Free Dragons on the Sea of Night by Eric Van Lustbader

stuck in amber. Everything is mutable, and change is inevitable.’
    â€˜But war is coming, Aufeya. Oh, not merely war. Now the Iskamen and the Adenese will have at each other until only one race is left alive. It is a nightmare, perhaps the very one that led me to sail the seas. Yet, as you see, I have not escaped. I have returned home on the eve of the holy war. Perhaps, then, it is my fate. And now I am faced with the question I have lived with all my life: how does one stop the inevitable?’
    A bird rustled in the underbrush. All around them, the date palms rattled and clattered in the dawn wind that had just begun rising. ‘When I was young, I never came out here on my own. I was too busy down at the port, watching the seamen tramping up and down the quays, and looking out to sea to catch a glimpse of my destiny. Or so I thought. Now I think I did it simply because my father had forbidden it to me. Always with him it was a question of the law and of obeying.’
    â€˜The sea is a harsh master,’ Aufeya said. ‘Perhaps you only traded one for the other.’
    â€˜But it was my choice,’ he said harshly. ‘Not his.’ Then he put his head down and gripped her hand in his own. ‘How Sanda wept when I left. She ran all the way down to the port in order to beg me to stay. “I shall die without you,” she said, and I kissed her and laughed at such childish sentiments.’
    Aufeya turned and gently kissed away the tears on his cheeks. ‘Perhaps one day,’ she whispered, ‘you will realize that you miss your father as much as you now miss Sanda.’
    The moon, bluish-white and full to bursting, broke from behind a cloudbank. Behind Aufeya and Moichi, shadows appeared, so faintly that they were like ghosts or angels, seen only intermittently in the corners of the eyes.
    Moichi raised his arm and pointed into the moonlight. ‘There, across Mu’ad, the Great Desert, lies Aden.’
    But Aufeya was looking to their left where, past the thousands of hectares of Iskael’s famed cedar groves, beyond the blackened volcanic steppes that led upward in unsteady increments to the lowest reaches of what, even as far away as the horizon, appeared to be a towering mountain. It was impossible to judge its size, since its crown was obscured by billowing cloud, mist and what might have been ice veils.
    She stared at the mountain, transfixed by something she could neither name nor imagine. The mist that clung to its ragged upper reaches appeared, in places, almost translucent. Once or twice she started, convinced that she had seen a flash of indescribable color, diffused and expanded by the curious, curling mist.
    What she could see of its slopes convinced her that she had never come across a natural formation like it. In her time she had seen many kinds of hills and crags, those humped and rounded by age, others sharp-edged, deep-gorged and in their adolescence. But the formidable ridges and rills of this mountain defied category.
    It was as if she were staring at a formation that had just now, in the darkness of the night, emerged from the molten core of the earth, raw and bleeding as Moichi’s emotions, and still full of primeval, fulminating energy. The fluted rills were disquieting, like great ebon rifts in the crust of the earth, the ridges plumed and spiky. She felt her scalp constrict, and she wiped her eyes which had unaccountably begun to water as they had done when as a child, she had stared too long into the noonday sun. She was about to make the sign of the Palliate but shuddered instead, knowing it no longer calmed her.
    â€˜Moichi,’ she said in a hoarse voice, ‘tell me about the mountain to the north.’
    â€˜I am afraid that would take years,’ he said. ‘That is the Mountain Sin’hai, the place of God.’
    â€˜The Iskamen God.’
    â€˜The only God.’
    And still she could not take her eyes off the terrifying