Absolute Heart

by Michael Vance Gurley

  “Come on!” Gavin roared as he pulled, losing all sense of being there aboard the ship. He suddenly thought of Landa, his dearest friend, the two of them playing as little children, Landa’s face covered in soot from some exploded experiment, her goggles outlined in black grease, both of them laughing. He saw her poking him under the table as his father chastised him for again not living up to his true potential and their family name, trying not to giggle and get into more trouble. Gavin tasted the metallic flavor of blood.

  He glanced back to her, her eyes clamped shut against the coming crash, wishing he could have been stronger. The bottom of the hull scraped along the grass, seeming to gently ease them down. But that thought ended quickly. The piercing bang of the vessel’s full weight hitting earth was followed by the entire ship listing right, spinning around, snapping most of the ropes holding the balloon to the mast and jackstays, and sliding unimpeded. Gavin and Landa tumbled across the planks, end over each other’s end until they came to rest, limbs akimbo.

  Steam escaped from the holes in the sides of the engine casing, creating a snakelike hissing. The clanking engine of the steam fire wagon grew louder. The firemen shouted at the pair, but Gavin couldn’t understand them over the cacophony.

  “You have to be all right,” Gavin begged.

  “Unf. Well, if you’d get your… your privates off my head, I might be.” They were still a mixture of arms and legs when the response team came to a stop nearby. The fires had put themselves out upon landing, if one could call it that, so there was naught to do for the firemen but survey the scene.

  “Nice arse!” One of them whistled. It was then Gavin realized he was hanging half over the stern rail, his pants ripped in the melee, exposing his posterior for all to see. His goggles had lost a lens, his black vest all its buttons, and he his pride. He blushed while he pulled the fabric together with one hand and helped Landa up with the other.

  “Wait,” one of the responders exclaimed. “Aren’t you…?”

  Eíre, Orion, and the Dragon

  “ARGH!”

  The soaked silk sheets fell off the handsome young man when he bolted upright in bed, screaming. Another nightmare. Young Orion, seventeen years of age, of the house of Oberon, had awoken in such a way for seven nights in a row. His brown hair clung to his cheeks and nose, sticky with sweat. Orion slipped out of the bed to reach for his leather pants just as the heavy oak door to his bedchambers swung open. The iron rings rattled when the door hit one of his absently discarded boots.

  “I… I beg your pardon, Warlock Orion. I… I… I simply worried you had… had…,” the surprised young man about his age said. He tried to explain the intrusion, but his shaking voice got the best of him and he bent his head to the floor.

  “Come now, Riley. ’Tis fine. I’ve nothing you haven’t seen or don’t have yourself.” He dropped his gaze to see he was still naked, dripping with sweat, and growing aroused, nightmare or no. He spared a quick glance at Riley’s fair skin flaring red, blushing, freckles spotting his face like a field of stars. Riley handed him a cloth to wipe himself.

  Orion was no fool. He knew the way Riley looked upon him. Orion was tall, athletic from years of handling swords, his shaggy brown hair curving across one eye. Although some of his features looked delicate, his cheekbones and attitude were as sharp and severe as his tongue. He’d had enough dalliances to know people wanted him. None of them meant anything to him. He wouldn’t let them. Attraction was a trait he had been trained to use, to unsettle and manipulate. He didn’t mind people looking upon him in the least. Or rather he didn’t mind Riley looking in the least. He watched Riley fall under this spell.

  Lost in thought, he clutched at his pendant, a small iron heart on a tight black leather strap around his throat. It accentuated the fine muscles of his bare neck. His great-aunt had given it to him when he was a little boy.

  Orion slowly pulled on his brown leather pants. He purposely laced the front closed to draw the eye of his servant. “Well, Riley, maybe you don’t have one just like it. Ha-ha.”

  Riley did not laugh, but he had been staring at Orion’s crotch with a poorly hidden side-eye. Orion finished putting on his loose gold-colored shirt and knee-high cloth boots before turning his back to Riley.

  When the silence grew unbearable, Orion looked over his shoulder. “Come on, Riley, I am joking with you. Yours is fine. My cloak, please.” Orion wasn’t close to anyone the way he was to the short, stout servant who never wavered in devotion. Or was it friendship? There were times, many of them, where he thought he could….

  “Sorry, sir,” Riley said, practically jumping halfway across the intricately carved scrollwork of the four-poster bed to snap the three-quarter-length green cloak around his master’s neck. Riley looked as though he were trapped in deep contemplation, and when prodded, finally said, “I really am worried about you.”

  “Don’t worry a single hair on your pretty head for me. I am fine,” Orion lied to Riley as much as to himself. “Worry about the poor sod chosen to test me today.”

  “You think you’ll face a warlock?” Riley asked, his nervousness betraying his worry.

  “Blaylock will do everything he can to stop me from ascending to mastery. He will fail,” Orion said, eyes narrowing.

  Orion whisked away into the stone-lined hall and down the grand staircase of Dublin Castle, one of the best defended in all of Ireland. It was not only because it had long ago become home to Queen Siobhán, Orion’s great-aunt, but it also held the Grand Hall, the meeting place of the Brotherhood of the Mage.

  Dublin Castle stood tall and imposing over the adjoining practice grounds. Its stone walls, built thick and reinforced with protection magick, were impenetrable, not that anything could get to Ireland’s shores unbidden anymore. An invisible thousand-year wall had been magicked across the Irish Sea, blocking England and anyone else from crossing it without permission.

  “Brethren, soldiers for the Mage,” Morgun Blaylock, the middle-aged bald monk and Grand Warlock of the Brotherhood of the Mage, shouted to the assembled. “These practice fields have stood for a millennium, as have we! Used long before coven wars, long before the scourge of the filthy clockwork engines polluted our world.”

  The crowd, awash in simple brown robes as well as gray, blue, green, or red cloaks, cheered before he continued. “Wiccan, druid, and faerie alike have been tested here at one point over the vast history of Eíre before the unification of the Ceann Kingdom.

  “Each of these cloaks signifies something truly powerful. Will the gray beginners ascend to that of blue? Will blues achieve the green color of apprentice? Who will become a master warlock and adorn themselves in red?” Blaylock ate up the cheers. “They will all be tested this day and we shall see.”

  Orion had his heart set on mastery. He certainly didn’t want a brown robe. That color held no interest for him. Disciples of the Brotherhood wore brown robes. Orion knew he was there, on his seventeenth birthday, to attain the red cloak. He could feel it. He had earned it, being tested each year, trying to move to the next color, suffering long hours in study, being burned, slashed, knocked unconscious in practice.

  “Are you worried this will be as your fifteenth birthday was, a test of mental discipline?” Riley asked.

  Orion had been judged on this very practice field. There was little he could have done to prepare. Every potential warlock was challenged according to their individual characteristics. How they decided what to test was a mystery to him.

  “Worried? You are the one who appears to be in a state,” Orion joked. “They can bring all the puzzles and mazes, no matter the complexity.”

  “It’s just that time…,” Riley started. “That time it became unsolvable.”

  “They changed the shape of the test again and again, and still I kept winning. And then they cheated.” Orion clenched his jaw.

  “They said you didn’t handle it well.”

  “Of course I didn’t. I beat them, Riley. They knew it, and yet
they kept sending puzzle after puzzle, and I solved them all.”

  “Not all of them,” Riley sputtered. Orion glared. “Sorry.”

  “Yes, well, like I said, they cheated, made it unwinnable,” Orion said, testing the cords on his cloak to see if they could be squeezed out of existence.

  “You earned your blue cloak anyway, sir!” Riley boasted, trying to settle Orion. “And then green, now red, I’m certain of it.” He didn’t sound sure.

  While awaiting his turn, Orion watched a small boy he thought was named Sean from the thirteen-year-old class. He was left alone in the center of the field. After a few moments when nothing happened, the boy started to wander around, looking for clues. Sean raised his arms and tried to conjure a spell, probably a revelation spell to help discover the test’s purpose. When this failed, he ran to the administering monk. Orion could not hear what was said, but he didn’t have to. It was obvious that because the boy did not discover anything, unable to conjure the necessary magick to read the signs to beat the test, he had failed.

  Failure in the thirteens bracket was too unbearable. It meant that young Sean, and any like him, would be relegated to non-magicked warrior status or, failing proficiency in that, worse duties in support of the Kingdom. The boy collapsed in tears and was dragged away. The field, as proclaimed by a livid monk of the Brotherhood, was for warlocks.

  “Orion of… Oberon,” the brown-robed monk, Declan Ahearn, called in disgust. Declan served as faithful—and Orion thought brainless—right hand to Blaylock. “Come forth and be tested.” Orion kept his snarl and disdain for the mountain-sized Declan to himself.

  Orion had an uneasy peace with the Brotherhood and its ilk because of his heredity. He had a direct familial connection with the queen. Although due to Siobhán’s mysterious age, he knew not how direct, so he simply referred to her as his great-aunt. Still, he needed to be careful considering how they despised how the people loved her above them.

  When he stepped to the pitch, the gathered attendees silenced themselves. Orion looked to the stands and then to the queen’s box. She was not there. Blaylock stood in front of the right-hand seat next to the throne. His bright red robe, outlined in flames, flared around him in the wind. Well, Orion thought it must have been wind, although there was none on the pitch. He wondered if Blaylock was full enough of himself to have magicked the wind for effect. Orion knew Blaylock would never wear the same bland brown robes as his followers. He was too dramatic for that.

  Blaylock’s presence worried Orion. What new horrors had they conjured for Orion’s test? Each year it had been more harrowing and dangerous. Last year he had been put in the infirmary, and it took two healers two days to revive him. He earned his green cloak that day, but it nearly killed him. Was today a no-win scenario?

  Bedford Tower began to bong the hour but stopped before reaching the correct hour as if time stopped. Orion looked to the sky, which had grown dark and eerily green and yellow. The wind, absent a moment before, exploded around him. Tornadoes formed high above before slamming into the earth from the heavens. Their sound roared in his ears. Was this part of the test, or had they been interrupted? Either way, Orion needed to act.

  A warlock warrior emerged from each tornado, riding the wind to swing wildly at Orion with staff and… were those swords? Orion squinted against the swirling tide of air torturing his face. A blade sliced through his forearm, flinging blood into the whirlwind. Orion’s blood.

  Orion gnashed his teeth with frustration boiling within him. He dug deep down into his abyss for power. Terrifying tornadoes and attackers surrounded him. All of a sudden, an idea came. Although “idea” was not quite right; it was much closer to a feeling. He reached into the brown leather pouch attached to a strap around his shoulder, hidden under the cloak, and pulled out a small amount of sand. He closed his eyes.

  Orion’s cloak blew off in a gust, and his hair changed to white—as it did when he used magick. He inhaled the sand, opened his eyes, which were now silver, and blew a stream of ragged granules toward the sky. Orion’s face showed strain from using such power as an incalculable amount of coarse sand exploded from him.

  The pieces coalesced into clumps, which turned in the tumult until the lumps began to take shape. Orion thrust his hands into the sky, and each mass turned into the form of a giant glowing brown dragon. They spread their enormous scaly wings and propelled themselves at the warlocks. Each breathed in the swirling dust and exhaled sand blasts at each attacker. The force of the wind intensified the attacks.

  One of the dragons screeched an ear-piercing roar when its sand blast knocked one of the warriors unconscious, hurtling to the ground. Orion’s face grew pale and drawn. The others had to escape from the field, fleeing for their lives, trying not to be torn to shreds by whirling dragons.

  The bell on the castle tower finished tolling the morning hour of nine with one last penetrating bong. When the sound crashed against the crowd, the sky above the pitch returned to a clear, motionless day. The gathered onlookers began to chant, “Red! Red!”

  Orion collapsed in a heap in the middle of the field, having expended all his energy. Riley ran to pick him up from the ground. Bloody warlocks limped off the field toward the castle, covered in sand and oozing wounds, cursing his name.

  Morgun Blaylock stood on the stage and looked across the field at the defeated warriors and the destruction. He allowed a look of horror to flash upon his face, but only for a moment.

  As Old as Fathers and Sons

  “GAVIN—”

  “I know, I know. The son of Jacobson Haveland can never do anything wrong, or it reflects poorly on you and the country,” Gavin said, more than a little snideness to his tone. Standing in his father’s home office never felt like being at home. It was so stuffy with the big desk and bookcases lined with legal texts. Gavin hardly ever entered the room unless he absolutely had to.

  “You can never be caught as a slinking thief of flags and… and…,” Jacobson said with growing irritation. A brown-haired, mustachioed, athletic man of forty, he towered over his son.

  “Would it have been better if we had not been caught?” Gavin asked. He knew better than to push his father too far, but his pride had been wounded far worse than the ache in his arms from pulling so hard on the stick.

  “We,” Jacobson said. He closed his eyes a moment before he turned his entire body to face Gavin. “The nerve of that girl, traipsing about town masquerading as a boy, pretending to do men’s work. Her father should know better. You are not to see that low-level girl again. Do you hear me?”

  “I will,” Gavin exclaimed in protest, fists pressed tightly to his sides. Tears sprang to his eyes as his heart quaked with fury. “You can’t stop me.”

  The rage building in his father thankfully suffered an interruption when the steam cuckoo on the wall behind Jacobson’s desk blew a whistle and began to move. Jacobson walked to it and waited as the wings lifted and spread, allowing a message to be pushed out of the piping behind it. The pipes snaked up the wall and disappeared to heaven knows where. He read the message, grimaced, took a breath, and turned to Gavin.

  “I am lead councilman of the Council of England, head of the trusted government. I should be focused on troop movements and faerie activity,” Jacobson said, waving the communiqué in the air. “And you are my son. To have the navy bring you to me in my own home like some common criminal is unacceptable.”

  Gavin shifted his feet as he readjusted his not-subtle grip on the tear in his pants to ensure his assets remained modest.

  “You will comport yourself as the child of a head of state. What will Councilman Rolston think when he finds out what mischief you’ve been up to?” Jacobson asked.

  “Maybe he—”

  Jacobson leaned in toward Gavin, an intimidating sight as he glowered over Gavin’s shorter frame. “Don’t be daft, boy. Rolston would like nothing more than to find a reason, any reason, to wrestle control away from me. I won’t allow your behavior to jeopardize
my plans. Do I make myself clear?”

  Gavin lowered his head after only a moment of looking into his father’s powerful glare. He felt such anger, and perhaps this would be an opportune time to flare out, to tell his father exactly what he thought of his lauded position on the Council of Nincompoops. To decry every horrible thing he knew his father had done in the name of the majestic nation. But he knew he could never win that argument. His father would not choose him over duty.

  “Yes, sir.” Someday he would fight back.

  Jacobson glared at Gavin a moment before withdrawing to his desk to retrieve yet another message delivered by the whir and whistles of the cuckoo pipeline. After reading it he looked more annoyed, if that was possible. “The headmaster, asking after you.” He wrote a short reply. He signed it, rolled it up, and placed a ribbon around the end.

  “Give this note to the headmaster. It will explain your tardiness this morning. Then off to class, and make every effort to not befoul our family name, if that’s even possible anymore,” Jacobson said. “Try to clean yourself up, and put on new trousers.”

  “But—”

  “You will be expected to work for the clothier from whom you decided to steal a flag—”

  “But—”

  “To make reparations. Now go,” he said before handing the note to Gavin. “But be back here directly after classes. No dawdling. You shall not leave the manor except for your studies.”

  The lion head on the door let out a low steam-powered roar to announce a visitor. It startled Gavin. Jacobson shot him a death glare before telling the visitor to come in.

  The door opened, and a portly older gentleman entered the room. He wore a stuffy, high-collared velvet coat. His sideburns were so long that they threatened to tie together. “To what do we owe the pleasure, Councilman Rolston?”