The outer wall had been unguarded, and the courtyard was similarly empty. Irregular flagstones covered the ground, weeds growing through the cracks – 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 – 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 – 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.

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"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.