I'd fallen asleep almost immediately following Beatrix's departure, and woken up in the early hours of the following morning.

My quarters were spread over a single spacious room that covered this level of the tower, with an office area sitting against one curving wall, and a bed and living space hugging the other. There was a window that looked out over the wall, but all I could see in the darkness – it had to have been three hours or more before morning bell when I awoke – were the sharp silhouettes of black fir trees cast against the mist-shrouded night sky.

My sleep had been quick to come, but I'd had nightmares all night, of a man falling from the roof of the fort, first faceless, and in later iterations, wearing my face. My dreaming mind had shuffled the geometry of the courtyard so that the dead tree was closer to the walls to facilitate the figure's impalement on its upturned branches, and in the nightmare the fall was often brought about by a shadowed attacker, or hidden monster, or in one repetition, by the man's own unconquerable despair – not a state of mind I was prone to, I felt lucky to be able to reassure myself.

Early morning or not, I was awake and rested from my journey, so I decided to begin my duties. I dressed in pants of a tightly-woven brown cloth, a white linen shirt, and a russet waistcoat that ended just above my hips, and pulled my bag out from under the bed, bringing it to the office area to begin unpacking.

The desk in the room was old, perhaps as old as the fort, and was covered in scratches and other signs of use. The chair looked newer, a black iron frame and wooden seat, with a squashed cushion sitting loosely on it.

I lit the oil lamp on the wall, placed my bag on the ground, and sat down to begin.

My ledger came out first. A blank book the length of my forearm from elbow to thumb, bound in red leather, with flaps that could unfold to keep the weather out. The paper inside was smooth and crisp, a cotton-linen mix, each bundle of pages sewn neatly into the binding with fine white thread. It was new, bought specifically for my new position, but I'd already covered the first few pages with notes on the fort and information gathered from the Polity records in North Hill.

I turned to the first blank page, and taking a carbon pencil from my writing kit, wrote a brief account of my arrival the previous day, dated and timed, with the names of the other staff members I'd met.

The next item I removed from my bag was a dagger. It was old steel, sheathed in leather, with a birch-bark grip and narrow cross-bar. It had been my great-grandfather's, supposedly, his sidearm during his career as a military mage in the court of some prince or other. History had forgotten – perhaps conveniently – which side of the revolution he'd fought on during the Reformation.

I'd made sure to keep the blade sharp, though it hadn't seen any use more violent than opening a letter in my lifetime.

I had some smaller bags within the main bag; soap and sewing kits, which I tossed into an armchair at the back of the room; a medicine bag of pain-relieving tea, bandages, and oil to apply to small wounds; a drawstring bag of silver coins, for all that I couldn't imagine a need for them out here.

I moved a towel in my bag and found a pendant – the holy symbol of The Hungry Word, the Library's patron deity. I wasn't at all devout, but participating in the religion that dominated the upper echelons of my last workplace had seemed prudent, and I'd attended services in the hope it might help me get ahead. The carved pictograph depicted an archaic word meaning both to swallow too much and to utter in fear, which would be most accurately translated into modern Morin as gulp.

It had never had any chance of holding a real connection to The Hungry Word. Even according to the canon of the Polity religions, only the silver holy symbols sanctified and worn by the clergy could truly bring prayers to the associated deity, and many doubted even that had any basis in reality. I had only ever worn the wooden symbol as an overt signifier of faith, and now I would keep it as a memento.

The last thing I removed was also from the Library, a wooden case containing my 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.

The wand had been my leaving gift from my colleagues at the Library, and while I might have been offended by a gift that I knew for a fact had been taken from the library's equipment room, I had decided to accept it in the spirit it was given.

My belongings weren't the only ones here. As Beatrix had said, the previous administrator's things were here as well, neatly put away around the room. Seeing them there, opening a drawer to find someone else's underclothes, accidentally knocking someone else's coat off a hook, left me with the feeling that I was staying in someone else's home, someone who might return at any minute and call me out as an imposter.

Not all of the last administrator's items were useless, either. I was delighted to find a heavy set of keys for the fort, which I hooked onto my belt with due reverence.

I gathered that the previous administrator had been a swordsman from the battered rapier sitting on the mantle above the room's small fireplace, though it wasn't a weapon I had any interest in – in fact I had no interest in any weapon.

The desk drawers held a 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 – likely nobody outside the Bureaucrat's Guild did – 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.

I left the teller in the desk, but clipped the prover's chain to my lapel and slipped the lens into my waistcoat pocket.

There was a heavy travelling cloak and a set of high quality camping gear, but this would be superfluous for me, as I was no wilder, and generally hated spending time outdoors.

I searched the office for any notes or paperwork my predecessor may have left, but failed to turn up anything. He must have had a ledger of his own, or some equivalent, but it didn't seem to be in his quarters.

I did find a folio of maps of the surrounding region which I set aside for study later, but there was no sign of the reams of documentation I was sure must have been created during the course of the fort's life. A troubling development.

As for now, early morning or not, I decided to take stock of the fort, to learn the layout on a more thorough tour of my own, and begin taking an initial inventory of the outpost's supplies.