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 — 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 — 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.

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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 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 — I hadn't investigated the small door in the rear of the outer wall — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — though I had to compare maps to check — 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.