Dune: List 5

The measure of Count Fenring's friendship may be seen first in a positive thing: he allayed the Landsraad's suspicions after the Arrakis Affair.

The guard captain, Iakin Nefud, squatted on a divan across the chamber, the stupor of semuta dullness in his flat face, the eerie wailing of semuta music around him.

You persist, however, in refusing to learn my true value to you. You are obstinate.

It is not enough that you say to me the Emperor is in a ferment about some association between Arrakis and his mysterious prison planet.

"The recruits come to believe in time that such a place as Salusa Secundus is justified because it produced them—the elite. The commonest Sardaukar trooper lives a life, in many respects, as exalted as that of any member of a Great House."

Were there people on Salusa Secundus before the Emperor sent his first contingents of prisoners there?

Even the Duke Leto, a cousin on the distaff side, never knew for sure.

"This Imperial popinjay. Count Fenring, came as official observer and to...ah, conclude a business arrangement between the Emperor and myself."

It was a kind of visual fatigue and it came, he knew, from the constant necessity of holding the prescient future as a kind of memory that was in itself a thing intrinsically of the past.

No, he reassured himself, for Alia-the-Strange-One, his sister, had gone there with his mother and with Chani—a twenty-thumper trip into the south, riding a Reverend Mother's palanquin fixed to the back of a wild maker.

"You never cease indoctrinating."
"Thus you yourself taught me," he said.

But beyond them both lay the clouded area, the Great Unrest where all the universe seemed embroiled.

In what other society of our universe, she asked herself, could a person of my station accept an anonymous drink and quaff that drink without fear?

Paul found himself riding upright atop the worm. He felt exultant, like an emperor surveying his world. He suppressed a sudden urge to cavort there, to turn the worm, to show off his mastery of this creature.

Paul stared at the dark visage above him, wondering at the reasons which had impelled Stilgar to say just that.

"I'd not have expected you to walk into this trap, Gurney."
"I'm properly chastened," Gurney said.

A curry color dominated the southern sky now and there came fitful bursts and gusts of wind that whipped dust around their heads.

Paul nodded, thinking how easily Gurney had fallen back into the pattern of Atreides retainer...but with subtle reservations...differences.

Blood suffused the Sardaukar's face.

The pale light of glowglobes gave the scene a tinge of unreality. It was like a tableau, but with the added dimension of warren smells, the whispers, the sounds of shuffling feet.

Bated silence came over the group, spreading out into the crowd.

"Repeat after me, Stilgar," Paul said, and he called up the words of investiture as he had heard his own father use them. "I, Stilgar, take this knife from the hands of my Duke."

Rabban has sent cautious overtures about a truce.

She sensed an immediate difference in the air about his face...but it was only the spice, the ubiquitous spice whose odor permeated everything in Fremen life.

Without questioning, because she recognized the tone of awareness in Chani's voice, Jessica lifted the ewer to her mouth, drew in a small sip.

"With his favorite Truthsayer and five legions of Sardaukar. The old Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is there with Thufir Hawat beside him and seven ships jammed with every conscript he could muster. Every Great House has its raiders above us...waiting."

"They might try a sortie by 'thopter," Stilgar said.

They placed it on the dais and the Emperor mounted, seated himself.

The Emperor had deigned to notice him.

The Baron darted his gaze left and right, reviled himself for coming here without his own guards, not that they'd be much use against Sardaukar.

"But error on the side of caution cannot be censured."
"Ah-h-h-h," the Emperor said. "Censure. Then I'm not to speak of how much time this Arrakis nonsense has taken from me?..."

All here—fawning, slyly plotting, "roughing it" with the Emperor...here to watch him put an end to this affair, to make epigrams over the battles and idolize the wounded.

"As bad as that," the Emperor murmured, and his tone of derision did not escape the Baron.

"Nothing money won't repair, I presume," Paul said.
"Except for the lives, m'Lord," Gurney said, and there was a tone of reproach in his voice as though to say: "When did an Atreides worry first about things when people were at stake?"

Paul thought then of prescient glimpses into the possibilities of this moment—and one time-line where Thufir carried a poisoned needle which the Emperor commanded he use against "this upstart Duke."

Jessica looked, recognizing the face from her Duke's dossiers.

"The Guild is crippled. Humans become little isolated clusters on their isolated planets. You know, I might do this thing out of pure spite...or out of ennui."

"My father," Paul said. "My good friends and companions, Thufir Hawat and Duncan Idaho, my years as a fugitive without rank or succor..."

And this yokel duke, this back-world adventurer could not possibly be a match for a Harkonnen trained in every device and every treachery by a thousand arena combats. And the yokel had no way of knowing he faced more weapons than a knife here.

Paul remained silent, probing with his inner senses, examining the blood from the wound, finding a trace of soporific from the Emperor's blade. He realigned his own metabolism to match this threat and change the molecules of the soporific, but he felt a thrill of doubt. They'd been prepared with soporific on a blade. A soporific. Nothing to alert a poison snooper, but strong enough to slow the muscles it touched.