Heretics of Dune dc-5

by Frank Herbert

  She passed her handlight across each body as she went. They had been stabbed almost identically. A slashing blade had been thrust upward just below the arch of the sternum.

  Ritual killings?

  Dryly puckered flesh had been withdrawn from the wounds, leaving a dark spot to mark them. These bodies were not from Fremen times, Odrade knew. Fremen death stills made ashes of all flesh to recover a body's water.

  Odrade probed ahead with her light and paused to consider her position. Discovery of the bodies intensified her sense of peril. I should have brought a weapon. But that would have aroused Waff's suspicions.

  The persistence of that inner warning could not be evaded. This relic of Sietch Tabr was perilous.

  The beam of her light revealed another stairway at the end of this hall. Cautiously, Odrade moved forward. At the first step, she sent the beam of her light probing upward. Shallow steps. Only a little way up, more rock - a wider space up there. Odrade turned and sent the light stabbing around this hallway. Chips and burn marks scarred the rock walls. Once more, she looked up the stairway.

  What is up there?

  The sense of danger was intense.

  One slow step at a time, pausing often, Odrade climbed. She emerged into a larger passage hewn through the native rock. More bodies greeted her. These had been abandoned in the disarray of their final moments. Again, she saw only mummified flesh stripped of clothing. They lay scattered along this wider passage - twenty of them. She wove her way around them. Some had been stabbed in the same way as the five on the lower level. Some had been slashed and hacked and burned by lasgun beams. One had been beheaded and the skin-masked skull lay against a wall of the passage like a ball abandoned from some terrible game.

  This new passage led straight ahead past openings into small chambers on both sides. She saw nothing of value in the small chambers where she sent her probing light: a few scattered strands of spice fiber, small spills of melted rock, melt bubbles occasionally on floors, walls, and ceilings.

  What violence was this?

  Suggestive stains could be seen on some of the chamber floors. Spilled blood? One chamber had a tiny mound of brown cloth in a corner. Scraps of torn fabric scattered under Odrade's foot.

  There was dust. Dust everywhere. Her feet stirred it up in passing.

  The passage ended at an archway that gave onto a deep ledge. She sent her light beyond the ledge: an enormous chamber, far larger than the one down below. Its curved ceiling went so high she knew it must extend into the rock base of the great wall. Wide, shallow steps led down from the ledge onto the chamber floor. Hesitantly, Odrade went down the steps and out onto the floor. She sent her light sweeping all around. Other passages led out of the great chamber. Some, she saw, had been blocked by stone and the stones torn away to be left scattered on the ledge and on this great floor.

  Odrade sniffed the air. Carried on the dust stirred up by her feet there was a definite smell of melange. The smell wove through her sense of peril. She wanted to leave, hurry back to the others. But the danger was a beacon. She had to learn where that beacon led.

  She knew where she was now, though. This was the great gathering chamber of Sietch Tabr, site of countless Fremen spice orgies and tribal convocations. Here, the Naib Stilgar had presided. Gurney Halleck had been here. The Lady Jessica. Paul Muad'dib. Chani, mother of Ghanima. Here, Muad'dib trained his fighters. The original Duncan Idaho was here... and the first Idaho ghola!

  Why have we been brought here? What is the danger?

  It was here, right here! She could feel it. In this place, the Tyrant had concealed a spice hoard. Bene Gesserit records said the hoard had filled this entire chamber to the ceiling and into many of the surrounding passages as well.

  Odrade pivoted, her gaze following the path of her light. Over there was the ledge of the Naibs. And there, the deeper Royal Ledge Muad'dib had commissioned.

  And there is the archway where I entered.

  She sent her light along the floor, noting places where searchers had chipped and burned the rock seeking more of the Tyrant's fabulous hoard. Fish Speakers had taken most of that melange, its hiding place revealed by the Idaho ghola who had been consort of the famed Siona. The records said subsequent searchers had found more caches hidden behind false walls and floors. There were many authenticated accounts and the verifications of Other Memories. The Famine Times had seen violence here when desperate searchers won through to this place. That might explain the bodies. Many had fought just for the chance to search Sietch Tabr.

  As she had been taught, Odrade tried to use her sense of danger as a guide. Did the miasma of past violence cling to these stones after all of those millennia? That was not her warning. Her warning was something immediate. Odrade's left foot encountered an uneven place on the floor. Her light picked out a dark line in the dust. She scattered the dust with a foot, revealing a letter and then an entire word burned in a flowing script.

  Odrade read the word silently and then aloud.

  "Arafel."

  She knew this word. Reverend Mothers of the Tyrant's time had impressed it into the Bene Gesserit consciousness, tracing its roots out to the most ancient sources.

  "Arafel: the cloud darkness at the end of the universe."

  Odrade felt the gasping accumulation of her warning sense. It focused on that single word.

  "The Tyrant's holy judgment," the priests called that word. "The cloud darkness of holy judgment!"

  She moved out along the word, staring down at it, noting the curling at the end that trailed off into a small arrow. She looked where the arrow pointed. Someone else had seen the arrow and had cut into the ledge where it pointed. Odrade crossed to where the searcher's burner had left a darker pool of melted rock on the chamber floor. Streams of melted stone ran out in fingers away from the ledge, each finger trailing from a deep hole burned into the rock of the ledge.

  Bending, Odrade peered into each hole with her light: Nothing. She sensed the treasure hunter's excitement riding on her warning-fear. The extent of the wealth this chamber had once held staggered imagination. In the worst of the old times, a hand-carried luggage case could hold enough spice to buy a planet. And the Fish Speakers had squandered this hoard, losing it in squabbles and shattering misjudgments and ordinary foolishness too picayune for history to record. They had been glad to accept Ixian alliance when the Tleilaxu broke the melange monopoly.

  Did the searchers find it all? The Tyrant was superbly clever.

  Arafel.

  At the end of the universe.

  Had he sent a message down the eons to the Bene Gesserit of today?

  She cast the beam of her light once more around the chamber and then upward.

  The ceiling described an almost perfect half globe overhead. It had been intended, she knew, as a model of the night sky seen from the entrance to Sietch Tabr. But even by the time of Liet Kynes, the first planetologist here, the original stars painted on that ceiling had been gone, lost in the tiny rock chippings of small quakes and the everyday abrasions of life.

  Odrade's breath quickened. The sense of peril had never been greater. The danger beacon shone within her! Quickly, she trotted directly across to the steps where she had descended to this floor. Turning there, she cast backward in her mind for Other Memories to limn this place. They came slowly, forcing past that heart-pounding sense of doom. Pointing the beam of her light upward and peering along it, Odrade placed those ancient memories over the scene in front of her.

  Bits of reflected brilliance! '

  Other Memories positioned them: indicators of the stars in a long-gone sky and right there! The silvery-yellow half circle of the Arrakeen sun. She knew it for a sunset sign.

  The Fremen day starts at night.

  Arafel!

  Keeping her light on that sunset marker, she mounted the steps backward and went around the chamber on the ledge to the exact position she had seen in Other Memories.

  Nothing remained of that ancient sun arc.<
br />
  Searchers had chipped at the wall where it had been. Stone bubbles glistened where a burner had been passed along the wall. No breaks entered the original rock.

  By the tightness in her chest, Odrade knew she teetered on the edge of a dangerous discovery. The beacon had led her here!

  Arafel... at the edge of the universe. Beyond the setting sun!

  She swept her light right and left. Another passage entrance opened on her left. Stones that had blocked it lay scattered on the ledge. Her heart pounding, Odrade slipped through the opening and found a short hall plugged with melted stone at the end. On her right, directly behind where the sunset marker had been, she found a small room thick with the smell of melange. Odrade entered the room and saw more signs of chipping and burning on walls and ceiling. The danger sense was oppressive here. She chanted the Litany Against Fear silently while she swept the beam of her light over the room. The place was almost square, about two meters on a side. The ceiling was less than half a meter above her head. Cinnamon pulsed in her nostrils. She sneezed and, blinking, saw a tiny discoloration on the floor beside the threshold.

  More marks of that ancient search?

  Bending close with her light held at a sharp angle on one side, she saw that she had glimpsed only the shadow of something etched deeply into the rock. Dust concealed most of it. She knelt and brushed the dust aside. Very thin etching and very deep. Whatever this was, it had been meant to endure. The last message of a lost Reverend Mother? This was a known Bene Gesserit artifice. She pressed sensitive fingertips against the etching and reconstructed its tracery in her mind.

  Recognition leaped into her awareness: one word - inscribed in ancient Chakobsa, "Here."

  This was no ordinary "here" to mark an ordinary place but the accented and emphatic "here" that said: "You have found me!" Her hammering heart emphasized it.

  Odrade rested her handlight on the floor near her right knee and let her fingers explore the threshold beside that ancient summons. The stonework appeared unbroken to the eye but her fingers detected a tiny discontinuity. She pressed the discontinuity, twisted, turned, changed the angle of pressure several times and repeated her effort.

  Nothing.

  Sitting back on her heels, Odrade studied the situation.

  "Here."

  The warning sense had grown even more acute. She could feel it as a pressure on her breathing.

  Withdrawing slightly, she pulled her light back and lay full length on the floor to stare narrowly along the base of the threshold. Here! Could she place a tool there beside that word and lever the threshold? No... a tool was not indicated. This thing had the smell of the Tyrant, not of a Reverend Mother. She tried to push the threshold sideways. Nothing moved.

  Feeling the tensions and danger sense accentuated by frustration, Odrade stood and kicked at the threshold beside the etched word. It moved! Something grated roughly against sand over her head.

  Odrade dodged backward as sand cascaded onto the floor in front of her. A deep rumbling sound filled the tiny chamber. The stones shook under her feet. The floor tipped downward in front of her toward the doorway, opening a space under the door and its wall.

  Once more, Odrade found herself precipitated forward and down into an unknown. Her light tumbled with her, its beam rolling over and over. She saw mounds of dark reddish brown in front of her. Cinnamon filled her nostrils.

  She fell beside her light onto a soft mounding of melange. The opening through which she had fallen lay out of reach some five meters overhead. She grabbed up her light. Its beam picked out wide stone steps cut into the rock beside the opening. Something written on the risers but she saw only that there was a way out. Her first panic subsided, but the sense of danger left her almost breathless, forcing the movements of her chest muscles.

  Left and right she sent the beam of her light into this place where she had fallen. It was a long room directly beneath the passage she had taken from the great chamber. The entire length of it was piled with melange!

  Odrade probed upward with her light and saw why no searcher tapping on that passage floor overhead had detected this chamber. Criss-crossed rock bracings transferred all strain deep into the stone walls. Anyone tapping overhead would get back the sounds of solid rock.

  Once more, Odrade looked at the melange around her. Even at today's tank-deflated prices, she knew she was standing on a treasure. This hoard would measure many long tons.

  Is that the danger?

  The warning sense within her remained just as acute as ever. The Tyrant's melange was not what she should fear. The triumvirate would make an equitable distribution of this lot and that would be the end of it. A bonus in the ghola project.

  Another danger remained. She could not avoid the warning.

  Again, she sent the light beam along the mounded melange. Her attention was drawn to the strip of wall above the spice. More words! Still in Chakobsa, written with a cutter in a fine flowing script, there was another message:

  "A REVEREND MOTHER WILL READ MY WORDS!"

  Something cold settled in Odrade's guts. She moved to her right with the light, plowing through an empire's ransom in melange. There was more to the message:

  "I BEQUEATH TO YOU MY FEAR AND LONELINESS. TO YOU I GIVE THE CERTAINTY THAT THE BODY AND SOUL OF THE BENE GESSERIT WILL MEET THE SAME FATE AS ALL OTHER BODIES AND ALL OTHER SOULS."

  Another paragraph of the message beckoned to the right of this one. She plowed through the cloying melange and stopped to read.

  "WHAT IS SURVIVAL IF YOU DO NOT SURVIVE WHOLE? ASK THE BENE TLEILAX THAT! WHAT IF YOU NO LONGER HEAR THE MUSIC OF LIFE? MEMORIES ARE NOT ENOUGH UNLESS THEY CALL YOU TO NOBLE PURPOSE!"

  There was more of it on the narrow end wall of the long chamber. Odrade stumbled through the melange and knelt to read:

  "WHY DID YOUR SISTERHOOD NOT BUILD THE GOLDEN PATH? YOU KNEW THE NECESSITY. YOUR FAILURE CONDEMNED ME, THE GOD EMPEROR, TO MILLENNIA OF PERSONAL DESPAIR."

  The words "God Emperor" were not in Chakobsa but in the language of the Islamiyat, where they conveyed an explicit second meaning to any speaker of that tongue:

  "Your God and Your Emperor because you made me so."

  Odrade smiled grimly. That would drive Waff into a religious frenzy! The higher he went, the easier to shatter his security.

  She did not doubt the accuracy of the Tyrant's accusation, nor the potential in his prediction that the Sisterhood could end. The sense of danger had led her to this place unerringly. Something more had been at work, too. The worms of Rakis still moved to the Tyrant's ancient beat. He might slumber in his endless dream but monstrous life, a pearl in each worm to remind it, carried on as the Tyrant had predicted.

  What was it he had told the Sisterhood in his own time? She recalled his words:

  "When I am gone, they must call me Shaitan, Emperor of Gehenna. The wheel must turn and turn along the Golden Path."

  Yes - that was what Taraza had meant. "But don't you see? The common people of Rakis have been calling him Shaitan for more than a thousand years."

  So Taraza had known this thing. Without ever seeing these words, she had known.

  I see your design, Taraza. And now I know the burden of fear you have carried all these years. I can feel it every bit as deeply as you do.

  Odrade knew then that this warning sense would not leave until she ended, or the Sisterhood vanished from existence, or the peril was resolved.

  Odrade lifted her light, got to her feet and slogged through the melange to the wide steps out of this place. At the steps, she recoiled. More of the Tyrant's words had been cut into each riser. Trembling, she read them as they moved upward to the opening.

  "MY WORDS ARE YOUR PAST, MY QUESTIONS ARE SIMPLE:

  "WITH WHOM DO YOU ALLY?

  "WITH THE SELF-IDOLATORS OF TLEILAX?

  "WITH MY FISH SPEAKER BUREAUCRACY?

  "WITH THE COSMOS-WANDERING GUILD?

  "WITH HARKONNEN BLOOD SACRIFICERS?

  "WITH A DOGMATIC SI
NK OF YOUR OWN CREATION?

  "HOW WILL YOU MEET YOUR END?

  "AS NO MORE THAN A SECRET SOCIETY?"

  Odrade climbed past the questions, reading them a second time as she went. Noble purpose? What a fragile thing that always was. And how easily distorted. But the power was there immersed in constant peril. It was all spelled out on the walls and stairs of that chamber. Taraza knew without having it explained. The Tyrant's meaning was clear:

  "Join me!"

  As she emerged into the small room, finding a narrow ledge along which she could swing herself to the door, Odrade looked down at the treasure she had found. She shook her head in wonder at Taraza's wisdom. So that was how the Sisterhood might end. Taraza's design was clear, all the pieces in place. Nothing certain. Wealth and power, it was all the same in the end. The noble design had been started and it must be completed even if that meant the death of the Sisterhood.

  ***

  What poor tools we have chosen!

  That girl waiting back there in the deep chamber below the desert, that girl and the ghola being prepared on Rakis.

  I speak your language now, old worm. It has no words but I know the heart of it.

  Our fathers ate manna in the desert,

  In the burning place where whirlwinds came.

  Lord, save us from that horrible land!

  Save us, oh-h-h-h-h save us

  From that dry and thirsty land.

  - Songs of Gurney Halleck, Museum of Dar-es-Balat

  Teg and Duncan, both heavily armed, emerged from the no-globe with Lucilla into the coldest part of the night. The stars were like needlepoints overhead, the air absolutely still until they disturbed it.