Dune: House Harkonnen

by Brian Herbert; Kevin J. Anderson

  Standing with Faroula in the midst of her vigil, Liet whispered to his friend, telling stories of Salusa Secundus, recalling the times the two had raided Harkonnen troops, when they had acted as bait to kill the enemy scouts who’d poisoned the wells of Bilar Camp.

  Still, Warrick lay unmoving, day after day, hour after hour.

  Faroula bowed her head and said in a voice that barely managed to escape her throat, “What have we done to offend Shai-Hulud? Why are we punished like this?”

  During the heavy silence in which Liet tried to find an answer for her, Warrick stirred on the pallet. Faroula gasped and took a half step back. Then her husband sat up. His lidless eyes flickered, as if focusing on the far wall.

  And he spoke, moving the sinews that held his jaws together. His teeth and his corrugated tongue stirred, forming harsh words.

  “I have seen a vision. Now I understand what I must do.”

  • • •

  For days Warrick shambled, slow but determined, through the passageways of the sietch. Blinded by the sand, he found his way by touch, seeing with inner mystical eyes. Keeping to the shadows, he looked like a mockery of a corpse. He spoke in a low, papery voice, but his words had a compelling edge.

  People wanted to run, but could not tear themselves away as he intoned, “When I was engulfed by the storm, at the moment I should have encountered death, a voice whispered to me from the sand-laden wind. It was Shai-Hulud himself, telling me why I must endure this tribulation.”

  Faroula, still wearing yellow, tried to drag her husband back to their quarters.

  Though the Fremen avoided speaking to him, they were drawn to listen. If ever a man could receive a holy vision, might it not be Warrick, after what he had endured in the maw of a storm? Was it just a coincidence that he had lived through what no other man had ever survived? Or did it prove that Shai-Hulud had plans for him, a thread in a cosmic tapestry? If ever they had seen a man touched by the fiery finger of God, Warrick was such a one.

  Staring ahead, he walked compulsively into the chambers where Heinar sat on a mat with the Council of Elders. The Fremen fell silent, unsure how to respond. Warrick stood just inside the chamber doorway.

  “You must drown a Maker,” he said. “Call the Sayyadina, and have her witness the ceremony of the Water of Life. I must transform it . . . so that I may proceed with my work.” He turned away with his shuffling gait, leaving Heinar and his companions appalled and confused.

  No man had ever taken the Water of Life and survived. It was a substance for Reverend Mothers, a magical, poisonous concoction that was fatal to anyone not prepared.

  Unswerving, Warrick walked into a common chamber where adolescents trampled raw spice in tubs; unmarried women curded melange distillate for the production of plastics and fuel. Against the walls, the whing and slap of a power loom made a hypnotic rhythm. Other Fremen labored meticulously on stillsuits, repairing and checking the intricate mechanisms.

  Solar-powered cookstoves heated a healthy gruel and mash, which the sietch members ate for a light midday meal; larger feasts occurred only after sundown, when dusk had cooled the desert. An old man with a nasal voice sang a sad lament, recounting the centuries of aimless journeys the Zensunni had endured before finally arriving on the desert planet. Liet-Kynes sat listlessly with two of Stilgar’s guerrilla fighters, drinking spice coffee.

  All activity stopped when Warrick arrived and began to talk. “I have seen a green Dune, a paradise. Even Umma Kynes does not know the grandeur that Shai-Hulud revealed to me.” His voice was like a cold wind through an open cave. “I have heard the Voice from the Outer World. I have had a vision of the Lisan al-Gaib, for whom we have waited. I have seen the way, as promised by legend, as promised by the Sayyadina.”

  The Fremen murmured at his audacity. They had heard the prophecy, knew that such a one was foretold. The Reverend Mothers had taught it for centuries, and legend had passed from tribe to tribe, generation to generation. The Fremen had waited so long that some were skeptical, but others were convinced— and fearful.

  “I must drink the Water of Life. I have seen the path.”

  Liet led his friend away from the communal chamber, back to his own rooms, where Faroula sat talking with her father. Looking up at her husband as he entered, her face was drawn with resignation and her eyes red with weeks of tears. On a carpet nearby, her baby son began to cry.

  Seeing Warrick and Liet together, the old Naib turned back to his daughter. “This is as it must be, Faroula,” Heinar said. “The elders have decided. It is a tremendous sacrifice, but if . . . if he is the one, if he is truly the Lisan al-Gaib, we must do as he says. We will give him the Water of Life.”

  • • •

  Liet and Faroula both tried to talk Warrick out of his obsession, but the scarred man persisted in his belief. He stared with lidless eyes, but could not meet their gaze. “It is my mashhad and my mihna. My spiritual test and my religious test.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t just strange sounds you heard in the wind?” Liet insisted. “Warrick, how do you know you’re not being deceived?”

  “Because I know.” And in the beatific face of his conviction, they had no choice but to believe him.

  Old Reverend Mother Ramallo journeyed from a distant sietch to preside over the ceremony, to prepare. Fremen men took their captive small worm, only ten meters in length, and wrestled it down, drowning it in water taken from a qanat. As the worm died and exhaled its poisonous bile, the Fremen gathered the liquid into a flexible jug and prepared it for the ceremony.

  In the midst of the commotion, Planetologist Kynes returned from his plantings, but was so focused on his own concerns that he did not grasp the significance of the event, only that it was important. He voiced awkward apologies to his son, expressing sadness over what had happened to Warrick . . . but Liet could see that planet-scale calculations and assessments continued in the back of his mind. His terraforming project could not rest for one moment, not even for the chance that Warrick might be the long-foretold messiah who would unify the Fremen into a fighting force.

  The population of Red Wall Sietch gathered in their huge meeting chamber. High above, on the open platform where Heinar addressed his tribe, Warrick stepped forth. The disfigured man was accompanied by the Naib and the powerful Sayyadina who had served these people for several generations. Old Ramallo looked as toughened and hard as a desert lizard who would hold her own against a hunting hawk.

  The Sayyadina summoned the watermasters and intoned the ritual words; the Fremen repeated them, but with a greater anxiety than usual. Some truly believed Warrick was everything he claimed to be; others could do no more than hope.

  Murmurs filled the chamber. Under normal circumstances, partaking in the tau orgy was a joyous event, celebrated only at times of great import: after a victory against Harkonnens or the discovery of a huge spice deposit or surviving a natural disaster.

  This time, though, the Fremen knew what was at stake.

  They looked at the mutilated face of Warrick as he stood, impassive and determined. They watched with hope and fear, wondering if he would change their lives . . . or fail horribly, as had other men in generations past.

  In the audience Liet stood beside Faroula and her baby, observing from the foremost tiers. Her lips were tight in a tense frown, her eyes closed in fearful anticipation. Liet could sense fear radiating from her, and he wanted to comfort her. Was she afraid that the poison would kill her husband . . . or rather afraid that he might survive and continue his painful daily life?

  Sayyadina Ramallo finished her benediction and handed the flask to Warrick. “Let Shai-Hulud judge now if your vision is true— if you are the Lisan al-Gaib, whom we have sought for so long.”

  “I have seen the Lisan al-Gaib,” Warrick said, then lowered his voice so that only the old woman could hear. “I did not say it was me.”

  The exposed bones and tendons on Warrick’s hands moved as he grasped the flexible nozzle and tilted
it toward his lips. Ramallo squeezed the sides of the bag, squirting a gush of poison into Warrick’s mouth.

  He swallowed convulsively, then swallowed again.

  The Fremen audience fell silent, a humming mass of humanity who tried to comprehend. Liet thought he could hear their hearts beating in unison. He experienced the whisper of each indrawn breath, sensed the blood pounding in his own ears. He waited and watched.

  “The hawk and the mouse are the same,” Warrick said, peering into the future.

  Within moments, the Water of Life began to do its work.

  • • •

  All of Warrick’s previous suffering, all the terrible anguish he had endured in the storm and afterward, were only prelude to the horrific death that awaited him. The poison pervaded the cells of his body, setting them afire.

  The Fremen believed that the disfigured man’s spiritual vision had deluded him. He raved and thrashed. “They do not know what they have created. Born of water, dies in sand!”

  Sayyadina Ramallo stepped back, like a predatory bird seeing prey turn on her. What does this mean?

  “They think they can control him . . . but they are deluded.”

  She chose her words carefully, interpreting them through her ancient, half-forgotten filter of the Panoplia Propheticus. “He says he can see where others cannot. He has seen the way.”

  “Lisan al-Gaib! He will be everything we dreamed.” Warrick retched so hard that his ribs cracked like kindling. Blood came from his mouth. “But nothing like we expected.”

  The Sayyadina raised her clawlike hands. “He has seen the Lisan al-Gaib. He is coming, and he will be everything we dreamed.”

  Warrick screamed until he had no more voice to utter a sound, twitched and kicked and thrashed until he had no more muscle control, until his brain was eaten away. The villagers of Bilar Camp had consumed heavily diluted Water of Life, and had still died in terrible agony. For Warrick, even such an insane death would have been a mercy.

  “The hawk and the mouse are the same!”

  Unable to help him, the Fremen could only watch in appalled dismay. Warrick’s death convulsions lasted for hours and hours . . . but Ramallo took far longer to interpret the disturbing visions he had seen.

  The stone is heavy and the sand weighty; but a fool’s wrath is heavier than them both.

  — DUKE LETO ATREIDES

  When a grim and unsettled Dominic Vernius returned to the polar base on Arrakis, his men rushed to greet him. Seeing the man’s expression, though, they knew their leader did not bear welcome news.

  Under the bald pate and heavy brow, his eyes were haunted, deep-set in shadowed hollows; his once-bronzed skin had aged prematurely, as if all the color and spirit had been scrubbed from him, leaving him with only an iron will. His last thread of hope had been severed, and now vengeance burned in his gaze.

  Bundled in a heavy synfur coat open at the front to reveal his mat of white chest hair, the veteran Asuyo stood on the landing platform, his expression lined with concern. He scratched his bristly shock of hair. “What is it, Dom? What’s happened, eh?”

  Dominic Vernius just stared at the towering walls of the crevasse that rose like a fortress around him. “I have seen things no Ixian should have to witness. My beloved world is as dead as my wife.”

  In a daze, he walked from his empty ship into the warren of passages that his men had drilled into the frozen walls. More smugglers greeted him, asked him for tidings . . . but he continued without answering. In confusion, the men whispered.

  Aimless, Dominic wandered from one passage to another. He trailed his fingertips along the polymer-sealed walls, imagining the caves of Ix. Coming to a stop, he drew a deep breath, and let his gaze fall half-closed. Through sheer force of will, he tried to summon the glory of House Vernius behind his eyelids, the wonders of the underground city of Vernii, the Grand Palais, the inverted stalactite buildings of crystalline architecture.

  Despite centuries of fierce competition from Richese, Ixians had been the undisputed masters of technology and innovation. But in only a few years the Tleilaxu had gutted those accomplishments, closed access to Ix, even driven off the Guild Bank, causing financiers to deal through off-world headquarters of Tleilaxu choosing. . . .

  In his prime, during the revolt on Ecaz, Dominic Vernius had given everything for his Emperor. He’d fought and sweated and bled to defend Corrino honor. So long ago, as if in another lifetime . . .

  Back then, the Ecazi separatists had seemed to be misguided dreamers, violent yet naive guerrillas who needed to be crushed into submission, lest they set a bad precedent for other uneasy worlds in the galactic Imperium.

  Dominic had lost many good men in those struggles. He had buried comrades. He had seen the painful deaths of soldiers who followed his orders into battle. He remembered rushing across the stubbled field of a burned forest beside Johdam’s brother, a brave and fast-thinking man. Yelling, weapons pointed ahead, they had fired into the nest of resistance fighters. Johdam’s brother had dropped to the ground. Dominic thought he’d tripped on a blackened root, but when he bent to pull the other man to his feet, he found only a smoldering neck stump from a photonic artillery blast. . . .

  Dominic had won the battle that day, at the cost of nearly a third of his men. His troops had succeeded in wiping out the Ecazi rebels, and for that, he had received accolades. The fallen soldiers had received mass graves on a planet far from their homes.

  The Corrinos did not deserve such sacrifices.

  The CHOAM directorship of House Vernius had been expanded because of his great deeds. At the victory celebrations, with a very young Archduke Ecaz seated once again on the Mahogany Throne, he’d been a revered guest on Kaitain. At Elrood’s side, Dominic had strolled through halls brimming with crystal, precious metals, and polished woods. He’d sat at feasting tables that seemed to stretch for kilometers, while crowds outside cheered his name. He’d stood proudly below the Golden Lion Throne while the Emperor presented him with the Medal of Valor, and other medals for his lieutenants.

  Dominic had emerged as a famous hero from those battles, earning the undying loyalty of his men— as they had shown him for years now, even here in this squalid place. No, the Corrinos deserved none of that.

  What are you thinking, Dominic? The voice seemed to whisper in his head, a soft musical tone that was oddly familiar . . . yet nearly forgotten.

  Shando. But it could not be. What are you thinking, Dominic?

  “What I saw on Ix drove away the last vestiges of my fear. It killed my restraint,” he said aloud, but in a quiet voice so that no one heard him . . . no one but the ethereal presence of his lovely Lady. “I’ve decided to do something, my love— something I should have done twenty years ago.”

  • • •

  In the months-long Antarctic day, Dominic did not mark the passage of hours or weeks on his chronometer. Shortly after he returned from Ix, with plans formed like stone sculptures in his mind, he went out alone. Dressed in worker’s clothes, he requested an audience with the water merchant, Rondo Tuek.

  The smugglers paid handsomely for Tuek’s silence every month, and the industrial baron arranged secret connections with the Guild for transport to other worlds. Dominic had never been interested in turning a profit and only stole solaris from the Imperial treasury in order to sabotage the Corrino name, so he’d never regretted paying the bribes. He spent what was necessary to do what he needed to do.

  None of the off-worlders at the water-processing factory recognized him, though some gave Dominic disapproving glances when he strode into the complex and insisted on seeing the water merchant.

  Tuek recognized him, but did not manage to cover his expression of shock. “It’s been years since you’ve shown your face here.”

  “I need your help,” Dominic said. “I want to purchase more services.”

  Rondo Tuek smiled, his wide-set eyes glimmering. He scratched the thick tuft of hair on the left side of his head. “Always happy to s
ell.” He gestured to a corridor. “This way, please.”

  As they rounded a bend, Dominic saw a man approaching. His heavy white parka was open at the front, and he carried a plex-file pack, which he flipped through as he walked. He had his head down.

  “Lingar Bewt,” Tuek said, his tone bemused. “Watch out or he’ll run into you.”

  Though Dominic tried to avoid him, the man wasn’t paying attention and brushed against Dominic anyway. Bewt leaned over to retrieve a dropped plex-file. His face, bland and round, was deeply tanned. He looked soft around the chin and the belly— definitely not military material.

  As the preoccupied man hurried on his way, Tuek said, “Bewt handles all my accounting and shipping. Don’t know what I’d do without him.”

  Inside Tuek’s locked personal offices, Dominic barely noticed the treasures, the wall hangings, the artwork.

  “I require a transport ship. Unmarked, a heavy hauler. I need to get it on board a Heighliner with no mention of my name.”

  Tuek folded his splayed hands together and blinked repeatedly. A slight tic in his neck caused his head to twitch from side to side. “You’ve found a large strike, then? How much spice did you get?” The squat man leaned forward. “I can help you sell it. I have my connections—”

  Dominic cut him off. “Not spice. And there’s no percentage in it for you. This is a . . . personal matter.”

  Disappointed, Tuek sat back, his shoulders slumping. “All right, then. For a price— which we can negotiate— I’ll find a big hauler. We will provide whatever you require. Let me contact the Guild and arrange for passage aboard the next Heighliner. Where’s your final destination?”

  Dominic looked away. “Kaitain, of course . . . the den of the Corrinos.” Then he blinked and sat up stiffly. “But then, that’s none of your business, Tuek.”

  “No,” the water merchant agreed, shaking his head. “None of my business.” A troubled expression crossed his face, and he distracted his guest as he shuffled papers and attended to the useless business cluttering his office. “Come back in a week, Dominic, and I will give you all the equipment you need. Shall we establish a price now?”