his cup. His expression was still dour, but there was an interested spark in his eye. "Apparently he threw himself from the roof. I asked the soldier on watch duty that night. He saw Wilfram climb up the ladder, walk to the edge, and throw himself over the side, like he was just jumping into a lake." I swallowed the last of my pancake, then felt a lead weight settle in my stomach. "Had he been unwell?" I asked flatly. "I''ll tell you what I told the commander. Healers who work in remote establishments are trained to see the signs. Wilf was a nervous man, there may have been instability towards the end, but he loved it out here. He loved the wilderness. I got the impression that he was never happy living among civilization. He certainly never showed any symptoms of misery to me, or that he would welcome his end." "That doesn''t really make me feel any better," I said. "He was the first such casualty here for years, I don''t think you need to worry about succumbing to something like that. But do come to me if you are feeling any kind of burden, or if you just want someone to talk to in confidence." I picked at the lump of oatmeal on my plate with a spoon, not eating it, but just moving it around. After a second of thought, in an off-hand manner, I asked, "Have you ever heard of an animal with white blood?" Terrance gave me an odd look. It must have seemed like quite a change of subject to him. "Perhaps I should be worried about you after all," he said. "Just idle curiosity," I said, waving it off. "I think there are some creatures with white blood. Crustaceans, seanids, rockslugs and the like. They have a copper blood, in contrast to our iron blood." "Oh? Does the chef ever serve crab or such?" "No, Sebastian. We''re hundreds of miles from the coast. That would be quite a delivery. I don''t think anyone has a craving that large." Feeling embarrassed again, and unfairly chastised, I wiped my mouth with my fingers, putting my spoon onto my finished plate. I was thinking of my next moves when the door burst open, revealing Commander Rosewood. She was wearing unfastened leather armor over an untucked shirt and brown pants. She belched loudly as she walked into the room. She reached out and ruffled my hair as she passed, before sitting at the head of the table and pulling the entire serving bowl of oatmeal to her place, diving into it with the serving spoon. I stood up quickly, straightening my hair, and doing my best to ignore her. "Thank you, Terrance," I said, though I couldn''t think what I was thanking him for. "I have duties to get to." He nodded. "See you later, Sebastian." With my ledger under my arm, I hurried for the door. 11. Gone to Rust After breakfast I put on my rain cloak and went down to the entrance hall, swinging open the front door and striding outside. I watched the doors carefully as I pushed them open. Beatrix had said she''d alarmed and warded the doors, but I felt no resistance opening them from the inside, only a strange buzzing sensation on my skin when I touched the wood to push them closed. Outside, it was a cool, damp morning, lit by gray light filtering through heavy clouds that had not yet begun to disgorge their contents. Above the walls I could detect a slight breeze making itself known by the swaying of nearby trees and the occasional gust that made it down to the ground. I began my survey in the courtyard, where the paving stones were broken and weed-strewn. It was a mess to look at. Plants of red, green, purple, yellow, indigo, and black rioted out of cracks in the stones ¡ª strange strangling plants that called to mind the seaweed-choked coastline I grew up exploring, outside my childhood town of Blackwater. The ground was littered by broken chips of rock; I recognized them as fragments of flagstones that had been tossed around by the weather, or by birds looking for insects beneath them. The state of the yard wouldn''t reflect well on us if anyone of any influence decided to visit, though from the attitudes I''d seen since my arrival, I gathered that was unlikely. Beneath the paving slabs the ground was firm enough, and when I lifted a stone by its corner, I found the coarse gravel beneath to be dry and stable. The courtyard would still serve as a place to muster the garrison or stow heavy loads without the ground cracking or sinking into mud. I unfolded my ledger from under my arm and made a note of the state of the courtyard. I had little experience with the kind of heavy labour fixing the paving would entail, but I paced out the yard and calculated an estimate of its area, keeping a tally of still-unbroken stones. The entire span would need to be weeded and re-paved in order for it to look respectable, and gathering the information necessary for more experienced minds to calculate the cost and benefit of such a task seemed to be the limit of what I owed my duty in the matter. The outbuilding on the right side of the courtyard was in good condition: a storeroom and a small forge as it turned out. The hearth was cold, no fire at all, and inside it smelled only of damp and gear-oil. Beatrix hadn''t introduced me to a blacksmith on the staff, so unless it was a secondary duty of one of the garrison troops, it didn''t seem likely there was anyone at the fort qualified to use it. I spent a few minutes updating my inventory with a list of the tools and materials available. There were ingots of iron and brass. To my surprise, there were also several bars of what I was sure was shifting steel. I picked one of them up, weighing it in my hand. It was smooth in places, its surface displaying the complex geometric pattern that I knew formed on the skin of the magical metal, but elsewhere it was covered in twisting barbs and coils of metal shavings, sharp and chaotic, as if it had been chewed up by metal-loving ants. When formed into a blade or tool, the metal could be convinced to maintain its strength and sharpness, or even take on magical properties. Left unused like this, without purpose, it clearly went to some strange variety of rust. I dropped the bar back on the pile. It was an extremely valuable material, moreso than anything I''d inventoried so far, save perhaps the amulets of protection I''d found in the undercroft, and the volume of metal here likely won that contest. It seemed like a terrible waste. Supplies left to rot, as the entire fort had been left to rot, for want of a reason to maintain it. As I noted the metal in my ledger, I again had the experience of pulling something lost back into existence, something valuable and abandoned made present and usable again through the act of proper documentation. I left the outbuilding, feeling a pang of regret and a strange sympathy for the abandoned smithy, like seeing a skilled craftsperson sitting idle and unchallenged. My next stop was the stables on the opposite side of the courtyard. As I approached the open doorway, I caught the sound of activity coming from inside. I could hear the sound of a brush sweeping along hide, animal noises, and a low voice. "There you go Gent. Easy. Easy. How''s that? Haven''t had to carry something in a while. You''ve been having it easy, haven''t you." I stepped inside. As my vision adjusted to the dim light, I spotted a figure at the far end, running a brush over the black coat of a short cavalry horse. The figure heard me and turned. It was Aleth Green, the yard hand I''d met while inventorying the fort undercroft. "Aleth, hello," I said. "Hi Mr. Lewis," he said, letting the hand holding the brush fall to his waist. He took a relaxed stance, shoulders slouched backwards. He was wearing what I took to be his work clothes: a thigh-length leather apron belted over a sleeveless white shirt, and leather chaps worn over a pair of coarse brown tressian pants. Tressian was a hardy, practically indestructible fabric, but had an abrasive texture. It was usually worn with a silk or cotton underlayer, but as far as I could tell Aleth was wearing it against bare skin. My gaze wandered to the horse''s enclosure, where a set of saddlebags and harness were hanging over the open gate. "Are you preparing him for the messenger?" I asked. "Yeah, that''s right. Commander said she''s sending Jaqi out at noon. Gotta get Gent ready." I stepped up to the horse and raised a hand to pat its nose, but it immediately took a dislike to me and snorted, pulling its head away. I''d only ridden a horse once before, and the combination of a skittish and nervous animal, put into partnership with a skittish and nervous human, had created a wretched experience for both of us. Aleth reached up with a hand to comfort the horse, who breathed out gently, then pushed into the touch. I stepped back, looking around the otherwise empty stable. "I thought there were two horses?" "That''s right, there is. Gent and Reddy. But Reddy doesn''t like being round the tackle. It stresses him out. So I roped him up outside until I''m done with Gent." "Isn''t a horse who''s afraid of their harness a little hard to use for anything?" I asked. Aleth glanced at me. "They don''t need a lot of riding. There''s no call for it. Jaqi isn''t even going to ride Gent south ¡ª he''s got a bad back. She just needs him to carry her packs and such." "I see," I said. "Is it normal for horses to have such particular needs?" "Well, they''ve got needs like people," Aleth said. "And Gent and Reddy are all we''ve got. You''ve got to treat them carefully or we''ll lose them, one way or another." "I always preferred cats," I said, looking at the horse. I caught its eye, and it immediately snorted and looked away. "I could look after a cat," Aleth said, suddenly wistful. "Not likely to get one out here though, as happy as it''d be with all the woods to run through." "The Library kept cats," I said, thinking back to Pewsley and Pibs, a tortoiseshell Rhosian and a gray common that the institution kept for mousing duties. "How do you deal with vermin here? Rats and the like. I noticed a lot of the food seems to be just kept out in the open." "Ms. Beatrix spells them away. She comes down to the lower level once a week to freshen the magic up. I''ve never seen a mouse or a silverfish inside since I''ve been here." "I''d like to be able to learn that one," I said. Following the last unusually warm summer in Bosleake, I considered flying ants to be a personal nemesis. "I''d want to learn soldiers'' magic, I think," Aleth replied, resuming his brushing of the horse. "The military mages can stay awake for days, did you know? They can keep a company warm even with no tents in the snow, too." "What kind of mage is Beatrix?" I asked. "I don''t know. Some other kind. She spells the water clean. She even does something to stop the outpipe from smelling." "That sounds useful," I said. The various orders of mages and what they were capable of was fairly far beyond my experience. To me, they existed as a monolithic professional class, operating a business that was both mysterious and opaque. I cast my gaze around the rest of the stable, then back to Aleth. "I''m just going to take stock of what we have in here," I said. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. Aleth nodded, barely acknowledging me now that his attention was back on the horse. I moved around the space, taking note of the various contents of the stables, correcting the oversight I''d made during my original inventory. There was a low hay loft up a short ladder at the far end, which I found to be almost full of hay. Evidently the rations for the horse residents of the fort were in a better state than those for the human ones. I inventoried the various pieces of equipment, having to stop and ask Aleth for the names and purpose of things several times. When I was finished, I said my goodbyes and left the building. The stable, for all that it was a wooden construction in a wet climate, was also in fairly good condition, which I put down to the relative ease with which the local staff might repair a wooden building, compared to the stone fort, which would require a mason at best. I was all but finished surveying the courtyard, save for a look at the outer wall, and the exterior of the fort itself. All of the stonework was cracked and weathered, subject to damage where water had eaten away at mortar, or where roots had threaded through the blocks. I didn''t have the skill or background to judge how serious any of it was, whether it was superficial, or critical, save for two very obvious examples. At one point there had been a stone staircase running up the inside of the outer wall, giving access to the walkway on top of it. Now, it was ruined. Something had given way, causing the staircase to collapse into a pile of stones. Someone had replaced it with a sad looking ladder to maintain access to the walkway, but this too had broken, with several of the rungs rotted through and snapped, making it, if not unusable, then very precarious. I found the second serious case of damage after threading through one of the weed-choked alleys that passed between the fort and the outer wall. On the rear side of the fort, the narrow space opened up into a rough overgrown area around twenty feet wide, with a tiny iron-clad door serving as a back exit through the outer wall, and a similarly sized back door in the fort itself. Here, the weeds and climbing vines had completely dominated the back wall of the fort, and in one place, thin roots had created a deep crack around the edge of one of the stone blocks. It looked like the front half of it was ready to fall off at any moment. Wading through the long grass brought me to the spot, and I felt at the stone. It wobbled when I pushed at it, clearly loose. I hesitated to try to pull it out. I could have just noted the damage and moved on, but I felt an anxiety that there could simply be an open hole behind the stone ¡ª a vulnerability to pests, to damp, to mould, to any ruinous force that might enter. I slipped my ledger beneath my waistcoat, where it sat precariously, then slipped my fingers around the edges of the broken stone. Slowly I worked it out of its seat, edging it out inch by inch. I didn''t let it fall. When I felt it was at the moment of balance, I tipped it towards myself and peered into the space behind. There was a gap, as I''d thought, but it didn''t cut fully through the wall. Instead it was a hollow space, chipped or eroded out of an interior layer of masonry. Sitting inside the hole was a dust-covered drawstring sack. I felt my heart take an extra beat. Finding something that had been deliberately hidden felt immediately transgressive to me, and my imagination quickly began pelting me with visions of what could be inside. At their most lurid, those momentary fantasies had me picturing the previous administrator''s records, stashed away for some reason. I put that highly unlikely possibility out of my mind and focused back on maintaining the balance of the stone. I struggled with the block, almost letting it fall out, then removed a hand to snatch the bag. After a few seconds of struggling, the stone block was back in place, and I was leaning back against the wall, breathing heavily, palms and cuffs covered in dirt and stone dust, and the leather sack in my hand. I took a few moments to catch my breath. Sweat had broken out on my forehead from the effort of holding the stone, which I felt sure had to weigh thirty pounds or more. When I''d recovered, I unstrung the sack and peeked inside. Bundled clothes, a fat envelope, a wooden case, and a small bag I took to be a coin purse. I quickly closed the bag and looked around. Somebody had hidden this bag. Who or why, I couldn''t guess. I wasn''t in a position to be observed. Only the upper windows of the fort overlooked this part of the grounds, and I was too close to the wall to be seen from those. I felt that I could remove the bag without anyone finding out. My survey wasn''t necessarily finished ¡ª I hadn''t investigated the small door in the rear of the outer wall ¡ª but the strange bag trumped all my previous priorities. At the very least its contents needed to be recorded in my inventory list, or so I told myself. Pulling my ledger out of my waistcoat and doing my best to hide the bundled sack behind it, I rushed back towards the doors, and then to my quarters. o o o o o I was concerned and mystified. I had hoped the envelope in the sack might contain a clue to its owner''s identity, but inside I had instead found a short stack of banker''s writs, eleven of them, each redeemable for fifty silver thrones. It was a small fortune ¡ª more than I would earn in the next two months, even on my new administrator salary. The writs were printed on good quality linen paper, which I knew could survive for years without degrading, and the leather bag had clearly kept the contents dry, so I had no clue about how long they''d been hidden out there. Such writs sometimes carried the name of the authorizing account, but these were the anonymous variety, paid in full at the point the bank issued them. The wooden case contained a wand with a design I didn''t recognize: a slightly curved wooden stick that reminded me of a hatchet handle, ending with a thumb-sized glass outcropping at one end. There was a strip of brass running along the length of the handle that felt warmer to the touch than I''d expect from something that had been sitting outside. The most perplexing discovery lay inside the small bag. What I''d taken to be a coin purse actually contained a number of small objects made of fired clay. They were all identical, each a little bigger than a coin, shaped like a stepped spiral ¡ª rust-brown snail shells wrought in precise straight-edged geometry. I pushed one of them around in my hand, feeling its cold weight against my palm. It lacked any unusual features that might be put down to magic, seeming like a simple clay design. Could they be game pieces? Some kind of bizarre clay currency? The spare clothes in the bag were nondescript ¡ª large garments in muted colors, of the kind that would be cinched or belted to fit any build. There was also a thick blanket, and a rain cloak bundled in with them. Wrapped in the blanket I got my first clue to the bag''s owner: a leather scroll case containing map of the local area, drawn by hand and annotated in black ink. The map from the scroll case had a route noted on it, traveling south down the main road for around six miles, before breaking off into the forest along a trail I hadn''t seen marked on any of the others. The route ultimately passed very close to the location of Hobs Mount ¡ª though I had to compare maps to check ¡ª before continuing on to the southwest, completely bypassing the main road and North Hill. I couldn''t be sure why someone would hide a bag like this outside, but I felt it was the kind of package someone would put together to allow them to leave discreetly and on short notice. That was my suspicion, but I had no proof. I didn''t even have much information. I warred with myself over the idea of turning in what I''d found. On one hand, there was nothing conclusively criminal or even questionable about the bag, but on the other... My thoughts stuttered to a stop. For a moment I stopped trying to rationalize what I was seeing, and actually looked at it. This was a bag put together by someone who intended to leave the fort quickly, and unseen. The notes on the small map were a fair match to the annotations on the other maps in my predecessor''s collection. My predecessor Wilfram Ged, who had later died, under circumstances that were still obscure to me. To my mind, the fact that somebody had hidden these items implied the existence of distrust. The fact that the owner had been planning to flee implied fear. That nobody else had retrieved this bag implied that it was still secret. And nobody had given me any information that would remotely explain its presence. To me, that implied there could be some kind of deception in play. I''d been trying to be the best administrator I could be, in the face of unpleasant surprises and disturbed sleep, but I''d have to have been a fool to pretend that everything here was still as I''d expected it to be on my journey up. Looking at the strange collection of evidence before me, I was forced to conclude that something was quite wrong at Fort Amalveor.