Firesign 1 - Wage Slave Rebellion by Stephen W. Gee

Author:Stephen W. Gee [Gee, Stephen W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2014-12-09T13:00:00+00:00

The arena master led the cultists to a heavy iron gate cut into an alcove under the stands. It sat next to the arena master’s offices, where the cultists captured him and his staff not long ago. The arena master quietly prayed for their safety while he fumbled with the cast-iron lock.

The gate swung open. The arena master tugged a torch off the holder just inside the doorway and, with the bearded man’s permission, lit it. He held it up and led them down the roughhewn staircase and into the tunnels below.

The Pit was much larger than just the arena itself. It sat at the middle of a complex of buildings that served the games, and which were connected to the arena by a series of underground tunnels. Of these, Gladiator’s Way was the largest and most important.

An artifact of the days when gladiators were condemned slaves rather than well-paid entertainers, the tunnel known as Gladiator’s Way led from the Gladiator School—now a preparatory area and armory for the entertainers, rather than a guarded barracks for the soon-to-die—directly to the Gate of Life, the massive gate through which all gladiators entered the arena. Though designed to ferry the condemned into the arena rather than risk their escape on the streets above, The Pit’s arena masters still found it useful for preventing their popular gladiators from being mobbed by fans before they got a chance to compete.

The stairs they were walking down were a recent addition, cut directly out of the tunnel wall so the arena master could react to any problems with the gladiators quickly. Now the arena master walked like the condemned of old, the torch bobbing over empty air as he weakly grasped the wall.

They stepped down onto Gladiator’s Way. The tunnel was massive, tall and wide enough to accommodate two elephants walking abreast, something which had been done many times47. On the other side of the tunnel was an elevator large enough to support twenty people at once. It went down into the Catacombs, a network of rooms and passages directly under the arena floor.

The arena master pointed to their right. “That leads out onto the arena floor. I-I’ll just go this way and speak to the gladiators,” he said, nodding into the long darkness on the other side.

“Let’s go,” said the woman with the knife. The arena master visibly shuddered as she and her companion followed him. The bearded man and the cultist with the crimson armband headed the other direction, toward the gates still open from the gladiators’ practice earlier.

As soon as the two men stepped out onto the arena floor, they looked up.

The sight was breathtaking. The bearded man looked up at the three tiers of seating above them, the great slabs of benches staring down at them as if the spectators were up there right now. The arena floor stretched in front of them, covered in a uniform shade of dull tan, save for where the sand was stained with dried blood. And

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