God Emperor of Dune (3 page)
Kwuteg heard Ulot’s screams, the abrupt and potent silence, then the renewed chase-yelps of the D-wolves. He tried not to let his mind create the image of another friend being slain by Leto’s monster guardians but imagination worked its sorcery on him. Kwuteg thought a curse against the tyrant but wasted no breath to voice it. There remained a chance that he could reach the sanctuary of the Idaho River. Kwuteg knew what his friends thought about him—even Siona. He had always been known as a conservative. Even as a child he had saved his energy until it counted most, parceling out his reserves like a miser.
In spite of the injured knee, Kwuteg increased his pace. He knew the river was near. His injury had gone beyond agony into a steady flame which filled his entire leg and side with its burning. He knew the limits of his endurance. He knew also that Siona should be almost at the water. The fastest runner of them all, she carried the sealed packet and, in it, the things they had stolen from the fortress in the Sareer. Kwuteg focused his thoughts on that packet as he ran.
Save it, Siona! Use it to destroy him!
The eager whining of the D-wolves penetrated Kwuteg’s consciousness. They were too close. He knew then that he would not escape.
But Siona must escape!
He risked a backward glance and saw one of the wolves move to flank him. The pattern of their attack plan imprinted itself on his awareness. As the flanking wolf leaped Kwuteg also leaped. Placing a tree between himself and the pack, he ducked beneath the flanking wolf, grasped one of its hind legs in both hands and, without stopping, whirled the captive wolf as a flail which scattered the others. Finding the creature not as heavy as he had expected, almost welcoming the change of action, he flailed his living bludgeon at the attackers in a dervish whirl which brought two of them down in a crash of skulls. But he could not guard every side. A lean male caught him in the back, hurling him against a tree and he lost his bludgeon.
“Go!” he screamed.
The pack bored in and Kwuteg caught the throat of the lean male in his teeth. He bit down with every gram of his final desperation. Wolf blood spurted over his face, blinding him. Rolling without any knowledge of where he went, Kwuteg grappled another wolf. Part of the pack dissolved into a yelping, whirling mob, some turning against their own injured. Most of the pack remained intent on the quarry, though. Teeth ripped Kwuteg’s throat from both sides.
Siona, too, had heard Ulot scream, then the unmistakable silence followed by the yelping of the pack as the wolves resumed the chase. Such anger filled her that she felt she might explode with it. Ulot had been included in this venture because of his analytical ability, his way of seeing a whole from only a few parts. It had been Ulot who, taking the inevitable magnifier from his kit, had examined the two strange volumes they had found in with the Citadel’s plans.
“I think it’s a cipher,” Ulot had said.
And Radi, poor Radi who had been the first of their team to die… . Radi had said, “We can’t afford the extra weight. Throw them away.”
Ulot had objected: “Unimportant things aren’t concealed this way.”
Kwuteg had joined Radi. “We came for the Citadel plans and we have them. Those things are too heavy.”
But Siona had agreed with Ulot. “I will carry them.”
That had ended the argument.
Poor Ulot.
They had all known him as the worst runner in the team. Ulot was slow in most things, but the clarity of his mind could not be denied.
He is trustworthy.
Ulot
had been
trustworthy.
had been
trustworthy.
Siona mastered her anger and used its energy to increase her pace. Trees whipped past her in the moonlight. She had entered that timeless void of the running when there was nothing else but her own movements, her own body doing what it had been conditioned to do.
Men thought her beautiful when she ran. Siona knew this. Her long dark hair was tied tightly to keep it from whipping in the wind of her passage. She had accused Kwuteg of foolishness when he had refused to copy her style.
Where is Kwuteg?
Her hair was not like Kwuteg’s. It was that deep brown which is sometimes confused with black, but is not truly black, not like Kwuteg’s at all.
In the way genes occasionally do, her features copied those of a long dead ancestor: gently oval and with a generous mouth, eyes of alert awareness above a small nose. Her body had grown lanky from years of running, but it sent strong sexual signals to the males around her.
Where is Kwuteg?
The wolf pack had fallen silent and this filled her with alarm. They had done that before bringing down Radi. It had been the same when they got Setuse.
She told herself the silence could mean other things. Kwuteg, too, was silent … and strong. The injury had not appeared to bother him too much.
Siona began to feel pain in her chest, the gasping-to-come which she knew well from the long kilometers of training. Perspiration still poured down her body under the thin, black running garment. The kit, with its precious contents sealed against the river passage ahead, rode high on her back. She thought about the Citadel charts folded there.
Where does Leto hide his hoard of spice?
It had to be somewhere within the Citadel. It had to be. Somewhere in the charts there would be a clue. The melange-spice for which the Bene Gesserit, the Guild and all the others hungered … that was a prize worth this risk.
And those two cryptic volumes. Kwuteg had been right in one thing. Ridulian crystal paper was heavy. But she shared Ulot’s excitement. Something important was concealed in those lines of cipher.
Once more the eager chase-yelps of the wolves sounded in the forest behind her.
Run, Kwuteg! Run!
Now, just ahead of her through the trees, she could see the wide cleared strip which bordered the Idaho River. She glimpsed moon brightness on water beyond the clearing.
Run, Kwuteg!
She longed for a sound from Kwuteg, any sound. Only the two of them remained now from the eleven who had started the run. Nine had paid for this venture with their lives:
Radi, Aline, Ulot, Setuse, Inineg, Onemao, Hutye, Memar and Oala.
Radi, Aline, Ulot, Setuse, Inineg, Onemao, Hutye, Memar and Oala.
Siona thought their names and with each sent a silent prayer to the old gods, not to the tyrant Leto. Especially, she prayed to Shai-Hulud.
I pray to Shai-Hulud, who lives in the sand.
Abruptly, she was out of the forest and onto the moon-bright stretch of mowed ground along the river. Straight ahead beyond a narrow shingle of beach, the water beckoned to her. The beach was silver against the oily flow.
A loud yell from back in the trees almost made her falter. She recognized Kwuteg’s voice above the wild wolf sounds. Kwuteg called out to her without name, an unmistakable cry with one word containing countless conversations—a message of death and life.
“Go!”
The pack sounds took on a terrible commotion of frenzied yelps, but nothing more from Kwuteg. She knew then how Kwuteg was spending the last energies of his life.
Delaying them to help me escape.
Obeying Kwuteg’s cry, she dashed to the river’s edge and plunged head-first into the water. The river was a freezing shock after the heat of the run. It stunned her for a moment and she floundered outward, struggling to swim and regain her breath. The precious kit floated and bumped against the back of her head.
The Idaho River was not wide here, no more than fifty meters, a gently sweeping curve with sandy indentations fringed by roots and shelving banks of lush reeds and grass where the water refused to stay in the straight lines Leto’s engineers had designed. Siona was strengthened by the knowledge that the D-wolves had been conditioned to stop at the water. Their territorial boundaries had been drawn, the river on this side and the desert wall on the other side. Still, she swam the last few meters underwater and surfaced in the shadows of a cutbank before turning and looking back.
The wolf pack stood ranged along the bank, all except one which had come down to the river’s edge. It leaned forward with its forefeet almost into the flow. She heard it whine.
Siona knew the wolf saw her. No doubt of that. D-wolves were noted for their keen eyesight. There were Gaze Hounds in the ancestry of Leto’s forest guardians and he bred the wolves for their eyesight. She wondered if this once the wolves might break through their conditioning. They were mostly sight-hunters. If that one wolf at the river’s edge should enter the water, all might follow. Siona held her breath. She felt the dragging of exhaustion. They had come almost thirty kilometers, the last half of it with the D-wolves close behind.
The wolf at the river’s edge whined once more then leaped back up to its companions. At some silent signal, they turned and loped back into the forest.
Siona knew where they would go. D-wolves were allowed to eat anything they brought down in the Forbidden Forest. Everyone knew this. It was why the wolves roamed the forest—the guardians of the Sareer.
“You’ll pay for this, Leto,” she whispered. It was a low sound, her voice, very close to the quiet rustling of the water against the reeds just behind her. “You’ll pay for Ulot, for Kwuteg and for all the others. You’ll pay.”
She pushed outward gently and drifted with the current until her feet met the first shelving of a narrow beach. Slowly, her body dragged down by fatigue, she climbed from the water and paused to check that the sealed contents of her kit had remained dry. The seal was unbroken. She stared at it a moment in the moonlight, then lifted her gaze to the forest wall across the river.
The price we paid. Ten dear friends.
Tears glimmered in her eyes, but she had the stuff of the ancient Fremen and her tears were few. The venture across the river, directly through the forest while the wolves patrolled the northern boundaries, then across the Last Desert of the Sareer and over the Citadel’s ramparts—all of this already was assuming dream proportions in her mind … even the flight from the wolves which she had anticipated because it was a certainty that the guardian pack would cross the track of the invaders and be waiting … all a dream. It was the past.
I escaped.
She restored the kit with its sealed packet and fastened it once more against her back.
I have broken through your defenses, Leto.
Siona thought then about the cryptic volumes. She felt certain that something hidden in those lines of cipher would open the way for her revenge.
I will destroy you, Leto!
Not
We will destroy you!
That was not Siona’s way. She would do it herself.
We will destroy you!
That was not Siona’s way. She would do it herself.
She turned and strode toward the orchards beyond the river’s mowed border. As she walked she repeated her oath, adding to it aloud the old Fremen formula which terminated in her full name:
“Siona Ibn Fuad al-Seyefa Atreides it is who curses you, Leto. You will pay in full!”
The following is from the Hadi Benotto translation of the volumes discovered at Dar-es-Balat:
I was born Leto Atreides II more than three thousand standard years ago, measuring from the moment when I cause these words to be printed. My father was Paul Muad’Dib. My mother was his Fremen consort, Chani. My maternal grandmother was Faroula, a noted herbalist among the Fremen. My paternal grandmother was Jessica, a product of the Bene Gesserit breeding scheme in their search for a male who could share the powers of the Sisterhood’s Reverend Mothers. My maternal grandfather was Liet-Kynes, the planetologist who organized the ecological transformation of Arrakis. My paternal grandfather was
The
Atreides, descendant of the House of Atreus and tracing his ancestry directly back to the Greek original.
The
Atreides, descendant of the House of Atreus and tracing his ancestry directly back to the Greek original.
Enough of these begats!
My paternal grandfather died as many good Greeks did, attempting to kill his mortal enemy, the old Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Both of them rest uncomfortably now in my ancestral memories. Even my father is not content. I have done what he feared to do and now his shade must share in the consequences.
The Golden Path demands it. And what is the Golden Path? you ask. It is the survival of humankind, nothing more nor less. We who have prescience, we who know the pitfalls in our human futures, this has always been our responsibility.
Survival.
How you feel about this—your petty woes and joys, even your agonies and raptures—seldom concerns us. My father had this power. I have it stronger. We can peer now and again through the veils of Time.
This planet of Arrakis from which I direct my multigalactic Empire is no longer what it was in the days when it was known as Dune. In those days, the entire planet was a desert. Now, there is just this little remnant, my Sareer. No longer does the giant sandworm roam free, producing the spice melange. The spice! Dune was noteworthy only as the source of melange,
the only source.
What an extraordinary substance. No laboratory has ever been able to duplicate it. And it is the most valuable substance humankind has ever found.
the only source.
What an extraordinary substance. No laboratory has ever been able to duplicate it. And it is the most valuable substance humankind has ever found.
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