Dune

Duncan fell silent. Was that it? Another disguise. Ambi . . . Tormsa had not changed his appearance. Tormsa. Was it a Tleilaxu name?

The guide extended a steaming cup toward Duncan. “A drink to restore you, Wose. Drink it fast. It will keep you warm.”

Duncan closed both hands around the cup. Wose. Wose and Tormsa. Tleilaxu Master and his Face Dancer companion.

Duncan lifted the cup toward Tormsa in the ancient gesture of Atreides battle comrades, then put it to his lips. Hot! But it warmed him as it went down. The drink had a faintly sweet flavor over some vegetable tang. He blew on it and drank it down as he saw Tormsa was doing.

Odd that I should not suspect poison or some drug, Duncan thought. But this Tormsa and the others last night had something of the Bashar about them. The gesture to a battle comrade had come naturally.

“Why are you risking your life this way?” Duncan asked.

“You know the Bashar and you have to ask?”

Duncan fell silent, abashed.

Tormsa leaned forward and recovered Duncan’s cup. Soon, all evidence of their breakfast lay hidden under the concealing rocks and dirt.

That food spoke of careful planning, Duncan thought. He turned and squatted on the cold ground. The mist was still out there beyond the screening bushes. Leafless limbs cut the view into odd bits and pieces. As he watched, the mist began to lift, revealing the blurred outlines of a city at the far edge of the valley.

Tormsa squatted beside him. “Very old city,” he said. “Harkonnen place. Look.” He passed a small monoscope to Duncan. “That is where we go tonight.”

Duncan put the monoscope to his left eye and tried to focus the oil lens. The controls felt unfamiliar, not at all like those he had learned as a pre-ghola youth or had been taught at the Keep. He removed it from his eye and examined it.

“Ixian?” he asked.

“No. We made it.” Tormsa reached over and pointed out two tiny buttons raised above the black tube. “Slow, fast. Push left to cycle out, right to cycle back.”

Again, Duncan lifted the scope to his eye.

Who were the we who had made this thing?

A touch of the fast button and the view leaped into his gaze. Tiny dots moved in the city. People! He increased the amplification. The people became small dolls. With them to give him scale, Duncan realized that the city at the valley’s edge was immense . . . and farther away than he had thought. A single rectangular structure stood in the center of the city, its top lost in the clouds. Gigantic.

Duncan knew this place now. The surroundings had changed but that central structure lay fixed in his memory.

How many of us vanished into that black hellhole and never returned?

“Nine hundred and fifty stories,” Tormsa said, seeing where Duncan’s gaze was directed. “Forty-five kilometers long, thirty kilometers wide. Plasteel and armor-plaz, all of it.”

“I know.” Duncan lowered the scope and returned it to Tormsa. “It was called Barony.”

“Ysai,” Tormsa said.

“That’s what they call it now,” Duncan said. “I have some different names for it.”

Duncan took a deep breath to put down the old hatreds. Those people were all dead. Only the building remained. And the memories. He scanned the city around that enormous structure. The place was a sprawling mass of warrens. Green spaces lay scattered throughout, each of them behind high walls. Single residences with private parks, Teg had said. The monoscope had revealed guards walking the wall tops.

Tormsa spat on the ground in front of him. “Harkonnen place.”

“They built to make people feel small,” Duncan said.

Tormsa nodded. “Small, no power in you.”

The guide had become almost loquacious, Duncan thought.

Occasionally during the night, Duncan had defied the order for silence and tried to make conversation.

“What animals made these passages?”

It had seemed a logical question for people trotting along an obvious animal track, even the musty smell of beasts in it.

“Do not talk!” Tormsa snapped.

Later, Duncan asked why they could not get a vehicle of some sort and escape in that. Even a groundcar would be preferable to this painful march across country where one route felt much like another.

Tormsa stopped them in a patch of moonlight and looked at Duncan as though he suspected his charge had suddenly become bereft of sense.

“Vehicles can follow!”

“No one can follow us when we’re on foot?”

“Followers also must be on foot. Here, they will be killed. They know.”

What a weird place! What a primitive place.