Dune

They entered a dimly lighted hallway that smelled of exotic foods and bitter essences. She was a moment identifying some of the things that assailed her nostrils. Melange. She caught the unmistakable cinnamon ripeness. And yes, semuta. She identified burned rice, higet salts. Someone was masking another kind of cooking. There were explosives being made here. She thought of warning Burzmali but reconsidered. It was not necessary for him to know and there might be ears in this confined space to hear whatever she said.

Burzmali led the way up a shadowy flight of stairs with a dim glowstrip along the slanting baseboard. At the top he found a hidden switch concealed behind a patch in the patched and repatched wall. There was no sound when he pushed the switch but Lucilla felt a change in the movement all around them. Silence. It was a new kind of silence in her experience, a crouching preparation for flight or violence.

It was cold in the stairwell and she shivered, but not from the chill. Footsteps sounded beyond the doorway beside the patch-masked switch.

A gray-haired hag in a yellow smock opened the door and peered up at them past her straggling eyebrows.

“It’s you,” she said, her voice wavering. She stood aside for them to enter.

Lucilla glanced swiftly around the room as she heard the door close behind them. It was a room the unobservant might think shabby, but that was superficial. Underneath, it was quality. The shabbiness was another mask, partly a matter of this place having been fitted to a particularly demanding person: This goes here and nowhere else! That goes over there and it stays there! The furnishings and bric-a-brac looked a little worn but someone here did not object to that. The room felt better this way. It was that kind of room.

Who possessed this room? The old woman? She was making her painful way toward a door on their left.

“We are not to be disturbed until dawn,” Burzmali said.

The old woman stopped and turned.

Lucilla studied her. Was this another who shammed advanced age? No. The age was real. Every motion was diffused by unsteadiness—a trembling of the neck, a failure of the body that betrayed her in ways she could not prevent.

“Even if it’s somebody important?” the old woman asked in her wavering voice.

The eyes twitched when she spoke. Her mouth moved only minimally to emit the necessary sounds, spacing out her words as though she drew them from somewhere deep within. Her shoulders, curved from years of bending at some fixed work, would not straighten enough for her to look Burzmali in the eyes. She peered upward past her brows instead, an oddly furtive posture.

“What important person are you expecting?” Burzmali asked.

The old woman shuddered and appeared to take a long time understanding.

“Impor-r-rtant people come here,” she said.

Lucilla recognized the body signals and blurted it because Burzmali must know:

“She’s from Rakis!”

The old woman’s curious upward gaze locked on Lucilla. The ancient voice said: “I was a priestess, Hormu Lady.”

“Of course she’s from Rakis,” Burzmali said. His tone warned her not to question.

“I would not harm you,” the hag whined.

“Do you still serve the Divided God?”

Again, there was that long delay for the old woman to respond.

“Many serve the Great Guldur,” she said.

Lucilla pursed her lips and once more scanned the room. The old woman had been reduced greatly in importance. “I am glad I do not have to kill you,” Lucilla said.

The old woman’s jaw drooped open in a parody of surprise while spittle dripped from her lips.

This was a descendant of Fremen? Lucilla let her revulsion come out in a long shudder. This mendicant bit of flotsam had been shaped from a people who walked tall and proud, a people who died bravely. This one would die whining.

“Please trust me,” the hag whined and fled the room.

“Why did you do that?” Burzmali demanded. “These are the ones who will get us to Rakis!”

She merely looked at him, recognizing the fear in his question. It was fear for her.

But I did not imprint him back there, she thought.

With a sense of shock she realized that Burzmali had recognized hate in her. I hate them! she thought. I hate the people of this planet!

That was a dangerous emotion for a Reverend Mother. Still it burned in her. This planet had changed her in a way she did not want. She did not want the realization that such things could be. Intellectual understanding was one thing; experience was another.

Damn them!

But they already were damned.

Her chest pained her. Frustration! There was no escaping this new awareness. What had happened to these people?

People?

The shells were here but they no longer could be called fully alive. Dangerous, though. Supremely dangerous.

“We must rest while we can,” Burzmali said.

“I do not have to earn my money?” she demanded.

Burzmali paled. “What we did was necessary! We were lucky and were not stopped but it could have happened!”