Bronso glanced through the partially open flap of the tent and lowered his voice. “The Emperor Paul-Muad’Dib.”
Rheinvar took a step backward, then burst out laughing. “You’ve come to us too late. Haven’t you heard? Muad’Dib is already dead.”
“I don’t mean physically. I mean his reputation, the myth and distortions around him. I have eyes inside the Citadel of Muad’Dib, and I watch what is happening there, and while I disagree with a great many political decisions, I have a very specific focus. I need to kill the idea that Paul was a messiah. The people, and the historians, must see that he was human—and deeply flawed. I need you to help me assassinate his character.”
“I hear that Muad’Dib killed a Face Dancer, at the end,” Sielto said with no emotion whatsoever. “An infiltrator and conspirator named Scytale. Maybe that’s a good enough reason for us to help you against him.”
Rheinvar continued to scowl. “It will be dangerous. Very dangerous.”
Bronso paced the tent floor, talking quickly. “You only need to provide me with cover and help me distribute propaganda against him. The Wayku have assisted me for years, but I want to do something even larger in scale now, building on what I have already done. I trust your skills and your subtlety, Rheinvar. In fact, in coming here I am trusting you with my life. I hope you deserve that trust, and that my childhood memories aren’t deceiving me.”
The troupe leader looked over at Sielto, and a wordless understanding passed between them. The Master Jongleur sat down behind a cluttered table, folded his hands in front of him, and grinned. “Then allow me to demonstrate a bit of trust myself, to seal our cooperation. I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out, a bright man like yourself.”
In front of Bronso’s eyes, the old man’s features altered, flowed, and settled into a bland, emotionless countenance. Another Face Dancer! “Vermillion Hells! Now I see why you haven’t changed in all these years.”
“The first Rheinvar—the one you knew as a boy—was indeed human. But seventeen years ago, after an assassination job went awry, he was severely injured during our escape. He died aboard the Heighliner shortly after it left orbit. Fortunately, no one but us saw him perish. We decided not to throw away his fame and reputation, his worth as the troupe leader, and our perfect cover.
“And so I was the Face Dancer chosen to take his place. But without the real Rheinvar, we lost our inspiration, and our stature as performers declined. I can mimic some of his skills, but I am not truly a Master Jongleur. I do not have his amazing hypnotic and manipulative powers. I can only pretend to be who he was. Without him, we lost something indefinable.”
“Something human, perhaps?” Bronso asked.
The two Face Dancers shrugged. “Do you still want our help?”
“More than ever, since now I’ve learned something about you that others do not know—something you might not even know yourselves.”
The shape-shifter assumed Rheinvar’s familiar appearance again. “Oh? And what is that, my friend?”
“That all Face Dancers are not the same inside.”
We live our lives, dream our dreams, and scheme our schemes. Shai-Hulud watches all.
—Fremen wisdom
Before Alia could become too involved in her wedding preparations, she went to Jessica, preoccupied with another matter. She wasn’t distracted or disturbed, but engrossed. “I have something you and I should do together, Mother—something I’d like us to share. It will put us both on the same course.” She seemed very excited by the prospect.
Curious, Jessica followed as Alia and Duncan led her down numerous corridors and stairwells beneath the keep into a large underground chamber, hewn by hand. Glowglobes bathed the grotto with light tuned to the white spectrum of Arrakis’s sun, so that the sandplankton could survive. Jessica smelled powerful conflicting odors—dust, sand, water, and the rough flinty stench of a worm.
“My brother created this place in the second year of his reign.” Alia inhaled deeply. “You know why, don’t you?”
Jessica looked across the large, deep sandy area encircled by a wide trough of water. Staring with intense focus, she could see tiny vibrations, ripples of movement beneath the sand. “Paul consumed the spice essence to enhance and pursue his visions. He kept a stunted worm here for whenever he required the Water of Life.”
“Yes. Sometimes he shared the converted spice essence with his circle of closest advisers. Other times he made the inner journey alone.” She paused, as if hesitant to make her suggestion, then smiled at Jessica. “Would you travel that path with me now, Mother? We did it together when I was but a fetus in your womb—when you were changed into a Reverend Mother, and I was changed into . . . myself.” She warmly took Duncan’s hand, but kept her eyes focused on her mother. “This will be the last opportunity before our wedding. I would consider it a sacrament. Who knows what we might discover together?”
Though she was uneasy, Jessica could not turn down her daughter’s request. The awakening effect of the awareness-spectrum drug intensified mental connections, creating a blurred form of shared consciousness. She and her daughter had already experienced a oneness, a unified pattern of thoughts that had gradually faded as Alia matured, and Jessica lived at a distance on Caladan. Now, Jessica did not want to expose all of her secrets to her daughter. All of Paul’s secrets. There were some things Alia could not know, would not understand.
Fortunately, Jessica was much stronger than she had been on that first night long ago during the tau orgy in sietch. In addition to her own experiences, the damaged and changed Tessia Vernius had shown her many ways to protect herself back on Wallach IX. Jessica could build mental walls securely enough. She would be safe. “Yes, Alia. This is something we should do together.”
Five amazon guards had followed them into the underground chamber, accompanied by a Fremen watermaster. Duncan signaled to the watermaster, who turned a heavy iron wheel on the stone wall. Gears shifted and machinery dropped, releasing a false floor beneath a narrow area of sand to create a trough, into which water flooded. The channel divided the enclosed dry space in half. A small worm erupted from beneath the sand, thrashing away from the flowing water as if it were acid.
It was a monster by any definition—a long serpentine form, a meter in girth and five meters long, the round mouth full of crystalline teeth, its eyeless head bobbing to and fro. By Arrakis standards, however, this was a stunted, immature specimen.
With a yell, Alia’s amazons lifted their metal staffs and jumped down onto the sand. They encircled the worm and struck its rippled segments with sharp blows. The creature thrashed and attacked, but the women dodged out of the way. Jessica realized the guards had done this before, and perhaps often. She wondered how frequently her daughter consumed the spice essence. And how frequently Paul had done it.
The watermaster worked another metal wheel, which created a new trough across the sand, blocking the worm with a second line of water, forcing it into a smaller and smaller area. As though it were an exhilarating sport, the women threw themselves upon the creature, grappling with it, wrestling it down to the sand.
The Fremen watermaster flooded more of the sand, and the stunted worm writhed against the liquid touch, jerking with electric spasms of fury. But the women caught the creature, pushed it down, submerged it until its head was beneath the deep water, its mouth agape. With splash and spray turning the sand to a slurry of brown grains, they held the beast under until the poisonous water had filled its gullet.
In its last spasms, the amazons hauled the worm’s dripping head out of the trough, while the watermaster ran forward with a large basin. Dying, the worm spewed out a cloudy liquid. The thick and potent bile was one of the deadliest known poisons, yet when catalyzed by a Sayyadina, it became a means of euphoria, a way to open the Inner Eye of awareness.
With a flushed face and bright gaze, the muddy watermaster stumbled up to them carrying the basin; its poisonous contents sloshing against the sides of the con
tainer. “Lady Alia, Lady Jessica—a bountiful harvest. Enough to make the tau drug for many of the faithful.”
Alia removed a small copper dipper from the side of the basin, filled it, and extended the ladle toward her mother. “Shall we both do the honors?”
Jessica took a mouthful of the foul-tasting alkaloid fluid, and her daughter followed suit. Holding it in her mouth, Jessica altered the chemical signature of the substance, manipulating the elemental bonds with her Bene Gesserit abilities, turning it into a seed chain of molecules that, when she and Alia both spat it back into the basin, transformed the bile from the dying worm. In a chain reaction, the liquid became something else.
The amazon guards and the watermaster watched with awe and hints of greedy hunger. Alia took the ladle again and drank deeply of the converted substance, as did her mother.
Alia extended the ladle to Duncan, who stood guard behind them, but the ghola refused. “I must remain alert. I have seen what this does to you.”
“You must see what it does to you. Take it, Duncan. Marry me in another way.”
Like a good soldier, he did as he was commanded. Duncan, always the same, always loyal to the Atreides. . . .
Before the drug could take effect, Alia offered the basin to her guards. “This is a blessing from the sister and mother of Muad’Dib. Take it, share it. Perhaps others will find the truth they seek.”
As the others hurried away, Jessica felt the drug thrum more and more loudly against her consciousness. Alia reached out to touch her, and Jessica responded, but she maintained her reserve, erecting a protective barrier inside her mind, letting her daughter see her and know her . . . but not everything.
Instead of answers, Jessica felt questions growing louder in her consciousness, the doubts, the turmoil that lay ahead, the empty and dangerous gulf of an uncontrolled future and the many paths that stretched out for humankind . . . possibilities upon possibilities upon possibilities. She knew this was the trap of prescience. Seeing futures did a person no good, unless one could determine the actual future that would occur.
Feeling the pull of the drug, Jessica heard and experienced changes in her body’s chemistry. She began to drift across endless dunes in her mind, back through countless generations, a chain of female ancestors all standing there to advise her, to reminisce about their long-forgotten lives, to criticize or to praise. Jessica had always kept them at a secure distance; she had seen what could happen to a Reverend Mother who let those constant haranguing voices dominate an individual personality.
How had Alia protected herself against the inner clamor? Unprepared and unborn, she could have initially drowned in the onslaught of all those lives. How had she protected herself?
And now, at the end of that long succession of past lives, Jessica discovered a figure standing before her in a robe, the face covered by a hood that flapped in a silent wind. A male figure. Paul? Something compelled her to turn, and at the other end of eternity she found her son standing there as well, but he had no face or voice.
Finally, she heard his words in her head: “There are few who can protect me . . . but many who would destroy me. You could do both, Mother—as could Alia. Which will you choose?”
She tried to ask for more information, but could not find her own voice. In response to her silence, Paul said only, “Remember your promise to me . . . the one you made on Ix.”
The sands whipped around her, bringing dust and haze that swirled faster and faster, scouring at her—until finally she was rubbing her eyes, looking around at the underground chamber, smelling the splashed water, the dead worm, and bitter bile.
Alia was already awake. Being more accustomed to the drug, her body had metabolized it faster. The girl’s spice-addicted deep blue eyes were open wide, her lips parted in a smile of amazement. Next to her Duncan sat rigid and cross-legged, still apparently dreaming.
“I saw Paul,” Alia said.
Jessica’s heart pounded faster. “And what did he say to you?”
Alia’s smile became mysterious. “That is something even a mother and a daughter cannot share.” Jessica realized, belatedly, that Alia had walled her off, too. “And what did you experience?”
Jessica shook her head slightly. “It was . . . perplexing. I need to meditate upon it further.”
When she rose, the stiff soreness in her limbs told her that she had been in a trance for quite some time. Her mouth was dry, with a sour residual taste from the liquid she’d consumed . . . and the strange vision she had experienced.
Jessica left Alia sitting beside Duncan. The young woman held the ghola’s arm, watching him, and guarding him as he finished his own inner journey. But Jessica was gone before he woke up.
When the true motive is love, there are no other explanations. Searching for them is like chasing grains of sand in the wind.
—Fremen proverb
Along with the wedding preparations, construction work continued at great speed to erect magnificent new temples to show the glory of St. Alia as well as Muad’Dib. Towering in a public square, a tall statue depicted the Janus figure, the duality of brother and sister, two visages facing opposite directions—the future and the past—Alia and Paul.
Newly minted coins bore the profile of Alia on one side, Madonna-like over two small babies, surrounded by the faint image of Paul-Muad’Dib, like a benevolent spirit watching over them; the flip side bore the Atreides hawk crest embellished with imperial styling and the words ALIA REGENT. Alia seemed to have learned the power of mythmaking from the example of her brother; even during Paul’s reign, the girl had made herself into a powerful religious leader on Dune.
Despite the anticipated joy and excitement of the wedding, Alia quietly asserted that there was danger all around—and Jessica could not discount her fears. Such a spectacle would indeed be a tempting time for someone to commit violence. A team of amazon guards never left the Regent’s side, and a Fremen troop led by Stilgar remained stationed outside the entrance to the conservatory where the twins were held. All offworld ships were searched thoroughly, every passenger questioned, each cargo deep-scanned.
Alia’s inner-circle priests carried the brunt of the expanded protective measures, with the Qizara Isbar proudly accepting a much more important role than he had held before. Jessica had not liked the fawning man when he’d come to Caladan to deliver the news of Paul’s death. Now, the more Isbar insisted that he was helping Alia, the less Jessica approved of him.
When she received a secret coded message revealing an assassination plot spearheaded by Isbar, even Jessica was surprised at the audacity of it. She studied the secret message again and again, listened to the surreptitiously recorded conversations that revealed Isbar’s plan in all its detail. Then she summoned Gurney Halleck to her quarters.
“‘Beware the viper in your own nest.’ ” Gurney’s scar flushed. “Didn’t Paul’s man Korba attempt something similar?”
“Yes, and that’s why he was executed. Korba wanted to make a martyr out of Paul so that the priesthood could use his memory for their own ends. Now, these people mean to do the same with Alia. If they remove her as Regent, they will have only the baby twins to worry about.”
“You might be on their target list yourself, my Lady. And Irulan. ‘Ambitions grow like weeds, and are as difficult to eradicate.’ ” The big man shook his head. “Are you sure of the information? Who provided it? I don’t like this anonymous source.”
“The source is not anonymous to me. I believe it to be unimpeachable, but I cannot reveal the name.”
Gurney lowered his head. “As you wish, my Lady.” She knew she was asking a great deal from him, but she expected his full acceptance. Jessica had come to Dune to honor Paul, to strengthen the name of their Great House, and to revere a fallen leader—her son. But she could do no less for her daughter. Alia was as much an Atreides as Paul.
Jessica tapped the scrap of spice paper and the words she had written there. “These are the three names. You know what to do. We c
an’t trust anyone, even those in Alia’s inner circle, but I trust you, Gurney.”
“I will take care of it.” His fists were clenched, his muscles bunched. As he departed, Jessica let out a long, slow sigh, fully aware of what she had set in motion.
That evening, after Isbar completed his service in the Fane of the Oracle, celebrating St. Alia of the Knife, the priest bowed to the cheering congregants, raised his hands in benediction, and stepped back behind the altar. His skin gleamed with scented oils. Isbar’s neck had begun to thicken with soft flesh, a plumpness that resulted from unlimited access to water for the first time in his life.
Parting the rust-orange curtains of spice-fiber fabric, he entered his private alcove and was surprised to find a man there waiting for him. “Gurney Halleck?” Recognizing him, Isbar did not call for the guards. “How may I help you?”
Gurney’s hands moved in a blur, fingers clenched around a thin cord of krimskell fiber, which he flashed around the priest’s neck and yanked tight. Isbar flailed and clawed at the garrote, but Gurney’s grip remained firm. He twisted and pulled tighter, and the cord swiftly cut off the priest’s breath, broke his hyoid bone, and silenced his larynx. As Gurney sawed deeper with the cord, Isbar’s eyes bulged; his lips opened and closed like a beached, gasping fish. In a fleeting thought, Gurney wondered if the desert man had ever seen a fish.
He spoke quietly into the priest’s ear. “Don’t pretend to wonder why I am here. You know your guilt, what you intended to do. Any plot against Alia is a plot against all Atreides.” He jerked the garrote tighter still. Isbar was beyond hearing, his throat nearly severed now. “And therefore it must be dealt with.”
Outside, the worshippers continued to file out of the temple, some still praying. They hadn’t even seen the hanging fabric panels stir.
The Winds of Dune Page 21
