Dune (30 page)

“You can hear me, Duke Leto,” the Baron said. “I know you can hear me. We
want to know from you where to find your concubine and the child you sired on
her.”

No sign escaped Leto, but the words were a wash of calmness through him.
It’s true, then: they don’t have Paul and Jessica.

“This is not a child’s game we play,” the Baron rumbled. “You must know
that.” He leaned toward Leto, studying the face. It pained the Baron that this
could not be handled privately, just between the two of them. To have others see
royalty in such straits–it set a bad precedent.

Leto could feel strength returning. And now, the memory of the false tooth
stood out in his mind like a steeple in a flat landscape. The nerve-?shaped
capsule within that tooth–the poison gas–he remembered who had put the deadly
weapon in his mouth.

Yueh.

Drug-?fogged memory of seeing a limp corpse dragged past him in this room
hung like a vapor in Leto’s mind. He knew it had been Yueh.

“Do you hear that noise, Duke Leto?” the Baron asked.

Leto grew conscious of a frog sound, the burred mewling of someone’s agony.

“We caught one of your men disguised as a Fremen, ” the Baron said. “We
penetrated the disguise quite easily: the eyes, you know. He insists he was sent
among the Fremen to spy on them. I’ve lived for a time on this planet, cher
cousin. One does not spy on those ragged scum of the desert. Tell me, did you
buy their help? Did you send your woman and son to them?”

Leto felt fear tighten his chest. If Yueh sent them to the desert fold . . .
the search won’t stop until they ‘re found.

“Come, come,” the Baron said. “We don’t have much time and pain is quick.
Please don’t bring it to this, my dear Duke.” The Baron looked up at Piter who
stood at Leto’s shoulder. “Piter doesn’t have all his tools here, but I’m sure
he could improvise.”

“Improvisation is sometimes the best, Baron.”

That silky, insinuating voice! Leto heard it at his ear.

“You had an emergency plan,” the Baron said. “Where have your woman and the
boy been sent?” He looked at Leto’s hand. “Your ring is missing. Does the boy
have it?”

The Baron looked up, stared into Leto’s eyes.
“You don’t answer,” he said. “Will you force me to do a thing I do not want
to do? Piter will use simple, direct methods. I agree they’re sometimes the
best, but it’s not good that you should be subjected to such things.”

“Hot tallow on the back, perhaps, or on the eyelids,” Piter said. “Perhaps
on other portions of the body. It’s especially effective when the subject
doesn’t know where the tallow will fall next. It’s a good method and there’s a
sort of beauty in the pattern of pus-?white blisters on naked skin, eh, Baron?”

“Exquisite,” the Baron said, and his voice sounded sour.

Those touching fingers! Leto watched the fat hands, the glittering jewels on
baby-?fat hands–their compulsive wandering.

The sounds of agony coming through the door behind him gnawed at the Duke’s
nerves. Who is it they caught? he wondered. Could it have been Idaho?

“Believe me, cher cousin,” the Baron said. “I do not want it to come to
this.”

“You think of nerve couriers racing to summon help that cannot come,” Piter
said. “There’s an artistry in this, you know.”

“You’re a superb artist,” the Baron growled. “Now, have the decency to be
silent.”

Leto suddenly recalled a thing Gurney Halleck had said once, seeing a
picture of the Baron: “ ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast
rise up out of the sea . . . and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’ ”

“We waste time, Baron,” Piter said.

“Perhaps.”

The Baron nodded. “You know, my dear Leto, you’ll tell us in the end where
they are. There’s a level of pain that’ll buy you.”

He’s most likely correct, Leto thought. Were if not for the tooth . . . and
the fact that I truly don’t know where they are.

The Baron picked up a sliver of meat, pressed the morsel into his mouth,
chewed slowly, swallowed. We must try a new tack, he thought.

“Observe this prize person who denies he’s for hire,” the Baron said.
“Observe him, Piter.”

And the Baron thought: Yes! See him there, this man who believes he cannot
be bought. See him detained there by a million shares of himself sold in
dribbles every second of his life! If you took him up now and shook him, he’d
rattle inside. Emptied! Sold out! What difference how he dies now?

The frog sounds in the background stopped.

The Baron saw Umman Kudu, the guard captain, appear in the doorway across
the room, shake his head. The captive hadn’t produced the needed information.
Another failure. Time to quit stalling with this fool Duke, this stupid soft
fool who didn’t realize how much hell there was so near him–only a nerve’s
thickness away.

This thought calmed the Baron, overcoming his reluctance to have a royal
person subject to pain. He saw himself suddenly as a surgeon exercising endless
supple scissor dissections–cutting away the masks from fools, exposing the hell
beneath.

Rabbits, all of them!

And how they cowered when they saw the carnivore!

Leto stared across the table, wondering why he waited. The tooth would end
it all quickly. Still–it had been good, much of this life. He found himself
remembering an antenna kite updangling in the shell-?blue sky of Caladan, and
Paul laughing with joy at the sight of it. And he remembered sunrise here on
Arrakis–colored strata of the Shield Wall mellowed by dust haze.

“Too bad,” the Baron muttered. He pushed himself back from the table, stood
up lightly in his suspensors and hesitated, seeing a change come over the Duke.
He saw the man draw in a deep breath, the jawline stiffen, the ripple of a
muscle there as the Duke clamped his mouth shut.

How he fears me! the Baron thought.
Shocked by fear that the Baron might escape him, Leto bit sharply on the
capsule tooth, felt it break. He opened his mouth, expelled the biting vapor he
could taste as it formed on his tongue. The Baron grew smaller, a figure seen in
a tightening tunnel. Leto heard a gasp beside his ear–the silky-?voiced one:
Piter.

It got him, too!

“Piter! What’s wrong?”

The rumbling voice was far away.

Leto sensed memories rolling in his mind–the old toothless mutterings of
hags. The room, the table, the Baron, a pair of terrified eyes–blue within
blue, the eyes–all compressed around him in ruined symmetry.

There was a man with a boot-?toe chin, a toy man falling. The toy man had a
broken nose slanted to the left: an offbeat metronome caught forever at the
start of an upward stroke. Leto heard the crash of crockery–so distant–a
roaring in his ears. His mind was a bin without end, catching everything.
Everything that had ever been: every shout, every whisper, every . . . silence.

One thought remained to him. Leto saw it in formless light on rays of black:
The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes. The thought struck him
with a sense of fullness he knew he could never explain.

Silence.

The Baron stood with his back against his private door, his own bolt hole
behind the table. He had slammed it on a room full of dead men. His senses took
in guards swarming around him. Did I breathe it? he asked himself. Whatever it
was in there, did it get me, too?

Sounds returned to him . . . and reason. He heard someone shouting orders–
gas masks . . . keep a door closed . . . get blowers going.

The others fell quickly, he thought. I’m still standing. I’m still
breathing. Merciless hell! That was close!

He could analyze it now. His shield had been activated, set low but still
enough to slow molecular interchange across the field barrier. And he had been
pushing himself away from the table . . . that and Piter’s shocked gasp which
had brought the guard captain darting forward into his own doom.

Chance and the warning in a dying man’s gasp–these had saved him.

The Baron felt no gratitude to Piter. The fool had got himself killed. And
that stupid guard captain! He’d said he scoped everyone before bringing them
into the Baron’s presence! How had it been possible for the Duke . . . ? No
warning. Not even from the poison snooper over the table–until it was too late.
How?

Well, no matter now, the Baron thought, his mind firming. The next guard
captain will begin by finding answers to these questions.

He grew aware of more activity down the hall–around the corner at the other
door to that room of death. The Baron pushed himself away from his own door,
studied the lackeys around him. They stood there staring, silent, waiting for
the Baron’s reaction.

Would the Baron be angry?

And the Baron realized only a few seconds had passed since his flight from
that terrible room.

Some of the guards had weapons leveled at the door. Some were directing
their ferocity toward the empty hall that stretched away toward the noises
around the corner to their right.

A man came striding around that corner, gas mask dangling by its straps at
his neck, his eyes intent on the overhead poison snoopers that lined this
corridor. He was yellow-?haired, flat of face with green eyes. Crisp lines
radiated from his thick-?lipped mouth. He looked like some water creature
misplaced among those who walked the land.

The Baron stared at the approaching man, recalling the name: Nefud. Iakin
Nefud. Guard corporal. Nefud was addicted to semuta, the drug-?music combination
that played itself in the deepest consciousness. A useful item of information,
that.

The man stopped in front of the Baron, saluted. “Corridor’s clear, m’Lord. I
was outside watching and saw that it must be poison gas. Ventilators in your
room were pulling air in from these corridors.” He glanced up at the snooper
over the Baron’s head. “None of the stuff escaped. We have the room cleaned out
now. What are your orders?”

The Baron recognized the man’s voice–the one who’d been shouting orders.
Efficient, this corporal, he thought.

“They’re all dead in there?” the Baron asked.

“Yes, m’Lord.”

Well, we must adjust, the Baron thought.

“First,” he said, “let me congratulate you, Nefud. You’re the new captain of
my guard. And I hope you’ll take to heart the lesson to be learned from the fate
of your predecessor.”

The Baron watched the awareness grow in his newly promoted guardsman. Nefud
knew he’d never again be without his semuta.

Nefud nodded. “My Lord knows I’ll devote myself entirely to his safety.”

“Yes. Well, to business. I suspect the Duke had something in his mouth. You
will find out what that something was, how it was used, who helped him put it
there. You’ll take every precaution–”

He broke off, his chain of thought shattered by a disturbance in the
corridor behind him–guards at the door to the lift from the lower levels of the
frigate trying to hold back a tall colonel bashar who had just emerged from the
lift.

The Baron couldn’t place the colonel bashar’s face: thin with mouth like a
slash in leather, twin ink spots for eyes.

“Get your hands off me, you pack of carrion-?eaters!” the man roared, and he
dashed the guards aside.

Ah-?h-?h, one of the Sardaukar, the Baron thought.

The colonel bashar came striding toward the Baron, whose eyes went to slits
of apprehension. The Sardaukar officers filled him with unease. They all seemed
to look like relatives of the Duke . . . the late Duke. And their manners with
the Baron!

The colonel bashar planted himself half a pace in front of the Baron, hands
on hips. The guard hovered behind him in twitching uncertainty.

The Baron noted the absence of salute, the disdain in the Sardaukar’s
manner, and his unease grew. There was only the one legion of them locally–ten
brigades–reinforcing the Harkonnen legions, but the Baron did not fool himself.
That one legion was perfectly capable of turning on the Harkonnens and
overcoming them.

“Tell your men they are not to prevent me from seeing you, Baron,” the
Sardaukar growled. “My men brought you the Atreides Duke before I could discuss
his fate with you. We will discuss it now.”

I must not lose face before my men, the Baron thought.

“So?” It was a coldly controlled word, and the Baron felt proud of it.

“My Emperor has charged me to make certain his royal cousin dies cleanly
without agony,” the colonel bashar said.

“Such were the Imperial orders to me,” the Baron lied. “Did you think I’d
disobey?”

“I’m to report to my Emperor what I see with my own eyes,” the Sardaukar
said.

“The Duke’s already dead,” the Baron snapped, and he waved a hand to dismiss
the fellow.

The colonel bashar remained planted facing the Baron. Not by flicker of eye
or muscle did he acknowledge he had been dismissed. “How?” he growled.

Really! the Baron thought. This is too much.
“By his own hand, if you must know,” the Baron said. “He took poison.”

“I will see the body now,” the colonel Bashar said.

The Baron raised his gaze to the ceiling in feigned exasperation while his
thoughts raced. Damnation! This sharp-?eyed Sardaukar will see the room before a
thing’s been changed!

“Now,” the Sardaukar growled. “I’ll see it with my own eyes.”

There was no preventing it, the Baron realized. The Sardaukar would see all.
He’d know the Duke had killed Harkonnen men . . . that the Baron most likely had
escaped by a narrow margin. There was the evidence of the dinner remnants on the
table, and the dead Duke across from it with destruction around him.

No preventing it at all.

“I’ll not be put off,” the colonel bashar snarled.

“You’re not being put off,” the Baron said, and he stared into the
Sardaukar’s obsidian eyes. “I hide nothing from my Emperor.” He nodded to Nefud.
“The colonel bashar is to see everything, at once. Take him in by the door where
you stood, Nefud.”