Dragons on the Sea of Night by Eric Van Lustbader

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:
    â€˜ 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