Dragons on the Sea of Night (10 page)

In other times and circumstances surely I would take Chiisai as my wife. Surely, the Kunshin would wish it, but I have spoken to him as the Kaer'n have spoken to me and he is resigned. He is, after all, more used to the Kaer'n than even I. I have lived with them, it is true, for some years, but he has known them all his adult life
.

He knows the inevitability of what must happen, but he does not know everything. His mind is human, after all, and can absorb only so much at a time. The Kaer'n are most cognizant of this. They are, I fear, more understanding than I would be. I find, over time, that I lose patience with this slowness of human thought, the sheer
linearity
of it
.

I must guard against such tendencies. The Kaer'n say that I must hold close the shreds of humanity still remaining to me, that I must not lose them. They are as important to my make-up
–
and therefore my power
–
as my own sorcerous dai-katana
.

I know the Kaer'n are right. They always are …

PART TWO

M
U'AD

FIVE

S
PIRITS
R
ISING

The white sun, crystalline as diamonds
, heavy as a mailed fist, beat down upon Mu'ad, the Great Desert. Moichi, lampblack smeared on his cheeks, his head covered with a capacious Fe'edjinn cowl, squinted into the rolling nothingness of white dune and wind-whipped sand. The heat penetrated even the sturdy oil-hardened leather of his seaboots. The soles of his feet were on fire and there was a distinct wetness between his toes, whether from burst blisters or blood and sweat he did not know.

Four days out into the Mu'ad and already it felt like a month. Tamuk had warned them of this. In fact, the First Darman had used every form of persuasion he could think of to talk Moichi out of his desire to go to the settlements in the Mu'ad. But Moichi remained resolved and, at last, Tamuk had acceded. Moichi was an Annai-Nin, after all, and brother to the Qa'tach.

Aufeya, lighter and thinner than he, seemed to be faring a bit better. Her entire face had disappeared within the Fe'edjinn's cowl and she wore the d'alb, the traditional desert robes as if she had been born to them. Being Daluzan that was, of course, impossible. Still, there was no doubt that she took to the desert life like a native, and for that Moichi was grateful.

In the hottest portions of the day she used small sticks to tent out the cowl, giving more shade, even a millimeter of which was priceless, and she caught herself as she nodded in her saddle.

Other times, she ignored Tamuk's instruction to ride single-file and came up beside Moichi. They spoke of many things but, oddly, never distant Daluzia, her home. She seemed fascinated by the Mu'ad, and when Moichi told her how the Iskamen had learned to terraform parts of the Great Desert, she seemed to know about it already. He should have marked this moment, and others like it, but perhaps still his need not to face the truth was too pressing.

Moichi would tell neither Tamuk nor Aufeya why he was so adamant about going to the Mu'ad. In truth, he was not sure himself. He only knew he was being drawn here like a lodestone to north. He wanted to mourn for Sanda and for his mate Arasomu, but his mind kept returning to the Makkon. Surely the Chaos beast had slaughtered them both. The manner of their deaths was identical. Over and above Moichi's shock at seeing another Makkon when he had been certain that the Dai-San had destroyed them all was the question: why? Why had the Makkon murdered these two people? Was there a connection or was it random mayhem? But, chillingly, his knowledge of the Makkon told him that they were a kind of harbinger – outriders for a more highly developed, more powerful Chaos force. In the time of the Kai-feng, it had been the Dolman. But the Sunset Warrior had slain the Dolman, of that Moichi was certain. What, then, was this Makkon's liege lord?

The Makkon never killed randomly. There was always a purpose. Chaos's purpose. But this Makkon was slightly different than all the others Moichi had encountered. Those had never been able to fully integrate themselves into the world of man and so their outlines pulsed and changed with every beat of their twin hearts. This one had not; it was fully in this world.

It was also without its tongue and filled with such a rage as Moichi had never felt before. There was a mystery here he knew needed solving. In the morning of Arasomu's murder he had walked the jam-packed streets of Ala'arat and was certain that the Makkon had fled the city. Where had it gone?

There was a spoor. Whereas its former brethren had left none, being only partially in this world, this one was all here, and Moichi could smell it. Not with his nose, but with his mind.

He could say nothing of these things to Tamuk, who would immediately dismiss him as a madman – the First Darman had his own agenda which dictated the murders had been committed by Al Rafaar, the Adenese terrorists. As for Aufeya, Moichi did not want to alarm her, as he himself was alarmed by the Makkon's malevolent presence.

Across the Mu'ad they rode, on dun-colored co'chyn, long-legged desert beasts with knobby knees, horned, triangular heads with sorrowful eyes and a curling trunk for sucking up water from the most unlikely places. Co'chyn also had three stomachs, two of which apparently stored fluids in the stifling heat and the long migratory marches of the species. Both the Iskamen and the Adenese had found ways to train these animals, using them exclusively for desert travel.

Tamuk, ever security-minded, had brought two of his Fe'edjinn warriors with him. They invariably rode at the front and rear of the single-file line. Normally, desert travel was accomplished at night, when the worst heat of the furnace day had dissipated somewhat, but in the Mu'ad this would have been a mistake and, in fact, had claimed the lives of many travelers unaccustomed to its peculiarities. Here, it was imperative that you keep moving during the bulk of the day, otherwise you could quite literally fry. In fact, sleep was only possible in those few hours on either side of midnight when the Mu'ad was merely hot, rather than unbearable.

Sleep, then, was often dreamless and absolute, the mind and body so exhausted that you would drift off before the evening meal was over. Not so for Moichi.

Each night he dreamed, and it was more or less the same dream – at least, it was the same person who came to him as if she were an angel in the cindery dark.

He dreamt of Sanda, slaughtered like a beast in her own bed. But they were like no dreams he had ever had before. Rather, they were like fevered visions or hallucinations that, in some cultures, were still called visitations.

Aufeya's mother Tsuki had claimed to have experienced such phenomena. Poor dead Tsuki, killed by the vengeful Sardonyx.

Sanda came to him in many guises. At first, she appeared as a teenager, bursting with life and energy, her eyes laughing even when he teased her or her face dark and flushed after witnessing one of his epic fights with Jesah. In these dreams she never spoke, merely guided him through flashes of memory which electrified him like lightning on a stormy night. At last, she led him to the deathbed of Jud'ae, a scene, finally, of forgiveness between father and son. At once, Moichi was again on the deck of his ship, scenting the imminence of death. He had returned home to find his father dying.

Then, Sanda came to him as a woman with the head of a bird – a snowy egret with downy feathers glistening of beaded water. Her long black beak hooked downward and there was a flopping fish impaled on its sharp tip, its flat golden eye staring at Moichi as if with a singular purpose. With a sudden flip of her head she swallowed the fish whole. Then her beak opened and she spoke:

‘
Time is of the essence/When the spirit flies above marsh and chasm Take care to bury past heart/And seek out the bear in the stone Not to possess/But to be possessed
.'

The voice was high, like a peacock's harsh and grating cry, and the dreaming Moichi was obliged to strain mightily to hear all the words. They made no sense to him, but he remembered them when he awoke and wrote them in charcoal in his stained leather-bound captain's logbook.

In the last of the dreams the night before they reached the first oasis encampment, deep within the Mu'ad, Sanda appeared as she must have on her blood-stained bed. It was appalling to see her face blue-white instead of flushed with color as he remembered her. She moved as if she were still in pain. Only (he thought in his dream) dead people cannot feel pain. She shuffled and cupped her hands at her lower belly to keep her innards from slithering to her feet. Her shattered chest was opened up like the skeleton of a wrecked vessel, rotting at the bottom of the sea. Ribbons of skin hung from her like sea grape.

Moichi tried to look into her eyes, to see any semblance of the beloved sister he had once known but, as in many dreams, his eyes refused to focus or, again, perhaps she had no eyes at all, for he was aware only of a yawning and terrifying void, as if whatever had once been Sanda – her spirit – had been torn from her along with her insides.

Sanda!
he cried soundlessly.
My sister!
His heart was beating so fast it seemed it might fly out of his chest or break into ten thousand pieces. He wanted only to talk with her – to
her
– not all these manifestations. He ached for reassurance that this was indeed a nightmare – everything she had ever been had been taken from her in the manner of her death.

Then she opened her mouth and, to his horror, blood spilled out. There was a horrid gurgling sound that eventually resolved itself into two words repeated over and over, and even when he awakened, bathed in sweat, trembling, his pulse pounding and his heart constricted with grief, he heard it still, echoing in the utter silence of the desert dawn:

Save me!

A blood-condor screamed, its iridescent purple plumage swooping just beyond the top of a dune. Tamuk called for the column to halt, and swinging his co'chyn around, rode back to where Moichi had reined in.

‘The settlement is on the far side of that dune,' he said tensely. ‘But you know as well as I do what the presence of the carrion eater augurs.'

‘Why have we stopped?' Aufeya asked, coming up on her co'chyn. ‘I see no sign of a settlement.'

‘I fear for them, lady,' Tamuk said, wheeling his mount round. ‘There were twenty settlers and Fe'edjinn.'

‘But there are no palms, no signs at all that we are near an oasis,' Aufeya insisted. ‘Even the Fe'edjinn could not have pitched camp without a steady supply of water nearby.'

‘She's right,' Moichi said. ‘Are you certain we are in the right place, First Darman?'

Tamuk snorted derisively, then, signalling to his men, who drew their scimitar-shaped weapons, he spurred his co'chyn toward the long rise of the dune beyond which the blood-condor continued to circle and swoop. Moichi and Aufeya followed the Fe'edjinn at a distance.

One of the Fe'edjinn, fed up with the bird's grating cry or perhaps nervous at what was waiting for them, loosed an arrow which struck the blood-condor in its breast. It plummeted straight down, disappearing behind the dune.

Moichi stood in his stirrups, urging his steed slowly forward as he scanned the horizon. There was naught to see in any direction but an endless sea of gently rolling dunes, here and there tufted with powdery sand as gusts of fiercely hot wind swirled.

Tamuk and his men crested the dune and began their descent of the far side. In a moment, they had disappeared, and Moichi urged his co'chyn up the slope. At the dune's crest he paused, waiting for Aufeya.

‘Where are they?' she asked, staring down at the waad, the deep depression below. It was devoid of all life. ‘It's as if the desert itself swallowed them whole.'

At that moment, they felt a rumbling. Their co'chyn snorted and skittered nervously as rivulets of sand began to stream down the far side of the dune into the waad. The rivulets soon became rills and streams that plumed into the air like rapids and waterfalls. The co'chyn screamed and bucked as their footing was eroded and they began to slide down the dune into the waad, which itself had changed radically. It was now an evil-looking swirl of sand that seemed to have turned molten, to be revolving, expanding before their eyes.

‘Quick!' Moichi shouted. ‘Off the co'chyn!'

He slid off his terrified mount, only to see it shoot past him, tumbling into the waad, which sucked it down like a gigantic maw. He turned, slipping in the cascading sand, pulling Aufeya off her co'chyn, as it slipped to its knobby knees, then tumbled trunk over tail into the maelstrom of the shifting waad.

‘Let's get out of here!' Moichi shouted, keeping hold of her as he tried to struggle up the slope of the dune. The two were reduced to crawling on all fours, but for every step up, the cascading rivers of sand took them down the equivalent of three.

Moichi glanced over his shoulder, saw how appallingly close they were to the sucking, swirling base of the waad and redoubled his efforts. He was rewarded by a heavy cascade of sand in his face, and he and Aufeya tumbled further down the dune.

The bottom of the bowl-shaped waad was sucked abruptly down, and from out of this hole rose a slithery thick shape, like a primeval serpent, huge and either covered by sand or made of sand itself. A beast. Could it be? Moichi wondered. A beast that lived below the surface of the Mu'ad.

The shape arched – far too large for the bowl of the waad to contain – and then, with a great thrashing, plunged into the center of the waad. It was now very close, and abruptly they heard the rumbling again, but this time it seemed to resolve itself into a voice that echoed off the dunes and the distant, uncaring white sky high above.

‘
FE'EDJINN!
' In an eerie, hissing attempt at pronunciation. ‘
FE'EDJINN!
'

Just above them, an avalanche of sand was forming, shaking itself from what once had been the crest of the dune. It was coming and Moichi knew there was nothing they could do to avoid it. But the rumbling echoed still in his brain and he fought for one last hope, to understand.