I left my office, locking the door, and headed downwards towards the ground level. The corridors were pitch dark and cold, and the damp smell from the gate had returned and grown, but I carried an oil lamp, and I felt no particular fear of the dark as I walked the halls.

As I passed the room Beatrix had identified as the captain's office, I noticed there was light shining under the door – a cold white light, like starlight – and I felt that the captain must be up late working on some important task. I took some comfort from being awake and working at the same early hour as him. We were alike in our diligence. I considered pausing and knocking on the door, making my introductions and letting him know that I was already seeing to my duties, but in the end I moved on, deciding that disturbing him now might make a bad first impression.

The ground floor of the fort held the kitchen, the bakery, and the buttery, as well as a small larder connected to the kitchens. I walked through all of them, taking the lay of the place. The ground floor also had the fort's bathroom, with several wood tubs separated by curtains and a large hearth for heating water, and I found the building's waste drain behind the next door down.

There was a locked door which none of my keys opened – perhaps part of the military function of the fort – and a locked entrance to the undercroft which I was able to unlock.

It was below the fort on the cellar level that I found the bulk of the fort's stores.

Casks of wheat flour and rye flour, sacks of oats and barley, bags of salt, clay jars of oil. There was a pile of loose root vegetables I thought were called 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.

I had never worked as a quartermaster, but even from the basic experience of managing my own home, I felt that the food stores were inadequate.

I would have to check with the current chef, but unless there was a hidden pile of food somewhere, I doubted we even had enough to last the month – a long time out here, when even in good weather a wagon might take a week to reach us from North Hill.

I tried to ignore the nagging worry as I continued my inventory. How could the captain let our food situation get into this state? There had to be something I was missing.

Stolen novel; please report.

There was a cache of weapons and armor in the undercroft. Thirty each of swords, spears, and long knives – a small fortune in arms, presumably left over from a time when the fort was more heavily garrisoned. I noted each of them, along with a word describing their condition. There were eight bows, kept unstrung to protect the wood, though one of them was cracked anyway. There were eight pieces of leather armor, and the same number of round shields. In a wooden box I found three amulets, each a delicate glass helix on a steel chain. The box was labelled Amulets of Protection – Second Grade.

I took one of them and put it around my neck, sliding the amulet below my clothes. I noted the remaining two in my ledger and moved on.

In the next chamber of the undercroft I found a bin of cut firewood, and that at least we had plenty of. We were just barely out of summer, but some industrious woodcutter had set aside an amount that would last me all winter if I were the only one using it. Perhaps it wasn't surprising; with the forest coming up practically to the fort's outer walls there was plenty of material to harvest. I wondered whether the undercroft was warm enough for fresh wood to dry out.

This chamber was also host to a lot of what I could only think of as junk. Damaged furniture which in theory could be repaired, but never had been, littered the ground by the wall. There was a metal chair like my own with a bent leg, a printing press the size of a large barrel with a crucial piece snapped, a chest like the one at the foot of my bed whose insides had been gnawed to sawdust by wood mites.

There were several empty crates, casks, and barrels, and more, even less useful things. Jars of paint, jute bags of nails, a sack of rusty woodworking tools, water-warped planks and spare wagon wheels, a mostly empty sack of mortar powder, gardening equipment, a birch-bark box of worn and damaged boots, an unopened sack of what felt like gravel. It was the refuse of decades.

Refuse or not, I recorded it all, taking a looping path through the stacks, identifying, classifying, and recording bags and boxes from large to small. It could have been tedious work, but I found that I took some enjoyment from even these small, mundane discoveries. Every closed box sparked a new curiosity, quickly satisfied by opening it. It was a maze of mundane mysteries, and more than that, by cataloging it I was creating a knowledge of what was down there where none had existed before. I felt that I was pulling things into the world; dragging them back into reality from the void of the lost.

As I was moving towards the final partitioned chamber in the undercroft, my lamp light caught a flash of white at head level.

I froze as I realized it was a face, watching me from the darkness.