Dune [Frank Herbert's Dune Saga Collection: Books 1 - 6]

“Reverend Mother, I shudder to see you in such circumstances,” Irulan said.

She stood just inside the cell door, measuring the various capacities of the room in her Bene Gesserit way. It was a three-meter cube carved with cutterays from the veined brown rock beneath Paul’s Keep. For furnishings, it contained one flimsy basket chair occupied now by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, a pallet with a brown cover upon which had been spread a deck of the new Dune Tarot cards, a metered water tap above a reclamation basin, a Fremen privy with moisture seals. It was all sparse, primitive. Yellow light came from anchored and caged glowglobes at the four corners of the ceiling.

“You’ve sent word to the Lady Jessica?” the Reverend Mother asked.

“Yes, but I don’t expect her to lift one finger against her firstborn,” Irulan said. She glanced at the cards. They spoke of the powerful turning their backs on supplicants. The card of the Great Worm lay beneath Desolate Sand. Patience was counseled. Did one require the tarot to see this? she asked herself.

A guard stood outside watching them through a metaglass window in the door. Irulan knew there’d be other monitors on this encounter. She had put in much thought and planning before daring to come here. To have stayed away carried its own perils, though.

The Reverend Mother had been engaged in prajna meditation interspersed with examinations of the tarot. Despite a feeling that she would never leave Arrakis alive, she had achieved a measure of calm through this. One’s oracular powers might be small, but muddy water was muddy water. And there was always the Litany Against Fear.

She had yet to assimilate the import of the actions which had precipitated her into this cell. Dark suspicions brooded in her mind (and the tarot hinted at confirmations). Was it possible the Guild had planned this?

A yellow-robed Qizara, head shaved for a turban, beady eyes of total blue in a bland round face, skin leathered by the wind and sun of Arrakis, had awaited her on the heighliner’s reception bridge. He had looked up from a bulb of spice-coffee being served by an obsequious steward, studied her a moment, put down the coffee bulb.

“You are the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam?”

To replay those words in her mind was to bring that moment alive in the memory. Her throat had constricted with an unmanageable spasm of fear. How had one of the Emperor’s minions learned of her presence on the heighliner?

“It came to our attention that you were aboard,” the Qizara said. “Have you forgotten that you are denied permission to set foot on the holy planet?”

“I am not on Arrakis,” she said. “I’m a passenger on a Guild heighliner in free space.”

“There is no such thing as free space, Madame.”

She read hate mingled with profound suspicion in his tone.

“Muad’Dib rules everywhere,” he said.

“Arrakis is not my destination,” she insisted.

“Arrakis is the destination of everyone,” he said. And she feared for a moment that he would launch into a recital of the mystical itinerary which pilgrims followed. (This very ship had carried thousands of them.)

But the Qizara had pulled a golden amulet from beneath his robe, kissed it, touched it to his forehead and placed it to his right ear, listened. Presently, he restored the amulet to its hidden place.

“You are ordered to gather your luggage and accompany me to Arrakis.”

“But I have business elsewhere!”

In that moment, she suspected Guild perfidy . . . or exposure through some transcendant power of the Emperor or his sister. Perhaps the Steersman did not conceal the conspiracy, after all. The abomination, Alia, certainly possessed the abilities of a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. What happened when those powers were coupled with the forces which worked in her brother?

“At once!” the Qizara snapped.

Everything in her cried out against setting foot once more on that accursed desert planet. Here was where the Lady Jessica had turned against the Sisterhood. Here was where they’d lost Paul Atreides, the kwisatz haderach they’d sought through long generations of careful breeding.

“At once,” she agreed.

“There’s little time,” the Qizara said. “When the Emperor commands, all his subjects obey.”

So the order had come from Paul!

She thought of protesting to the heighliner’s Navigator-Commander, but the futility of such a gesture stopped her. What could the Guild do?

“The Emperor has said I must die if I set foot on Dune,” she said, making a last desperate effort. “You spoke of this yourself. You are condemning me if you take me down there.”