Firesign 1 - Wage Slave Rebellion (10 page)

“I’m excited,” said Gavi in a dead monotone, not lifting her head. “I can barely contain myself. Woo.”

Raedren turned to Mazik. “I think she means it.”

“You know it,” said Mazik with a point and a wink. He turned serious again. “Yes, we definitely need more information. I might be able to help with that—I can talk to some customers, people in the guilds, maybe even go to a guardhouse or two and tell them my manager wants me to practice pitching to them, try to get them to lower their guards, haha, and maybe get something out of them—but I actually think we’ve got enough information to at least get started. What we really need is someone who can help us think through all of this, so we can begin narrowing down who these kidnappers might be and what other information we need to find.”

Gavi lifted her head, actually listening now. “And I assume you have someone in mind.”

“Righto!” said Mazik. “Are you both free during lunch tomorrow?”

“I can be,” said Raedren.

“I don’t work until later on, so sure,” said Gavi. “Which, by the way, is another problem. Unlike you two, I actually work at night. Like I’m supposed to be doing right now, come to think of it.”

“So ask your boss to let you start working earlier in the day from now on. He’s not an ass like mine, so I’m sure he’ll let you,” said Mazik. “Since you’re both free, let’s meet in front of me’n Rae’s apartment at twelve thirty. That should give everyone enough time to grab lunch before we head out.”

“Where are we going?” asked Raedren.

“You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see,” said Mazik, waggling a finger.

“I won’t come if you don’t tell me,” said Raedren.

“Gah, you’re no fun,” said Mazik. He sighed. “If they’re probably casters, we should start by talking to someone who knows even more about casters than we do. That means Kalenia.”

*      *      *

“That wasn’t so much when I first decided to become a caster as when I swore I was going to do it.”

“Hell or high water?” asked Mazik.

“You know it.”

“My turn?” said Raedren.

“I believe it is!” said Mazik, slamming his mug down. “Let’s go with something different. Tell us about the moment you officially became a caster.”

“You mean when I first started casting a little? Because I could—”

“Nope. The moment itself,” said Mazik.

Raedren looked down at his lap. “Do I have to?”

Mazik grinned. “Yup.”

“Ugh.” Raedren ran a hand through his hair. “You’re the worst. So I think it was…”

“Now now, don’t cry,” said the teacher. He knelt in front of the crying boy. He tried to pat him on the shoulder, but a shimmering barrier rebuffed him. The boy’s crying redoubled.

The teacher grasped the boy on both shoulders, and though the barrier hissed as it fought against him, he held on. The boy panicked, but the teacher shushed him into silence.

“There there, don’t worry. Do you remember what I told you about mana pools?”

The little boy nodded, sniffling. “There’s mana everywhere, but we can only use what we can hold inside us. That’s our mana pool.”

The teacher nodded as his hands sizzled. “Yes, right. And how much mana you can hold in your mana pool is set at birth. Raedren, did you know you have a very large mana pool?”

Raedren shook his head.

“It’s true. That’s why your Personal Mana Barrier—this barrier around you,” the teacher said, patting the eight-year-old’s shoulders, “is so dark. Your MPB marks the edges of your mana pool, and helps you keep the mana in. Now you won’t have to collect mana before every spell. Isn’t that good?”

The little boy wiped at his tears, then nodded. “But—”

“Don’t worry,” said the teacher. His hands were still sizzling where they held the boy’s shoulders. “Your MPB also protects you. You just have to learn how to control it. When you do, it will be invisible, and will only react to whatever
you
don’t want to touch you. You’ll still be able to play. It will just protect you if you fall.”

Raedren looked up at his teacher, no longer crying.

“Class, do you see how my hands are just barely touching Raedren, even though the barrier is pushing me away?”

The rest of the class, who had been silently watching, crowded around. “But your hands—”

“Don’t worry. I’m pretty tough,” said the teacher. He pressed against Raedren’s barriers, his hands brushing the boy’s shoulders. “See?”

The class said they did. “That’s because MPBs are soft, flexible barriers. They only stop part of any damage, not all of it. They won’t protect you completely, but they’ll make everything hurt less. That also makes them harder to break, so they should always be there for you.”

There was a surge of mana, and Raedren’s barrier shattered around the teacher’s hands. The teacher held the boy’s arms, squeezing gently.

“They
can
break, though, if they’re worn down in the same place. And it takes a long time to restore them, so be careful. Hours in most cases.”

“But—”

“I know, Raedren. I’ll teach you how to control it. First, hold onto your mana before it leaks away. Do you have it?”

Raedren nodded. “Yes.”

“Can you tell whether you have the same amount of mana you used to?”

Little Raedren frowned as he concentrated. “There’s less.”

“That’s right,” said the teacher. “Your mana pool plus your MPB make up your true mana pool. You can make your MPB stronger or your mana pool larger by moving mana from one to the other. Try to keep about a fifth of your mana in your MPB, though. That’s the sweet spot.”

Raedren looked at his teacher, perplexed. The teacher laughed.

“Sorry, that’s too much right now. You’ll learn how to estimate your mana later on. Let me teach you how to control this. I want you to close your eyes and focus….”

*      *      *

It was the next afternoon, and Mazik, Gavi, and Raedren were walking through the city together. All around them were people and buildings aplenty, all of them packed shoulder-to-architecture like sardines in a tin half as big as was needed. Houk was a large city, but there was never enough room for all the people who wanted to live there. Wasted space was a luxury it could seldom afford.

Usually. At the end of the street, tall wrought-iron gates opened into a luxurious scene. A vast garden dominated their view, filled with lush grasses and flourishing trees, their boughs shot through with blossoms of crimson, purple, and royal blue as the flowers gradually awoke from their winter slumber. On the exquisitely laid-out paths that crisscrossed these gardens, people strolled. The sweet scent of cherries and magnolias wafted through the air, temporarily overpowering the pungent smells of the city and wrapping the trio in nature’s loving embrace.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been here,” said Raedren. “And even longer since I’ve entered through the front door.”

“I feel out of place,” said Gavi, fidgeting. She ran her hand down her long tunic and worn trousers. “Everyone else is wearing nice robes. I stick out.”

“Eh, I wouldn’t worry,” said Mazik, who looked sharp in his work clothes, Gavi couldn’t help but notice. “Most of them are probably only wearing robes because they didn’t want to think about what they were going to wear today. I bet a lot of them are naked under those things. I know I usually was.”

Raedren put a hand to his lips, and his cheeks ballooned like a distressed puffer fish, complete with oddly fishy barfing noises.

“You know you like it,” said Mazik with a wink. Raedren shook his head.

As the three of them bantered back and forth, they reached the front gates. There, on the arch overhead, shaped out of iron and warped by over two hundred years of Houk’s schizophrenic weather, were the words
A
IN &
N
AROUFF
U
NIVERSITY
²³
.

After Mazik spoke with the guards, they proceeded onto the university grounds.

“I wish I could have gone to a college like this,” said Gavi. Despite her earlier protestations she was taking in the scenery, trying to absorb as much of it as possible before she went back to the crowded cityscape of Houk proper. “Or, you know, any college at all.”

“Shit, me too,” said Mazik. He reached up and plucked a blossom from a tree branch as they passed, twirling the orange-and-yellow flower between thumb and forefinger. “Say what you will about the stuck-up pricks who go here, this place is waaay nicer than Telman
²⁴
. Speaking of…”

Mazik spun his ring around, hiding the stylized T from casual inspection. He clenched his hand, feeling the cool shape of the light blue gem embedded in its face.

“The people aren’t bad either,” said Raedren, as he watched a pair of women wearing conservative robes cross the path further ahead. He had already spun his ring around.

“You only say that because you like nice, innocent girls who would rather spend their time researching magickal theory than get drafted,” said Mazik. He grinned. “But yes, they are nice.”

“I was about to say, I thought we were going to meet your girlfriend,” said Gavi. She slowed down as they approached a split in the path. “Which way?”

“This way,” said Mazik as he turned left.

Winding their way through campus, Mazik and the others skirted the main building and headed toward a smaller one on west campus. Compared to the main building, whose elaborate tower stuck out like a tribute to the god of unnecessarily opulent architecture, their destination was little more than a box of brick and windows. It only had one attempt at ornamentation, a statue in the front courtyard, and it wasn’t even a good attempt; it looked like someone had started out carving a naked god, only to get drunk halfway through and decide it should be a flamingo instead. The result was confusing, unsettling, and vaguely non-Euclidean. People’s eyes watered if they stared at it for too long.

“By the way, did you call ahead to tell her we were coming?” asked Raedren as they walked up the steps. He reached for the door, and held it open for his companions.

“Uhm,” said Mazik.

There was silence for a second, and then Gavi sighed. “You didn’t call her, did you?”

Mazik shook his head. “I did not. I thought we’d surprise her!”

“And if she’s not here?” asked Gavi as they entered the stairwell.

Mazik waved his hands, fingers splayed. “Surprise!”

Gavi glared at him, but it only made him smile wider. Two flights of stairs and one hallway later, the three of them arrived at their destination.

Imagine what would happen if a magician’s workshop had sex with a scientist’s laboratory. Now stop that, because it’s weird, and not helpful at all. The room was closer to 70 percent laboratory and 25 percent classroom, with the only concessions to magick being a pair of badly singed target dummies in one corner and a few dribbly candles along the back wall. Everything else was cold tile and colder pizza, white lab coats and coats of arms, and research papers piled on top of half-written dissertations draped over stacks of textbooks in various states of reading and/or writing. In the middle of it all, perched on top of a lopsided stool and with her face mere centimeters away from the page she was scribbling on, was a woman.

Holding a finger up to his lips, Mazik stealthily tiptoed toward her, a humongous grin on his face. He enveloped her in a bear hug. “Hey, darling!”

“Eep!” squeaked the woman, her shoulders seizing up as she jumped. Papers scattered across the floor as she nearly toppled from her seat.

“Aww, don’t worry, beautiful. It’s just me,” said Mazik, his voice full of honey and chili peppers. The woman stopped flailing and really looked at him. Mazik smiled. “Hi.”

“You!” she said, beating her fists against his chest. Mazik shook with laughter, until he could take it no more and drew her into a kiss.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Gavi.

“I know what you mean,” said Raedren, duplicating his earlier faux-vomiting expression. He cleared his throat, and the two separated.

“It’s great to see you all again,” said Kalenia Jiun’Westyark, Graduate Researcher of Applied Geosocial Magicks at Ain & Narouff University, and Mazik’s girlfriend. A lithe woman with delicate cheekbones and lips that seemed designed to hold a graceful smile, she looked like a noble’s daughter dressing up as a nerdy graduate student. She was the real deal, though, complete with single-minded focus and a complete disregard for anything that didn’t interest her. Mazik liked to joke that sometimes she got so absorbed in her work that she would pass out from forgetting to eat, which, unlike most of what Mazik said, was actually true.

Smoothing out her black and purple robes, which had become creased from hours of diligent studying and seconds of hysterical laughter, Kalenia bowed. “It’s been too long.”

Gavi and Raedren bowed in return. “Yes, it has. It’s nice to see you as well,” said Gavi. “Sorry we didn’t tell you we were coming. We
thought
your boyfriend was going to tell you, but, well…”

“Surprise!” said Mazik.

“Oh, it’s no problem. I was just doing a little research,” said Kalenia, waving at the table. “I was actually about to take a…” she started, and then trailed off, because that’s when she noticed all of the papers scattered across the floor.

“Oh shoot!” said Kalenia, scrambling to collect them.

Cute
, thought Raedren with a touch of jealousy.

She’s cute,
thought Gavi, with a touch of a more complex kind of jealousy.

Mazik laughed. “Here, I’ll help you.”

Once the four of them had collected the papers and put them back in order, they sat. “So,” said Kalenia, folding her hands demurely on her lap. “What brings you all here?”