Dune (79 page)

“My brother knows I'm here,” Alia said.

“Can you tell him to surrender as the price of your life?”

Alia smiled up at him with clear innocence. “I shall not do that,” she said.

The Baron stumbled forward to stand beside Alia. “Majesty,” he pleaded, “I knew nothing of—”

“Interrupt me once more, Baron,” the Emperor said, “and you will lose the powers of interruption . . . forever.” He kept his attention focused on Alia, studying her through slitted lids. “You will not, eh? Can you read in my mind what I'll do if you disobey me?”

“I've already said I cannot read minds,” she said, “but one doesn't need telepathy to read your intentions.”

The Emperor scowled. “Child, your cause is hopeless. I have but to rally my forces and reduce this planet to—”

“It's not that simple,” Alia said. She looked at the two Guildsmen. “Ask them.”

“It is not wise to go against my desires,” the Emperor said. “You should not deny me the least thing.”

“My brother comes now,” Alia said. “Even an Emperor may tremble before Muad'Dib, for he has the strength of righteousness and heaven smiles upon him.”

The Emperor surged to his feet. “This play has gone far enough. I will take your brother and this planet and grind them to—”

The room rumbled and shook around them. There came a sudden cascade of sand behind the throne where the hutment was coupled to the Emperor's ship. The abrupt flicker-tightening of skin pressure told of a wide-area shield being activated.

“I told you,” Alia said. “My brother comes.”

The Emperor stood in front of his throne, right hand pressed to right ear, the servo-receiver there chattering its report on the situation. The Baron moved two steps behind Alia. Sardaukar were leaping to positions at the doors.

“We will fall back into space and reform,” the Emperor said. “Baron, my apologies. These madmen
are
attacking under cover of the storm. We will show them an Emperor's wrath, then.” He pointed at Alia. “Give her body to the storm.”

As he spoke, Alia fled backward, feigning terror. “Let the storm have what it can take!” she screamed. And she backed into the Baron's arms.

“I have her, Majesty!” the Baron shouted. “Shall I dispatch her now-eeeeeeeeeeeh!” He hurled her to the floor, clutched his left arm.

“I'm sorry, Grandfather,” Alia said. “You've met the Atreides gom jabbar.” She got to her feet, dropped a dark needle from her hand.

The Baron fell back. His eyes bulged as he stared at a red slash on his left palm. “You . . . you. . . .” He rolled sideways in his suspensors, a sagging mass of flesh supported inches off the floor with head lolling and mouth hanging open.

“These people are insane,” the Emperor snarled. “Quick! Into the ship. We'll purge this planet of every . . . . ”

Something sparkled to his left. A roll of ball lightning bounced away from the wall there, crackled as it touched the metal floor. The smell of burned insulation swept through the selamlik.

“The shield!” one of the Sardaukar officers shouted. “The outer shield is down! They . . . .”

His words were drowned in a metallic roaring as the shipwall behind the Emperor trembled and rocked.

“They've shot the nose off our ship!” someone called.

Dust boiled through the room. Under its cover, Alia leaped up, ran toward the outer door.

The Emperor whirled, motioned his people into an emergency door that swung open in the ship's side behind the throne. He flashed a hand signal to a Sardaukar officer leaping through the dust haze. “We will make our stand here!” the Emperor ordered.

Another crash shook the hutment. The double doors banged open at the far side of the chamber admitting wind-blown sand and the sound of shouting. A small, black-robed figure could be seen momentarily against the light—Alia darting out to find a knife and, as befitted her Fremen training, to kill Harkonnen and Sardaukar wounded. House Sardaukar charged through a greened yellow haze toward the opening, weapons ready, forming an arc there to protect the Emperor's retreat.

“Save yourself, Sire!” a Sardaukar officer shouted. “Into the ship!”

But the Emperor stood alone now on his dais pointing toward the doors. A forty-meter section of the hutment had been blasted away there and the selamlik's doors opened now onto drifting sand. A dust cloud hung low over the outside world blowing from pastel distances. Static lightning crackled from the cloud and the spark flashes of shields being shorted out by the storm's charge could be seen through the haze. The plain surged with figures in combat—Sardaukar and leaping gyrating robed men who seemed to come down out of the storm.

All this was as a frame for the target of the Emperor's pointing hand.

Out of the sand haze came an orderly mass of flashing shapes—great rising curves with crystal spokes that resolved into the gaping mouths of sandworms, a massed wall of them, each with troops of Fremen riding to the attack. They came in a hissing wedge, robes whipping in the wind as they cut through the melee on the plain.

Onward toward the Emperor's hutment they came while the House Sardaukar stood awed for the first time in their history by an onslaught their minds found difficult to accept.

But the figures leaping from the worm backs were men, and the blades flashing in that ominous yellow light were a thing the Sardaukar had been trained to face. They threw themselves into combat. And it was man to man on the plain of Arrakeen while a picked Sardaukar bodyguard pressed the Emperor back into the ship, sealed the door on him, and prepared to die at the door as part of his shield.

In the shock of comparative silence within the ship, the Emperor stared at the wide-eyed faces of his suite, seeing his oldest daughter with the flush of exertion on her cheeks, the old Truthsayer standing like a black shadow with her hood pulled about her face, finding at last the faces he sought—the two Guildsmen. They wore the Guild gray, unadorned, and it seemed to fit the calm they maintained despite the high emotions around them.

The taller of the two, though, held a hand to his left eye. As the Emperor watched, someone jostled the Guildsman's arm, the hand moved, and the eye was revealed. The man had lost one of his masking contact lenses, and the eye stared out a total blue so dark as to be almost black.

The smaller of the pair elbowed his way a step nearer the Emperor, said: “We cannot know how it will go.” And the taller companion, hand restored to eye, added in a cold voice: “But this Muad'Dib cannot know, either.”

The words shocked the Emperor out of his daze. He checked the scorn on his tongue by a visible effort because it did not take a Guild navigator's single-minded focus on the main chance to see the immediate future out on that plain. Were these two so dependent upon their faculty that they had lost the use of their eyes and their reason? he wondered.

“Reverend Mother,” he said, “we must devise a plan.”

She pulled the hood from her face, met his gaze with an unblinking stare. The look that passed between them carried complete understanding. They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.

“Summon Count Fenring from his quarters,” the Reverend Mother said.

The Padishah Emperor nodded, waved for one of his aides to obey that command.

 

IT WAS to the Arrakeen governor's mansion, the old Residency the Atreides had first occupied on Dune, that they escorted Paul-Muad'Dib on the evening of his victory. The building stood as Rabban had restored it, virtually untouched by the fighting although there had been looting by townspeople. Some of the furnishings in the main hall had been overturned or smashed.

Paul strode through the main entrance with Gurney Halleck and Stilgar a pace behind. Their escort fanned out into the Great Hall, straightening the place and clearing an area for Muad'Dib. One squad began investigating that no sly trap had been planted here.

“I remember the day we first came here with your father,” Gurney said. He glanced around at the beams and the high, slitted windows. “I didn't like this place then and I like it less now. One of our caves would be safer.”

“Spoken like a true Fremen,” Stilgar said, and he marked the cold smile that his words brought to Muad'Dib's lips. “Will you reconsider, Muad'Dib?”

“This place is a symbol,” Paul said. “Rabban lived here. By occupying this place I seal my victory for all to understand. Send men through the building. Touch nothing. Just be certain no Harkonnen people or toys remain.”

“As you command,” Stilgar said, and reluctance was heavy in his tone as he turned to obey.

Communications men hurried into the room with their equipment, began setting up near the massive fireplace. The Fremen guard that augmented the surviving Fedaykin took up stations around the room. There was muttering among them, much darting of suspicious glances. This had been too long a place of the enemy for them to accept their presence in it casually.

“Gurney, have an escort bring my mother and Chani,” Paul said. “Does Chani know yet about our son?”

“The message was sent, m'Lord.”

“Are the makers being taken out of the basin yet?”

“Yes, m'Lord. The storm's almost spent.”

“What's the extent of the storm damage?” Paul asked.

“In the direct path—on the landing field and across the spice storage yards of the plain—extensive damage,” Gurney said. “As much from battle as from the storm.”

“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?”

But Paul could only focus his attention on the inner eye and the gaps visible to him in the time-wall that still lay across his path. Through each gap the jihad raged away down the corridors of the future.

He sighed, crossed the hall, seeing a chair against the wall. The chair had once stood in the dining hall and might even have held his own father. At the moment, though, it was only an object to rest his weariness and conceal it from the men. He sat down, pulling his robes around his legs, loosening his stillsuit at the neck.

“The Emperor is still holed up in the remains of his ship,” Gurney said.

“For now, contain him there,” Paul said. “Have they found the Harkonnens yet?”

“They're still examining the dead.”

“What reply from the ships up there?” He jerked his chin toward the ceiling.

“No reply yet, m'Lord.”

Paul sighed, resting against the back of his chair. Presently, he said: “Bring me a captive Sardaukar. We must send a message to our Emperor. It's time to discuss terms.”

“Yes, m'Lord.”

Gurney turned away, dropped a hand signal to one of the Fedaykin who took up close-guard position beside Paul.

“Gurney,” Paul whispered. “Since we've been rejoined I've yet to hear you produce the proper quotation for the event.” He turned, saw Gurney swallow, saw the sudden grim hardening of the man's jaw.

“As you wish, m'Lord,” Gurney said. He cleared his throat, rasped: “‘And the victory that day was turned into mourning unto all the people: for the people heard say that day how the king was grieved for his son.' ”

Paul closed his eyes, forcing grief out of his mind, letting it wait as he had once waited to mourn his father. Now, he gave his thoughts over to this day's accumulated discoveries—the mixed futures and the hidden presence of Alia within his awareness.

Of all the uses of time-vision, this was the strangest. “I have breasted the future to place my words where only you can hear them,” Alia had said. “Even you cannot do that, my brother. I find it an interesting play. And . . . oh, yes—I've killed our grandfather, the demented old Baron. He had very little pain.”

Silence. His time sense had seen her withdrawal.

“Muad'Dib.”

Paul opened his eyes to see Stilgar's black-bearded visage above him, the dark eyes glaring with battle light.

“You've found the body of the old Baron,” Paul said.

A hush of the person settled over Stilgar. “How could you know?” he whispered. “We just found the body in that great pile of metal the Emperor built.”

Paul ignored the question, seeing Gurney return accompanied by two Fremen who supported a captive Sardaukar.

“Here's one of them, m'Lord,” Gurney said. He signed to the guard to hold the captive five paces in front of Paul.

The Sardaukar's eyes, Paul noted, carried a glazed expression of shock. A blue bruise stretched from the bridge of his nose to the corner of his mouth. He was of the blond, chisel-featured caste, the look that seemed synonymous with rank among the Sardaukar, yet there were no insignia on his torn uniform except the gold buttons with the Imperial crest and the tattered braid of his trousers.