At the Citadel

"He could've gotten us in there."

Affe ground her teeth in frustration as the burly official came to meet her face to face. One useless person after another kept leading her from point to point, and not a one with a brain in his head. If she had wanted to be led, she wouldn't have cared. But they led her against her will.

She glanced at Tuck. The boy couldn't tell if he was astonished at the city or terrified of it. He kept looking around in wonderment, then cringing at anything that looked strange.

"Keep yourself to yourself," she snapped at him. "We're just going to go in, deliver a report and leave."

He nodded, his arms spasming as if the gesture itself scared him. "You're not leaving me."

Affe took a deep sigh and stared at the official, no more than half-a-dozen paces away now. If the boy took off, the man would get suspicious. It was just too late. Her instinct had known that, though her mind had not thought of it.

"I guess not," she said, and decided to seize the initiative. She stepped forward as the official opened his mouth.

"Affe Kurzeit, with a report from the front for the Mardux." She reeled off the proper codes that identified her assignment and authority. The official, half a head taller than her, hesitated. He was new, she could tell. Broad across the shoulders, but strained behind the ears. She hoped he wouldn't do anything stupid, him or the two guards flanking him.

"What front?" he said after a moment's constipated thought, his eyes looking Affe up and down more than listening to what she had said.

"The north one." Affe couldn't bring herself to lie about that one, but she inwardly thanked Tamon for letting her know the Mardux thought the Mar fought each other there, as well. "It is most urgent I am admitted so that I may deliver my report directly to the Mardux."

The official glanced at Tuck. "And him?"

Affe had already decided. "My apprentice," she said. "If he is to become a successful mapmaker, he must see how a report is delivered. And learn to have a bit of backbone in front of authority," she added as Tuck's eyes watered at the mention of meeting the Mardux. She met the official's eyes squarely. "Well? I must be admitted. If you have some confusion, then direct me to your superior."

"The Mardux has said no one may come into the citadel. And I am my superior."

"Very well. Then when I see him, and he recognizes the importance of my words, I will direct the emphasis of the delay onto you, Captain ...?"

"Oh no, oh no," the man said. He gestured to the guards. "Croft there will lead you inside. I'm sure the Mardux eagerly anticipates your words. I look forward to seeing you again." He smiled a bit then, probably in what he thought was mischievousness.

Affe shook her head and followed Croft, Tuck trailing her heels. "It's not as though I did anything particularly witty," she said to Tuck. "You see how stupid he was?"

Tuck nodded, head bobbing like a chicken's.

"Maybe you're not as stupid as you look," Affe grudgingly said to him. "Just keep your peace inside, though. I am going to give my report and leave, and you are going to leave with me."

The youth's head bobbed again, eyes scanning the ground, walls and ceiling and occasionally his nose.

The halls of the citadel were sparsely populated. It was a large building to begin with, its original purpose lost in the ages since it had been built. The stone behemoth seemed even more vast with hallways empty of any furnishing or signs of life. Tuck breathed out whenever he saw someone, as if they were pockets of fresh air in the midst of a bad expulsion of gas from a bog.

Two people they saw were brown-garbed servants, who saw them first and ducked down different hallways. The third was a woman who strode past them with her nose high in the air, cloak swirling about her. Tuck nearly tripped over it, but Affe caught his arm.

"Magocrat," Affe told him as she guided him back to balance. "A weard, probably with some power."

"Was sh-she angry?" Tuck said, staring the direction she had gone.

"Angry? I doubt it. Magocrats and weards have a tendency to think they are better than people who can't use magic. At least, that's how they feel in Domus." She had to say that, because Gabel and Ries had not thought that way. Maybe Gabel had, she amended, but he was at least personable. In a way.

"Why would they be better?"

Affe nudged Tuck to start walking again, even as Croft scowled at them for stopping.

"They're not any better than us, but they can use their magic to do things we can't. Mostly they use it as a weapon and survival tool, just like a knife. But weards are as rare as steel knives themselves."

"If everybody had m-magic," Tuck said, "we'd all have knives?"

"We'd all be knives, Tuck. We'd have no need of knives." Her voice was flat. This was another political debate she had heard and dealt with, but it held no weight to her. The way things worked right now, it was enough she had her own steel knife. "We could burn a path from here to the southern coast, boil away the swamp, turn the mud into rock, and fly like a bird over our new road. At the end, we could all stand in a mile-wide circle and chop off each other's heads. Afterward, we could attend a feast in a castle grander than the citadel, with food from all parts of the world."

Affe shook her head at Tuck's awed stare. "But we can't," she said. "The magocrats insist on strict control over who can use magic." She met Croft's dirty stare with a blank one of her own. "And that means the only people who can use it are people who are magocrats."

Croft opened a great door barring their way, and they walked into one of the citadel's many great rooms, the ceiling ten paces above their heads, darkened by the fires burning in two pits toward the center. At the far end, a small group of people clustered around a table. The smell of roasted meat and flatulence hung heavy in the air.

One of the people looked up as Croft opened the door, and now a man rushed toward them.

"The Mardux is not to be disturbed," the man said hastily. "He is busy."

Croft glanced at Affe, who stared at him impassively, then he looked at the official. "This woman, Affe Kurzeit, has a report to deliver to the Mardux."

The official, yellow robe open at the collar and grease from food smeared on it, looked from Affe to Tuck to Croft and back again, then glanced over his shoulder at the table, where the noises of people eating and discussing had not abated.

"Busy, I said," he went on in a frantic voice. "He will not take kindly to an interruption."

Affe counted six more people back by the table. By the sounds of it, the dinner conversation was on some part of the fighting. Occasional raucous laughter split the air. One man in particular was a bit louder than the rest, but Affe could not point out who that was.

"I must see the Mardux to deliver my report about the northern front," Affe said. "I will wait here until he is done."

"I cannot wait for him," Croft said. "You, magocrat. Wait here with her and the boy."

"I must ..." But Croft was already gone.

The magocrat turned to go, but somehow Tuck had wandered behind him and the two fell in a heap. Affe shook her head and helped him up, but she didn't let go of his greasy sleeve.

"What makes you so nervous, man?" she asked. "What has the Mardux done?"

"Vandal!" someone called from down at the table. "Come back! You are missing out on the story!"

The official, Vandal, looked at Affe and then down at the table. He twisted his arm free of her hand.

"Wait here," he said, and briskly walked down to the other end of the room. Affe noticed him walk wide of something on the floor before the table. She glanced at Tuck, on his hands and knees near the wall, retching.

"Don't get sick," she said.

At the other end of the room, Vandal whispered urgently to one of the men, who had stilled. The conversation continued on, though, and after a minute the man Vandal spoke to — the Mardux, Affe guessed — brushed Vandal off, lifted a dripping haunch of meat to his lips, and bit into it. Vandal stared back at Affe, then sat down at the table.

"We wait," she said to Tuck, who sat with his back to the wall and his head lolling between his knees. She looked back at the table where the Mardux and his advisors ate, then sat down next to the boy. "We wait, and hope they have no other designs for us."

Copyright 2005-2007 Eric Zawadzki and Matthew Schick. All Rights Reserved.
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