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"The Lady Jessica must be told," Idaho said. "Gurney says--"
"That message may not come from Gurney Halleck."
"It comes from no other. We Atreides have our ways of verifying messages. Stil, won't you at least explore some of--"
"Jacurutu is no more," Stilgar said. "It was destroyed many generations ago." He touched Idaho's sleeve. "In any event, I cannot spare the fighting men. These are troubled times, the threat to the qanat ... you understand?" He sat back. "Now, when Alia--"
"There is no more Alia," Idaho said.
"So you say." Stilgar took another sip of coffee, replaced the cup. "Let it rest there, friend Idaho. Often there's no need to tear off an arm to remove a splinter."
"Then let's talk about Ghanima."
"There's no need. She has my countenance, my bond. No one can harm her here."
He cannot be that naive, Idaho thought.
But Stilgar was rising to indicate that the interview was ended.
Idaho levered himself to his feet, feeling the stiffness in his knees. His calves felt numb. As Idaho stood, an aide entered and stood aside. Javid came into the room behind him. Idaho turned. Stilgar stood four paces away. Without hesitating, Idaho drew his knife in one swift motion and drove its point into the breast of the unsuspecting Javid. The man staggered backward, pulling himself off the knife. He turned, fell onto his face. His legs kicked and he was dead.
"That was to silence the gossip," Idaho said.
The aide stood with drawn knife, undecided how to react. Idaho had already sheathed his own knife, leaving a trace of blood on the edge of his yellow robe.
"You have defiled my honor!" Stilgar cried. "This is neutral--"
"Shut up!" Idaho glared at the shocked Naib. "You wear a collar, Stilgar! "
It was one of the three most deadly insults which could be directed at a Fremen. Stilgar's face went pale.
"You are a servant," Idaho said. "You've sold Fremen for their water."
This was the second most deadly insult, the one which had destroyed the original Jacurutu.
Stilgar ground his teeth, put a hand on his crysknife. The aide stepped back away from the body in the doorway.
Turning his back on the Naib, Idaho stepped into the door, taking the narrow opening beside Javid's body and speaking without turning, delivered the third insult. "You have no immortality, Stilgar. None of your descendants carry your blood!"
"Where do you go now, mentat?" Stilgar called as Idaho continued leaving the room. Stilgar's voice was as cold as a wind from the poles.
"To find Jacurutu," Idaho said, still not turning.
Stilgar drew his knife. "Perhaps I can help you."
Idaho was at the outer lip of the passage now. Without stopping, he said: "If you'd help me with your knife, water-thief, please do it in my back. That's the fitting way for one who wears the collar of a demon."
With two leaping strides Stilgar crossed the room, stepped on Javid's body and caught Idaho in the outer passage. One gnarled hand jerked Idaho around and to a stop. Stilgar confronted Idaho with bared teeth and a drawn knife. Such was his rage that Stilgar did not even see the curious smile on Idaho's face.
"Draw your knife, mentat scum!" Stilgar roared.
Idaho laughed. He cuffed Stilgar sharply--left hand, right hand--two stinging slaps to the head.
With an incoherent screech, Stilgar drove his knife into Idaho's abdomen, striking upward through the diaphragm into the heart.
Idaho sagged onto the blade, grinned up at Stilgar, whose rage dissolved into sudden icy shock.
"Two deaths for the Atreides," Idaho husked. "The second for no better reason than the first." He lurched sideways, collapsed to the stone floor on his face. Blood spread out from his wound.
Stilgar stared down past his dripping knife at the body of Idaho, took a deep, trembling breath. Javid lay dead behind him. And the consort of Alia, the Womb of Heaven, lay dead at Stilgar's own hands. It might be argued that a Naib had but protected the honor of his name, avenging the threat to his promised neutrality. But this dead man was Duncan Idaho. No matter the arguments available, no matter the "extenuating circumstances," nothing could erase such an act. Even were Alia to approve privately, she would be forced to respond publicly in revenge. She was, after all, Fremen. To rule Fremen, she could be nothing else, not even to the smallest degree.
Only then did it occur to Stilgar that this situation was precisely what Idaho had intended to buy with his "second death."
Stilgar looked up, saw the shocked face of Harah, his second wife, peering at him in an enclosing throng. Everywhere Stilgar turned there were faces with identical expressions: shock and an understanding of the consequences.
Slowly Stilgar drew himself erect, wiped the blade on his sleeve and sheathed it. Speaking to the faces, his tone casual, he said: "Those who'll go with me should pack at once. Send men to summon worms."
"Where will you go, Stilgar?" Harah asked.
"Into the desert."
"I will go with you," she said.
"Of course you'll go with me. All of my wives will go with me. And Ghanima. Get her, Harah. At once."
"Yes, Stilgar ... at once." She hesitated. "And Irulan?"
"If she wishes."
"Yes, husband." Still she hesitated. "You take Ghani as hostage?"
"Hostage?" He was genuinely startled by the thought. "Woman ..." He touched Idaho's body softly with a toe. "If this mentat was right, I'm Ghani's only hope." And he remembered then Leto's warning: "Beware of Alia. You must take Ghani and flee."
After the Fremen, all Planetologists see life as expressions of energy and look for the overriding relationships. In small pieces, bits and parcels which grow into general understanding, the Fremen racial wisdom is translated into a new certainty. The thing Fremen have as a people, any people can have. They need but develop a sense for energy relationships. They need but observe that energy soaks up the patterns of things and builds with those patterns.
--THE ARRAKEEN CATASTROPHE AFTER HARQ AL-ADA
It was Tuek's Sietch on the inner lip of False Wall. Halleck stood in the shadow of the rock buttress which shielded the high entrance to the sietch, waiting for those inside to decide whether they would shelter him. He turned his gaze outward to the northern desert and then upward to the grey-blue morning sky. The smugglers here had been astonished to learn that he, an off-worlder, had captured a worm and ridden it. But Halleck had been equally astonished at their reaction. The thing was simple for an agile man who'd seen it done many times.
Halleck returned his attention to the desert, the silver desert of shining rocks and grey-green fields where water had worked its magic. All of this struck him suddenly as an enormously fragile containment of energy, of life--everything threatened by an abrupt shift in the pattern of change.
He knew the source of this reaction. It was the bustling scene on the desert floor below him. Containers of dead sandtrout were being trundled into the sietch for distillation and recovery of their water. There were thousands of the creatures. They had come to an outpouring of water. And it was this outpouring which had set Halleck's mind racing.
Halleck stared downward across the sietch fields and the qanat boundary which no longer flowed with precious water. He had seen the holes in the qanat's stone walls, the rending of the rock liner which had spilled water into the sand. What had made those holes? Some stretched along twenty meters of the qanat's most vulnerable sections, in places where soft sand led outward into water-absorbing depressions. It was those depressions which had swarmed with sandtrout. The children of the sietch were killing them and capturing them.
Repair teams worked on the shattered walls of the qanat. Others carried minims of irrigation water to the most needy plants. The water source in the gigantic cistern beneath Tuek's windtrap had been closed off, preventing the flow into the shattered qanat. The sun-powered pumps had been disconnected. The irrigation water came from dwindling pools at the bottom of the qanat and, lab
oriously, from the cistern within the sietch.
The metal frame of the doorseal behind Halleck crackled in the growing warmth of the day. As though the sound moved his eyes, Halleck found his gaze drawn to the farthest curve of the qanat, to the place where water had reached most impudently into the desert. The garden-hopeful planners of the sietch had planted a special tree there and it was doomed unless the water flow could be restored soon. Halleck stared at the silly, trailing plumage of a willow tree there shredded by sand and wind. For him, that tree symbolized the new reality for himself and for Arrakis.
Both of us are alien here.
They were taking a long time over their decision within the sietch, but they could use good fighting men. Smugglers always needed good men. Halleck had no illusions about them, though. The smugglers of this age were not the smugglers who'd sheltered him so many years ago when he'd fled the dissolution of his Duke's fief. No, these were a new breed, quick to seek profit.
Again he focused on the silly willow. It came to Halleck then that the stormwinds of his new reality might shred these smugglers and all of their friends. It might destroy Stilgar with his fragile neutrality and take with him all of the tribes who remained loyal to Alia. They'd all become colonial peoples. Halleck had seen it happen before, knowing the bitter taste of it on his own homeworld. He saw it clearly, recalling the mannerisms of the city Fremen, the pattern of the suburbs, and the unmistakable ways of the rural sietch which rubbed off even on this smugglers' hideaway. The rural districts were colonies of the urban centers. They'd learned how to wear a padded yoke, led into it by their greed if not their superstitions. Even here, especially here, the people had the attitude of a subject population, not the attitude of free men. They were defensive, concealing, evasive. Any manifestation of authority was subject to resentment--any authority: the Regency's, Stilgar's, their own Council ...
I can't trust them, Halleck thought. He could only use them and nurture their distrust of others. It was sad. Gone was the old give and take of free men. The old ways had been reduced to ritual words, their origins lost to memory.
Alia had done her work well, punishing opposition and rewarding assistance, shifting the Imperial forces in random fashion, concealing the major elements of her Imperial power. The spies! Gods below, the spies she must have!
Halleck could almost see the deadly rhythm of movement and counter-movement by which Alia hoped to keep her opposition off balance.
