Dune

She had come to a reassuring thought about Burzmali, though. He was like Teg. Neither of them pursued a course that would lead them into a dead end—not if they could help it. She suspected there were support forces concealed in the bushes around them even now.

The snow-covered trail ended in a paved pathway, gently curved inward from the edges and kept free of snow by a melt system. There was a trickle of dampness in the center. Lucilla was several steps onto this path before she recognized what it must be—a magchute. It was an ancient magnetic transport base that once had carried goods or raw materials to a pre-Scattering factory.

“It gets steeper here,” Burzmali warned her. “They’ve carved steps in it but watch it. They’re not very deep.”

They came presently to the end of the magchute. It stopped at a decrepit wall—local brick atop a plasteel foundation. The faint light of stars in a clearing sky revealed crude workmanship in the bricks—typical Famine-Times construction. The wall was a mass of vines and mottled fungus. The growth did little to conceal the cracked courses of the bricks and the crude efforts to fill chinks with mortar. A single row of narrow windows looked down onto the place where the magchute debouched into a mass of bushes and weeds. Three of the windows glowed electric blue with some inner activity that was accompanied by faint crackling sounds.

“This was a factory in the old days,” Burzmali said.

“I have eyes and a memory,” Lucilla snapped. Did this grunting male think her completely devoid of intelligence?

Something creaked dismally off to their left. A patch of sod and weeds lifted atop a cellar door accompanied by an upward glow of brilliant yellow light.

“Quick!” Burzmali led her at a swift run across thick vegetation and down a flight of steps exposed by the lifting door. The door creaked closed behind them in a grumbling of machinery.

Lucilla found herself in a large space with a low ceiling. Light came from long lines of modern glowglobes strung along massive plasteel girders overhead. The floor was swept clean but showed scratches and indentations of activity, the locations no doubt of bygone machinery. She glimpsed movement far off across the open space. A young woman in a version of Lucilla’s dragon robe trotted toward them.

Lucilla sniffed. There was a stink of acid in the room and undertones of something foul.

“This was a Harkonnen factory,” Burzmali said. “I wonder what they made here?”

The young woman stopped in front of Lucilla. She had a willowy figure, elegant in shape and motion under the clinging robe. A subcutaneous glow came from her face. It spoke of exercise and good health. The green eyes, though, were hard and chilling in the way they measured everything they saw.

“So they sent more than one of us to watch this place,” she said.

Lucilla put out a restraining hand as Burzmali started to respond. This woman was not what she seemed. No more than I am! Lucilla chose her words carefully. “We always know each other, it seems.”

The young woman smiled. “I watched your approach. I could not believe my eyes.” She swept a sneering glance across Burzmali. “This was supposed to be a customer?”

“And guide,” Lucilla said. She noted the puzzlement on Burzmali’s face and prayed he would not ask the wrong question. This young woman was danger!

“Weren’t we expected?” Burzmali asked.

“Ahhhh, it speaks,” the young woman said, laughing. Her laugh was as cold as her eyes.

“I prefer that you do not refer to me as ‘it,’” Burzmali said.

“I call Gammu scum anything I wish,” the young woman said. “Don’t speak to me of your preferences!”

“What did you call me?” Burzmali was tired and his anger came boiling up at this unexpected attack.

“I call you anything I choose, scum!”

Burzmali had suffered enough. Before Lucilla could stop him, he uttered a low growl and aimed a heavy slap at the young woman.

The blow did not land.

Lucilla watched in fascination as the woman dropped under the attack, caught Burzmali’s sleeve as one might catch a bit of fabric blowing in the wind and, in a blindingly fast pirouette whose speed almost hid its delicacy, sent Burzmali skidding across the floor. The woman dropped to a half crouch on one foot, the other prepared to kick.

“I shall kill him now,” she said.

Lucilla, not knowing what might happen next, folded her body sideways, barely avoiding the woman’s suddenly outthrust foot, and countered with a standard Bene Gesserit sabard that dumped the young woman on her back doubled up where the blow had caught her in the abdomen.

“A suggestion that you kill my guide is uncalled for, whatever your name is,” Lucilla said.

The young woman gasped for breath, then, panting between words: “I am called Murbella, Great Honored Matre. You shame me by defeating me with such a slow attack. Why do you do that?”

“You needed a lesson,” Lucilla said.