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 – ignoring its imagined cries of pain – 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 – 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.

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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 – quiet now – 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 – a foolish move to ever have lifted it, I could have cut myself! – 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 – a flaw of wands held in long storage – 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 – the state of Wilfram's sword had made me uneasy. I wondered if I could find out exactly how my predecessor had died.