Dune

Teg sampled a spoonful of a honey-sweetened confection. He swallowed it, then: “This place is a jewel.”

“I have kept it a careful secret,” Delnay said. “Except for a few close friends, of course. To what do I owe the honor of your invitation?”

“Have you ever been . . . ah, marked by an Honored Matre?”

“Lords of perdition, no! I’m not important enough for that.”

“I was hoping to ask you to risk your life, Delnay.”

“In what way?” No hesitation. That was reassuring.

“There is a place in Ysai where my old soldiers meet. I want to go there and see as many of them as possible.”

“Through the streets in full regalia the way you are now?”

“In any way you can arrange it.”

Delnay put a finger to his lower lip and leaned back to stare at Teg. “You’re not an easy figure to disguise, you know. However, there may be a way.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes.” He smiled. “You won’t like it, I’m afraid.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Some padding and other alterations. We will pass you off as a Bordano overseer. You’ll smell of the sewer, of course. And you’ll have to carry it off that you don’t notice.”

“Why do you think that will succeed?” Teg asked.

“Oh, there’s going to be a storm tonight. Regular thing this time of year. Laying down the moisture for next year’s open crops. And filling the reservoirs for the heated fields, you know.”

“I don’t understand your reasoning, but when I’ve finished another of these confections, we’ll go,” Teg said.

“You’ll like the place where we take refuge from the storm,” Delnay said. “I’m mad, you know, to do this. But the proprietor here said I was to help you or never come here again.”

It was an hour after dark when Delnay led him to the rendezvous point. Teg, dressed in leathers and affecting a limp, was forced to use much of his mental power to ignore his own odors. Delnay’s friends had plastered Teg with sewage and then hosed him off. The forced-air drying brought back most of the effluent aromas.

A remote-reading weather station at the door of the meeting place told Teg it had dropped fifteen degrees outside in the preceding hour. Delnay preceded him and hurried away into a crowded room where there was much noise and the sound of clinking glassware. Teg paused to study the doorside station. The wind was gusting to thirty klicks, he saw. Barometric pressure down. He looked at the sign above the station:

“A service to our customers.”

Presumably, a service to the bar as well. Departing customers might well take one look at these readings and return to the warmth and camaraderie behind them.

In a large fireplace with inglenook at the far end of the bar there was a real fire burning. Aromatic wood.

Delnay returned, wrinkled his nose at Teg’s smell and led him around the edge of the crowd into a back room, then through this into a private bathroom. Teg’s uniform—cleaned and pressed—was laid out over a chair there.

“I’ll be in the inglenook when you come out,” Delnay said.

“In full regalia, eh?” Teg asked.

“It’s only dangerous out in the streets,” Delnay said. He went back the way they had come.

Teg emerged presently and found his way to the inglenook through groups that turned suddenly silent as people recognized him. Murmurous comments swept through the room. “The old Bashar himself.” “Oh, yes, it’s Teg. Served with him, I did. Know that face and figure anywhere.”

Customers had crowded into the atavistic warmth of the fireside. There was a rich smell of wet clothing and drink-fogged breaths there.

So the storm had driven this crowd into the bar? Teg looked at the battle-hardened military faces all around him, thinking that this was not a usual gathering, no matter what Delnay said. The people here knew one another, though, and had expected to meet one another here at this time.

Delnay was sitting on one of the benches in the inglenook, a glass containing an amber drink in his hand.

“You put out the word to meet us here,” Teg said.

“Isn’t that what you wanted, Bashar?”

“Who are you, Delnay?”

“I own a winter farm a few klicks south of here and I have some banker friends who will occasionally loan me a groundcar. If you want me to be more specific, I’m like the rest of the people in this room—someone who wants the Honored Matres off our necks.”

A man behind Teg asked: “Is it true that you killed a hundred of them today, Bashar?”

Teg spoke dryly without turning. “The number is greatly exaggerated. Could I have a drink, please?”

From his greater height, Teg scanned the room while someone was getting him a glass. When it was thrust into his hand, it was, as he expected, the deep blue of Danian Marinete. These old soldiers knew his preferences.

The drinking activity in the room continued but at a more subdued pace. They were waiting for him to state his purpose.