Firesign 1 - Wage Slave Rebellion (50 page)

“Of course,” said Mazik, standing up. Everyone fidgeted in the uncomfortable silence, save for Tomar, who looked like he was trying not to smile.

“I’m sure you’ve all heard about my recent adventure, so I’d like to start out by saying that I wouldn’t have been able to do any of it if it weren’t for all of you,” said Mazik.

“Oh stop, it was nothing!” someone called out, drawing laughter from the crowd. It quickly snowballed, first into applause, then cheering, then whistling, whooping, and wild, ecstatic hollering. Mazik smiled as the tension boiled away.

“No, it’s true,” said Mazik as the laughter died down. “If it wasn’t for this place, I probably wouldn’t have been pissed off enough to do something that fucking crazy.”

The room fell silent, his coworker’s smiles dissolving in an instant. Into the silence came Mazik, a raptor’s grin on his face as he stalked forward.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with most of you, save for how you don’t seem to care who buys your weapons, as long as they can pay. I wonder, how many of them have gotten into the hands of children? Or murderers, or thieves, or even those cultists who were trying to kill me a week ago?” Mazik tapped a finger on the side of his head. “Food for thought.

“No, it’s people like
you
who are the problem,” said Mazik, spinning and pointing at Rose like a witness identifying the perpetrator. “You’re a short-sighted, small-minded little bully who gets his rocks off bossing people around just because you’re better at lying to scared old ladies. And you know what?” he said, stopping in front of Rose. Mazik loomed. “
Good for you
. You’re good at selling, and that’s great. But you’re a terrible fucking boss. Fucking atrocious. Everyone thinks so, they just don’t want to say it.”

Rose turned to the nearest coworker, but they averted their eyes. Everyone did.

“Hey.
Focus
,” said Mazik, snapping in front of Rose’s face and pointing at his own eyes. Rose turned back. “Why don’t you do everyone a favor and go back to defrauding old ladies full-time? Or do something useful with your life instead, you fucking asshole.”

Mazik spun around, marched over to the chair, grabbed it, and turned back to the crowd.

“But you know what? I don’t give a shit anymore. I don’t even care enough to rant. You wanted a few words? How about these.”

Mazik stuck one hand out, his middle finger extended gloriously to the sky.

“
FUCK
this place, and I”—Mazik picked up the chair, lifted it over his head, and
slammed
it into the ground, shattering it into a thousand pieces—“
QUIT!
”

Panting, a smile of immense pleasure splashed across his face as the cloud of splinters rained down around him, Mazik looked down at the shattered chair fragments in his hands. He laughed, tossed them to the ground, and turned to leave.

“So what, you’re just going to go become a mercenary?” asked Rose. “You’re just going to kill people for money?”

Mazik turned back, anger flaring in his eyes. “We’re all mercenaries you little piece of shit, every single one of us. If the wages stop coming, so would you.” Mazik straightened up. “At least I have the decency to admit it.”

Mazik stomped over to the door, but stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “And your weapons are terrible! One of them broke on me mid-battle!” he yelled, drawing the offending knife and slamming it into the wall. The broken blade was driven up to the hilt into the cheap plaster, sticking there. Then Mazik kicked down the door and left forever.

May the bridges I burn light my way
, thought Mazik as he left the building and walked out into the crisp morning air. It was an old saying he heard once upon a time from someone much wiser than him, but it fit now. He could almost feel the bridges burning, to that unhappy future he never wanted to have.

Mazik shook his limbs as he leapt onto a nearby bench, laughing with childlike glee. “I can’t believe I did it!” he said as he sailed through the air. He let loose a loud whoop of delight, scaring a bunch of birds and seriously unnerving the shopkeepers he skipped past. He couldn’t have cared less.

Mazik jumped onto a fountain and looked out over the waking city. He took a deep breath, savoring it. The Houkian air was no cleaner than before, but it tasted great to him. It was one of the sweetest moments of his entire life.

So far.

 
For more stories in the world of Firesign, visit
www.stephenwgee.com
. Free adventures are released periodically. Go check it out. There may be one waiting for you now.

Afterword

Thank you for reading my first novel,
Wage Slave Rebellion
. This book is the first story in the
Firesign
series, but it also represents the realization of a dream of mine, and there are many people I need to thank for that.

First and foremost are my friends. Brian Hughes, Simon Rouswell, Brent Topa, Jeremiah Ray, Michelle George, R.J. Goss—there are so many people who cheered me on, and listened to me talk about this book for years before I was finally able to give them something they could read. Special thanks go to Brian Hughes. You hold the distinction of being the first person to read a completed draft of this book, and for that, I’m sorry. It was bad man, real bad. But you helped make it better, for which I am grateful.

Thank you to everyone who helped me do the hard work of putting this together. To my editors, Jim Thomsen and Christina Tinling, thank you for cutting the fluff and catching all the errors I missed. Thank you also to Frank William and Atreyu Studios for the wonderful illustrations. When I saw some of your early sketches, I said, “Wow … there they are.” Suddenly it felt real.

Then there’s everyone at Random Curiosity, where I’ve been writing under the name Stilts for three years and counting. There were times when I was freaking out about life too much to work on this book, but blogging at Random Curiosity kept me churning out words every single week. For that, and for all the kindness the readers of Random Curiosity have shown me over the years, thank you. I’d list you all by name, but we’d be here all day, so just know that you all rock.

Special thanks go to the head honcho of Random Curiosity, Divine, for giving me the chance to write publically and on a deadline. I hope I haven’t been too much of a pain, and have repaid in some small part everything you’ve done for me. Sorry I repaid your kindness by making your pen name synonymous with the kind of magick that Mazik hates. I swear I came up the arcane/divine dichotomy before we ever met!

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the other writers and staff of Random Curiosity as well—Tommy ‘takaii’ Koo, Dan ‘Guardian Enzo’ Green, Zanibas, Cherry ‘Cherrie’ Chan, Harry ‘Zephyr’ Xia, Bryan ‘Xumbra’ Tsang, and anyone else I didn’t mention, both past and present. Just being able to write with such an amazing group of people helped me plow through the rough times.

I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to everyone who has inspired me, chief among them Terry Pratchett, Seth Godin, and Akamatsu Ken. That an English author, an American marketer, and a Japanese mangaka are some of my biggest influences probably speaks volumes about me, but I have no idea what it says. Other than I am a very strange man, but we all knew that already.

Finally, thank you to my parents, Thomas and Sherry Gee, and my older brother Daniel Listi. I know you’ve always wanted to help me with this writing thing, even when you admitted you had no idea what to do. Don’t worry, you’ve helped a lot. Getting me this far is more than enough. I’ll take it from here.

To everyone else, I hope you’ve enjoyed this book. Let’s continue making fun, entertaining, and interesting stories together, because this whole thing isn’t as much fun without you. Thank you so much for reading. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

S
TEPHEN
W
.
G
EE

November 2014

About the Author

STEPHEN W. GEE is a fantasy author, anime blogger, craft beer lover, and exceedingly tall man.
Wage Slave Rebellion
is his first novel. There will be more where it came from.

www.stephenwgee.com

Notes

¹
That’s pronounced “Howkh,” like the word “how” with the first half of “cuss” tacked onto the end, which is what every Houkian does when visitors inevitably mispronounce the city’s name. Repeatedly.

²
Though it’s debatable how anything so massive could nestle up to anything. Mostly it just sprawled. That’s one of the nice things about poets: they can find something pretty to say about nearly anything, and no one calls them out for making things up.

³
Or a hot poker to the delicates if whoever did the naming didn’t show appropriate deference to whoever was in charge. Considering the high body count the city’s founder, Lord Houk, racked up when he was conquering the area, that probably played a part.

⁴
Especially to the City Guard, who saw Mazik and instantly suspected they ought to be arresting him for something. Sooner or later they were generally right.

⁵
In Houk there were three basic levels of schooling: low school, middle school, and high school. There was also college, for those considered suitable
⁶
. None of these were mandatory.

⁶
That is, anyone with enough money to pay for it. On other worlds, people say that knowledge is power. On Aegis, there’s a direct correlation.

⁷
Though rarely at the same time and place. There’s a bit of bad blood between humanity and their hulking, two-meter-tall, blue-skinned fellow sapients. Quite a lot of bad blood. Rivers come to mind.

⁸
On Aegis, most people have what are called
complex surnames
, which consist of a short maiden name followed by a longer bachelor name separated by an apostrophe. When a couple marries, the man takes the woman’s maiden name and the woman takes the man’s bachelor name; this results in a society of tightly-knit nuclear families and distant extended ones, which is great if you have useless cousins or greedy grandchildren you want to avoid. It also means people are often called by the part of their surname they’ll presumably always have, i.e. a woman’s maiden name (Gavi
Ven
’Kalil) and a man’s bachelor name (Mazik Kil’
Raeus
).

⁹
Mazik’s boss didn’t have a complex surname because his family came from a part of Aegis that didn’t use them. Mazik wasn’t sure where. He never cared enough to ask.

¹⁰
The Houkian language was lax with honorifics. Men are called Mas (Mas Kil’Raeus), women are called Mis (Mis Gavi), and that was enough most of the time. This saved everyone involved from many an awkward situation, such as trying to guess a woman’s age or marital status. No one wins at that game, so it’s better off avoided.

¹¹
Mazik served for three years in the Houkian military, just as all citizens did
¹²
, Raedren and Gavi included. What fighting abilities he learned through youthful indiscretions were refined there, and then frequently forgotten due to copious amounts of alcohol.

¹²
Save for those who were rich, powerful, arrogant, or stupid enough to try to dodge the draft and risk the military finding out. Since Mazik and the others were none of those, it was easier to just serve. That was about the only easy thing about it.

¹³
Banished is a more appropriate term. Aegisian gods aren’t exactly immortal, but it’s hard to get rid of them permanently.

¹⁴
Adventurers are basically roving mercenaries with better public relations, though only slightly. The guilds helped ensure this by making sure their members solved more problems than they caused. Most of the time.

¹⁵
By their very nature, a salesperson’s favorite customers were always the most lucrative ones. While meeting Eilou had indeed brought Mazik a lot of business—Eilou was part of one of Vector’s most active adventuring teams, so landing him as a customer had led to a number of referrals—that wasn’t why Mazik liked him. He honestly liked Eilou as a person, which, if anything else, proved Mazik wasn’t fit to be a salesman.