balanced as was the way of elves. They swayed slightly with the motion of the ship, but both of them were perfectly at ease, as if they were standing on dry ground, not above a drop that would shatter their bodies if they were to accidentally fall to the deck sixty feet below.
‘This is the topsail,’ she said.
‘And what are you called?’
‘Karaya.’
‘I am Tyrion.’
‘You are Prince Tyrion,’ she said. ‘You are the nephew of Lady Malene. We were sent all this way to pick you up. You must be a personage of some importance.’
‘Really?’
‘A trading Eagle is not normally dispatched to a small fishing port in Cothique for matters of no consequence. We should be sailing to the Old World or Cathay. Instead, we are off the coast of Ulthuan carrying a cargo of warriors and horses.’
‘I had not realised I was so valuable,’ said Tyrion.
The girl smiled at him. ‘House Emeraldsea thinks so.’
‘You have a pretty smile,’ he said.
‘And you have strange and lovely eyes,’ she said. He found the intensity of her look somewhat disturbing. It reminded him of a question he had been wanting to ask for a while.
‘Why does everyone look at me so oddly?’ he asked. The girl looked startled. It was obviously not what she had been expecting him to say. The mood of the moment was broken.
‘You really don’t know?’
Tyrion shook his head.
‘I hate to strike such a blow to your vanity but it is not just because they are overwhelmed by your sheer physical beauty.’
‘I do find that hard to believe,’ said Tyrion.
Karaya smiled.
‘It’s because you look like a statue.’
‘Are we talking about my chiselled good looks?’
‘No. We are talking about the fact that you look like the statue of Aenarion in Lothern harbour. That’s why the whole crew spend so much time staring at you.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. The resemblance is uncanny.’
‘You mean aside from the fact that the statue is six hundred feet tall and I am not.’
‘You will have a chance to judge for yourself soon. We will arrive in Lothern in the next few days if the winds are fair.’
Tyrion noticed dark clouds gathering in the distance. He wondered if a storm was coming in.
From below an officer bellowed an order and Karaya jumped to obey.
‘Perhaps we can continue this discussion later,’ said Tyrion.
‘Perhaps,’ the sailor girl replied. ‘There are other things I would like to discuss too.’
N’Kari felt his storm being birthed. He felt like howling with glee. The first part of his plan was under way. The weather was shaped to his will. Now he needed to make sure the other elements were in place.
Carefully, with infinite patience, he extruded tiny filaments of himself through the waystones. He was not yet powerful enough to break out physically but he could send out a message to every elf with even the slightest sensitivity to such things and blend their dreams with his own. He would prepare the world for his coming and make sure the first recruits were ready for his army.
Mages across the face of the world would sense something, for their gift would make them sensitive to his magic. That would not be such a bad thing. Some of them would provide him with excellent recruits.
He invoked the name of Slaanesh and sent thistledown splinters of dream out from the waystones into the night. Borne by the winds of magic, they floated over Ulthuan and touched the dreams of those they were drawn to.
In southern Cothique, a group of orgiastic cultists was touched by magic. As they lay naked and spent from their ritual lovemaking, they felt an odd desire enter their minds, to go to a certain place at a certain time and make themselves ready for the rise of a new prophet who was about to enter their world.
In the Shadowlands, a group of dark elf infiltrators learned that if they headed eastwards, they would find something of great use to their master. It seemed to them that Morathi herself had appeared naked in their dreams with the instructions and promised them the ultimate reward of her person if they obeyed.
In Saphery, an archmage who had long dabbled in the ways of the Dark Prince of Pleasure dreamed that he would learn a great secret if he ventured to the western waystone of the realm.
In Lothern, the greatest assassin in the world dreamed of rebellion against his master and a life of luxury among the enemies he had been raised to hate. He woke beside the