Dune: The Duke of Caladan

by Brian Herbert

  “We do,” Fenring said, knowing he needed to have sharp words with Baron Harkonnen. “After today, that understanding will be even more clear.”

  When he entered Tuek’s new office chamber, he saw more metal furnishings than before, four desks, records cabinets, additional workstations. Before Fenring had a chance to sit, the scarred smuggler strode in, weary and obviously upset. He chased away the workers at the desks, then sealed the office door so he could have privacy with Fenring. “Your timing is perfect, Count. In a matter of minutes, we will bring in Rulla and her secret lover.” He ground his teeth together. “This will be unpleasant, but beneficial to you, and to me.” He looked sickened and disturbed, but a hard expression came over his face. “I trust the sacrifice I offer up will be of sufficient magnitude for your purposes.”

  “Hmmm-ahh, we shall see.”

  They heard a commotion down a side tunnel, gruff voices shouting. A woman cried out, “Don’t hurt him!” Moments later, Rulla was pushed roughly into the office chamber, thrashing like a trapped predator. She sneered at Esmar, “Your men are hurting him!”

  “Then he should not be resisting.” Tuek looked expectantly toward the tunnel. “He knows what he has done, and knows his life hangs in the balance, along with yours. You have both betrayed me.”

  More dusty smugglers entered the chamber, wrestling a man forward. When they hauled their captive into the stone-walled office and released him, Fenring was astonished to see that it was Staban Tuek, the son by Esmar’s first wife. The young man had deep scratches on his face, and blood trickled from his mouth.

  The smugglers brought Esmar’s son to him and released their grip. Staban simmered, tried to recover some of his dignity. Esmar stepped forward and struck him hard on the face with a closed fist.

  The younger man flinched and reeled, but did not raise his hands in defense. Esmar hit him again, even harder this time, causing Staban to fall and then struggle back to his feet. “Why don’t you fight back?” He struck his son a third time, a hard slap.

  Staban said, “Because I would never strike my father. I cannot—”

  Esmar raged, “You will not hit me, but you take my wife?”

  Rulla watched, seething but held back by other smugglers. Fenring was pleased to see how utterly loyal the crew was to Esmar Tuek. She shrieked, “He ravished me! I never gave my consent—”

  Esmar silenced her with a vicious glare. “My son has betrayed me, but he is not a rapist.” He shoved Staban back into the arms of the men who had brought him. The young man looked down at the rock floor.

  “But you, Rulla … I also know what you are.” His tone was low, menacing. When he turned to face Count Fenring, his demeanor changed as he concocted his story, the tale they would report back to Kaitain. He spoke while looking at her, but it was for the benefit of Fenring and the other men present. “Rulla, I also know about the rogue smuggling operation you ran, that you hired a band of pirates, stole melange, and sold it off of Arrakis without any of us knowing.” He glared at her. “If you would deceive me in love, you would also deceive me in business.”

  Fenring smiled, nodding in satisfaction. “Yes, hmmm, I have seen the evidence of your involvement, and it is quite convincing. That will do, indeed.”

  Rulla stopped thrashing long enough to look entirely baffled. Confusion took the place of her fury. “I do not know what you’re talking about. I have done no such thing!” She looked at the other smugglers, saw only stony faces. “I’m not involved in any pirate operations.”

  “The Emperor is not happy about the black-market spice being diverted from his oversight,” Fenring said. “He will be most pleased when I report to him that we have found the perpetrator.”

  Rulla continued staring. “This is nonsense!”

  The smuggler leader lowered his head somberly. “My only question is whether my son was also involved … or if he can be salvaged.” He looked at the young man.

  Staban stood straight and faced his father, unafraid of being beaten again. “I know nothing of Rulla’s other activities.” He made no additional excuses.

  Esmar stared at him for a long moment, and Fenring could feel the tension rising to a boil. Finally, the smuggler leader turned away. “I believe you.”

  “Lies!” Rulla cried to her husband. “Lies! How could you betray me like this?”

  “Look in your own mirror for the true traitor.” Esmar stepped closer. “Count Fenring, the Imperial Spice Observer, will witness how we mete out justice in the desert. In this case, it is also the Emperor’s justice.”

  Staban looked broken, but he shored himself up. “And me, Father?”

  The smuggler leader remained silent, then said, “I still hold out a faint hope that you might be worth keeping alive.”

  Rulla writhed, arched her back as if to intentionally emphasize her swollen belly. “No! I am carrying a child!” She flashed a glance at the stoic Staban, then said to Esmar, “Your … your grandson!”

  “The product of your seduction, and your schemes.” Tuek turned away, gestured for his crew to drag her away.

  “But the child is innocent!” Rulla wailed.

  “Many innocents die in the desert,” Esmar said. “But you are not innocent.”

  Fenring was impressed by the surprise. He had told Tuek to produce a scapegoat, a sacrifice of sufficient magnitude to convince Shaddam that the gesture was painful and real. His seductress wife and his unborn grandchild? The Emperor would be more impressed than he ever expected. He would have no doubts at all.

  Fenring extended the cloth band that had been his blindfold while he was brought out to the hidden base. “If I might suggest … this can also be used as a gag?”

  * * *

  AT NIGHT, FROM a ridge high enough to provide a superb view, Count Fenring and Esmar Tuek each watched through oil-lens viewers as Rulla was brought onto the open sand. An imaging unit also captured high-resolution video of the event, because Shaddam would want to see every detail. He would know Fenring was doing a good job.

  The dunes were illuminated by pale light from both small moons. Fenring adjusted the lenses to see a contingent of Tuek’s smugglers pulling the pregnant woman’s arms and legs, extending them so that she was spread-eagled on the sand.

  “A shame we cannot hear her last words, hmmm?” the Count said.

  Tuek snorted. “She has already said enough. And done enough. She should have known better than to betray her husband.”

  The men thrust a Fremen thumper into the sand not far from the woman, activated the syncopated device, and rushed away to a small escape ’thopter. With a flurry of articulated wings, the craft took off, flitting away.

  Through the viewer, Fenring zoomed in. The imaging panel followed his view. “This should not take long.”

  Esmar Tuek seemed to be carved from sandstone. “No, it will not.”

  His son, Staban, stood next to him, unbound, but he looked as if he had been wrapped in strangling shigawire. His skin was as pale as bleached sand. Esmar turned to him, his voice filled with so much anger it was like an accelerant waiting for a spark. “But for my mercy, and my faith that you are not permanently corrupted, you could be out there beside her.”

  Staban’s response was so quiet it seemed little more than a breath. “This is worse.”

  The scarred smuggler looked at him with hardened blue-within-blue eyes. “As I intended it to be.”

  Esmar Tuek had also offered two other smugglers to be surrendered as coconspirators, men he had wanted to get rid of, regardless. While they, like his wife, were not involved in the still-mysterious piracy efforts, Tuek had caught them stealing and used the opportunity to clean house. It would reinforce the story Fenring needed to weave for Shaddam. These other victims would meet a different end, though. Tuek had plans for them.

  Though he heard no sound due to the distance, Fenring watched Rulla thrash and try to break free of her bonds. Staban stared, swallowed visibly, but made no sound.

  The nearby thu
mper sent out the rhythmic percussion that would call a worm. Thump, thump, thump! When Fenring concentrated, he could hear the faint sound and felt the anticipation build. Few non-Fremen ever actually saw the enormous, territorial sandworms of the deep desert.

  Esmar Tuek just stared ahead into the night. He had lowered his oil lenses. “Can you hear it?”

  “The thumper? Yes, it is quite distinctive, even at such a distance—”

  “Not that. Listen.”

  When he concentrated, Fenring heard a distant rumbling noise, a hissing vibration like a rolling wave. With stark shadow edges from the moonlight, he could see the advancing front, a mound in the sand that traveled forward with amazing speed.

  A huge, long shape moved toward the staked woman with the inevitability of a planetary collision. Screaming, Rulla managed to pull one arm free and rip the stake out of the sand. She spun, curled, and lashed with her free hand, trying to yank the other stake loose. Liberating both arms, she worked at her feet. She was amazingly nimble, considering her late pregnancy.

  “She is a strong Fremen woman,” Esmar said in a dead voice. “She may even get the knots loose.”

  Fenring wondered, “If she gets herself free, can she run far enough away?”

  “No.”

  Staban whispered, “She is also carrying your grandson.”

  The older man’s face pinched. “She died for me at the moment of her betrayal with you. I have no grandson.”

  Fenring could feel the tension crackling between the two men. Life, and decisions, were hard in the desert. He had left his nose plugs loose, and he drew in a deep breath of the arid air. He smelled dust and melange. He had never been this close to a sandworm before and found it exhilarating. Somewhere deep inside, he felt an uncharacteristic tinge of fear.

  Rulla was still struggling to get free when the sands shifted and engulfed her. The monster went deep beneath the dunes and then erupted upward, devouring her and the thumper in a massive blast of sand.

  Fenring stared in awe at the primal power of the scene, then lowered his oil-lens binoculars. No sign remained of her.

  The imagers recorded everything for Emperor Shaddam. Fenring decided he would keep a copy for himself.

  The smuggler leader stared for a long moment in silence. “I will make Staban watch her execution over and over again.” He heaved a hitching breath. “To reinforce the lesson I want to teach him.”

  Trust, love, and honor are intertwined, yet too often they remain three separate strands.

  —DUKE LETO ATREIDES, private journals (thought to be destroyed)

  The smoke of burning barra fields smeared the sky like a stain on Leto’s reputation, yet the destruction all around felt gratifying—a cleansing of the insidious Caladan drug.

  This scorched-earth attack was necessary, like a surgeon excising gangrenous flesh. No mercy for the murderous Chaen Marek. These ailar drug operations had harmed his people and had blackened his honor. As the Duke of Caladan, he considered himself inherently responsible for letting the deadly drug spread across the worlds of humanity.

  He took no comfort in the knowledge that there were far worse drugs than ailar, many more euphoric chemicals and more destructive practices. Humans had a penchant for finding addictive and deadly vices. The use of such recreational substances had grown more widespread in response to the dramatically increased costs of melange, thanks to the Emperor’s spice surtax.

  But this problem had struck here, in his home, not on some distant desert planet or in the jungles of Ecaz. Barra ferns grew only on Caladan. Chaen Marek had cultivated and processed the ailar right here, and that practice shamed House Atreides.

  Recently, the grieving Lord Atikk had filed a formal complaint in the Landsraad, although the nobles were far too preoccupied with filling countless empty seats to give priority to a petty inter-House squabble.

  Leto meant to eradicate every channel. Half measures would not be sufficient. His beloved Caladan would no longer be the source, and that was all he could do. His response would be swift and sure, and plain for the whole Imperium to see.

  After gathering reports from his network of sources, Thufir Hawat had already unraveled the surprising spread of ailar usage across the Imperium, with Caladan at the nexus. And the Mentat had only just begun to turn over rocks to see what data he could find. Many more dark and hidden facts were sure to come scuttling into the light.

  Leto stood with a hand on his bloody sword, turning to watch as mercenary prisoners were taken and workers rounded up. The Atreides fire crews torched the remaining fields, cutting down mature fern trees that loomed over the compound.

  Duncan Idaho looked sullen after reporting the escape of Chaen Marek. Atreides searchers had scoured the newly exposed tunnels beneath the forest and found a secret exit hatch and the burn marks of jet-pod exhaust where a small escape craft had taken off.

  Though deeply disappointed, Leto still felt victorious. “Marek may have slipped away, but we castrated his operations. His ailar production has been ruined, and we will dismantle the entire distribution network, destroy his black market. The man has nothing left but to lick his wounds.”

  Leto was shocked to learn that a Tleilaxu had set up his operations here on Caladan. He already had many good reasons to despise the Bene Tleilax for what they’d done to his ally House Vernius, as part of Shaddam’s secret scheme to create a synthetic spice. Now a Tleilaxu had come here, genetically modified a native Caladan plant, and turned it into something more addictive, more deadly.

  After seeing the scope of the barra fields, the equipment, mercenaries, and weaponry, Leto was convinced this was no simple one-man operation. Tleilaxu genetic manipulation was a complex process, not performed on a whim.

  Who was financing Chaen Marek? Shaddam Corrino had commissioned the earlier Tleilaxu work on Ix, but that entire plan had disastrously failed. Was the new Tleilaxu drug lord an independent operator, or was there some larger scheme? What if the Emperor himself was involved as he had been on Ix?

  “Most of the records are destroyed, my Lord,” Gurney Halleck confessed, his face flushed. With burn-reddened hands, he carried a small set of scorched documents and two shigawire spools. “It was my own damned clumsiness, a self-destruct setup. I should have noticed the trigger. This was all I could salvage. I hope Thufir can get something worthwhile from it.”

  “Thufir will find anything there is to be found,” Leto said, accepting the illicit records. “We are not finished here, but we did the right thing.”

  It put into perspective how little he needed to care about the insulting rejection from Duke Verdun. Hawat had already compiled a list of new candidates for Paul, and the names were waiting for him on his desk back at the castle. Leto would review them as soon as he returned, even consult with his son this time. He didn’t have to rush to marry off Paul; he just needed to dangle the possibility, play the game. Yes, he would select one of the names and send another carefully worded letter.

  Without question, allying his House with House Verdun would have been a terrible mistake. Even so, the obnoxious nobleman’s implication that House Atreides was too lackluster bothered him, that Paul was not worthy. How many other Houses Major secretly thought the same? Would his son and heir be turned down again?

  Previously, he had convinced himself that ruling only Caladan—his home, his world, his entire universe—was sufficient. But if Fausto Verdun and other Landsraad nobles considered Paul and House Atreides beneath their notice, was that partly Leto’s own fault? Perhaps he should work harder to play the political game, especially now with so many opportunities on the table.

  Caladan was close to his heart, but in the reality of Imperial power and influence, perhaps one small planet wasn’t enough. An Atreides Duke had ruled here for twenty-six generations … did that make House Atreides appear to be stagnant? His father had once told him that contentment is the first step toward downfall.

  Perhaps Leto should have demanded more, been more ambitious, gra
bbed possibilities for wealth and power. Hawat had advised him, and even Jessica had understood the need to look for opportunities. After Otorio, there were plenty of holdings available.…

  He watched his troops finish their mopping-up operations. A lieutenant jogged up to deliver a casualty report, and Leto was sad to learn that he had lost nearly a hundred fighters, although Marek’s mercenaries had suffered far greater casualties. Still, that was more blood on the drug lord’s hands.

  His thoughts kept circling back to the same question. Perhaps House Atreides did need more power, more political influence, more clout.

  Leto said he was willing to do anything for Paul and the future of his House. Then he corrected his thought. Anything honorable.

  * * *

  BACK IN THE castle behind closed doors, with glowglobes dimmed to a warm orange light, Leto allowed himself to be a man and a lover. He let down his personal walls and opened his heart to rest in Jessica’s arms. Now that he was home safe, she made love to him with a desperation that revealed just how worried she had been.

  As they lay in the spacious bed, they fit together in perfect harmony, warm skin softly touching. In the afterglow, they faced each other, Leto’s gray eyes looking into her green gems. They spoke in whispers because they did not need to be louder. He stroked a strand of bronze hair that had drifted down her cheek.

  Even here, he was still the Duke, and they did not speak of trivialities. Jessica was his most important adviser, his quiet and steady confidante. He spoke to her about what he had been thinking, how he needed to seize the opportunities. “Jessica, I am … reconsidering my priorities.”