Dune (31 page)

The Baron shifted his attention to the guard captain—Umman Kudu: scissors-line of jaw muscles, chin like a boot toe—a man to be trusted because the captain's vices were known.

“First, where is the traitor who gave me the Duke?” the Baron asked. “I must give the traitor his reward.”

Piter turned on one toe, motioned to the guard outside.

A bit of black movement there and Yueh walked through. His motions were stiff and stringy. The mustache drooped beside his purple lips. Only the old eyes seemed alive. Yueh came to a stop three paces into the room, obeying a motion from Piter, and stood there staring across the open space at the Baron.

“Ah-h-h, Dr. Yueh.”

“M'Lord Harkonnen.”

“You've given us the Duke, I hear.”

“My half of the bargain, m'Lord.”

The Baron looked at Piter.

Piter nodded.

The Baron looked back at Yueh. “The letter of the bargain, eh? And I....” He spat the words out: “What was I to do in return?”

“You remember quite well, m'Lord Harkonnen.”

And Yueh allowed himself to think now, hearing the loud silence of clocks in his mind. He had seen the subtle betrayals in the Baron's manner. Wanna was indeed dead—gone far beyond their reach. Otherwise, there'd still be a hold on the weak doctor. The Baron's manner showed there was no hold; it was ended.

“Do I?” the Baron asked.

“You promised to deliver my Wanna from her agony.”

The Baron nodded. “Oh, yes. Now, I remember. So I did. That was my promise. That was how we bent the Imperial Conditioning. You couldn't endure seeing your Bene Gesserit witch grovel in Piter's pain amplifiers. Well, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen always keeps his promises. I told you I'd free her from the agony and permit you to join her. So be it.” He waved a hand at Piter.

Piter's blue eyes took a glazed look. His movement was catlike in its sudden fluidity. The knife in his hand glistened like a claw as it flashed into Yueh's back.

The old man stiffened, never taking his attention from the Baron.

“So join her!” the Baron spat.

Yueh stood, swaying. His lips moved with careful precision, and his voice came in oddly measured cadence: “You ... think ... you ... de ... feated ... me. You ... think ... I ... did ... not ... know ... what ... I ... bought ... for ... my ... Wanna.”

He toppled. No bending or softening. It was like a tree falling.

“So join her,” the Baron repeated. But his words were like a weak echo.

Yueh had filled him with a sense of foreboding. He whipped his attention to Piter, watched the man wipe the blade on a scrap of cloth, watched the creamy look of satisfaction in the blue eyes.

So that's how he kills by his own hand,
the Baron thought.
It's well to know.

“He did give us the Duke?” the Baron asked.

“Of a certainty, my Lord,” Piter said.

“Then get him in here!”

Piter glanced at the guard captain, who whirled to obey.

The Baron looked down at Yueh. From the way the man had fallen, you could suspect oak in him instead of bones.

“I never could bring myself to trust a traitor,” the Baron said. “Not even a traitor I created.”

He glanced at the night-shrouded viewport. That black bag of stillness out there was his, the Baron knew. There was no more crump of artillery against the Shield Wall caves; the burrow traps were sealed off. Quite suddenly, the Baron's mind could conceive of nothing more beautiful than that utter emptiness of black. Unless it were white on the black. Plated white on the black. Porcelain white.

But there was still the feeling of doubt.

What had the old fool of a doctor meant? Of course, he'd probably known what would happen to him in the end. But that bit about thinking he'd been defeated:
“You think you defeated me.
”

What had he meant?

The Duke Leto Atreides came through the door. His arms were bound in chains, the eagle face streaked with dirt. His uniform was torn where someone had ripped off his insignia. There were tatters at his waist where the shield belt had been removed without first freeing the uniform ties. The Duke's eyes held a glazed, insane look.

“Wel-l-l-l,” the Baron said. He hesitated, drawing in a deep breath. He knew he had spoken too loudly. This moment, long-envisioned, had lost some of its savor.

“I believe the good Duke is drugged,” Piter said. “That's how Yueh caught him for us.” Piter turned to the Duke. “Aren't you drugged, my dear Duke?”

The voice was far away. Leto could feel the chains, the ache of muscles, his cracked lips, his burning cheeks, the dry taste of thirst whispering its grit in his mouth. But sounds were dull, hidden by a cottony blanket. And he saw only dim shapes through the blanket.

“What of the woman and the boy, Piter?” the Baron asked. “Any word yet?”

Piter's tongue darted over his lips.

“You've heard something!” the Baron snapped. “What?”

Piter glanced at the guard captain, back to the Baron. “The men who were sent to do the job, my'Lord—they've ... ah ... been... ah ...found.”

“Well, they report everything satisfactory?”

“They're dead, m'Lord.”

“Of course they are! What I want to know is—”

“They were dead when found, m'Lord.”

The Baron's face went livid. “And the woman and boy?”

“No sign, m'Lord, but there was a worm. It came while the scene was being investigated. Perhaps it's as we wished—an accident. Possibly—”

“We do not deal in possibilities, Piter. What of the missing'thopter? Does that suggest anything to my Mentat?”

“One of the Duke's men obviously escaped in it, m'Lord. Killed our pilot and escaped.”

“Which of the Duke's men?”

“It was a clean, silent killing, m'Lord. Hawat, perhaps, or that Halleck one. Possibly Idaho. Or any top lieutenant.”

“Possibilities,” the Baron muttered. He glanced at the swaying, drugged figure of the Duke.

“The situation is in hand, m'Lord,” Piter said.

“No, it isn't! Where is that stupid planetologist? Where is this man Kynes?”

“We've word where to find him and he's been sent for, m'Lord.”

“I don't like the way the Emperor's servant is helping us,” the Baron muttered.

They were words through a cottony blanket, but some of them burned in Leto's mind.
Woman and boy
—
nosign.
Paul and Jessica had escaped. And the fate of Hawat, Halleck, and Idaho remained an unknown. There was still hope.

“Where is the ducal signet ring?” the Baron demanded. “His finger is bare.”

“The Sardaukar say it was not on him when he was taken, my Lord,” the guard captain said.

“You killed the doctor too soon,” the Baron said. “That was a mistake. You should've warned me, Piter. You moved too precipitately for the good of our enterprise.” He scowled. “Possibilities!”

The thought hung like a sine wave in Leto's mind:
Paul and Jessica have escaped!
And there was something else in his memory: a bargain. He could amost remember it.

He remembered part of it now:
a pill of poison gas shaped into a false tooth.

Someone had told him to remember the tooth. The tooth was in his mouth. He could feel its shape with his tongue. All he had to do was bite sharply on it.

The someone had told him to wait until he was near the Baron. Who had told him? He couldn't remember.

“How long will he remain drugged like this?” the Baron asked.

“Perhaps another hour, m'Lord.”

“Perhaps,” the Baron muttered. Again, he turned to the night-blackened window. “I am hungry.”

That's the Baron, that fuzzy gray shape there,
Leto thought. The shape danced back and forth, swaying with the movement of the room. And the room expanded and contracted. It grew brighter and darker. It folded into blackness and faded.

Time became a sequence of layers for the Duke. He drifted up through them.
I must wait.

There was a table. Leto saw the table quite clearly. And a gross, fat man on the other side of the table, the remains of a meal in front of him. Leto felt himself sitting in a chair across from the fat man, felt the chains, the straps that held his tingling body in the chair. He was aware there had been a passage of time, but its length escaped him.

“I believe he's coming around, Baron.”

“So I see, Piter.”

Leto sensed increasing definition in his surroundings. The chair beneath him took on firmness, the bindings were sharper.

And he saw the Baron clearly now. Leto watched the movements of the man's hands: compulsive touchings—the edge of a plate, the handle of a spoon, a finger tracing the fold of a jowl.

Leto watched the moving hand, fascinated by it.

“You can hear me, Duke Leto,” the Baron said. “I know you can hear me. We want to know from you where to find your concubine and the child you sired on her.”

No sign escaped Leto, but the words were a wash of calmness through him.
It's true, then: they don't have Paul and Jessica.

“This is not a child's game we play,” the Baron rumbled. “You must know that.” He leaned toward Leto, studying the face. It pained the Baron that this could not be handled privately, just between the two of them. To have others see royalty in such straits—it set a bad precedent.

Leto could feel strength returning. And now, the memory of the false tooth stood out in his mind like a steeple in a flat landscape. The nerve-shaped capsule within that tooth—the poison gas—he remembered who had put the deadly weapon in his mouth.

Drug-fogged memory of seeing a limp corpse dragged past him in this room hung like a vapor in Leto's mind. He knew it had been Yueh.

“Do you hear that noise, Duke Leto?” the Baron asked.

Leto grew conscious of a frog sound, the burred mewling of someone's agony.

“We caught one of your men disguised as a Fremen,” the Baron said. “We penetrated the disguise quite easily: the eyes, you know. He insists he was sent among the Fremen to spy on them. I've lived for a time on this planet, cher cousin. One does not spy on those ragged scum of the desert. Tell me, did you buy their help? Did you send your woman and son to them?”

Leto felt fear tighten his chest.
If Yueh sent them to the desert fold
...
the search won't stop until they're found.

“Come, come,” the Baron said. “We don't have much time and pain is quick. Please don't bring it to this, my dear Duke.” The Baron looked up at Piter who stood at Leto's shoulder. “Piter doesn't have all his tools here, but I'm sure he could improvise.”

“Improvisation is sometimes the best, Baron.”

That silky, insinuating voice!
Leto heard it at his ear.

“You had an emergency plan,” the Baron said. “Where have your woman and the boy been sent?” He looked at Leto's hand. “Your ring is missing. Does the boy have it?”

The Baron looked up, stared into Leto's eyes.

“You don't answer,” he said. “Will you force me to do a thing I do not want to do? Piter will use simple, direct methods. I agree they're sometimes the best, but it's not good that you should be subjected to such things.”

“Hot tallow on the back, perhaps, or on the eyelids,” Piter said. “Perhaps on other portions of the body. It's especially effective when the subject doesn't know where the tallow will fall next. It's a good method and there's a sort of beauty in the pattern of pus-white blisters on naked skin, eh, Baron?”

“Exquisite,” the Baron said, and his voice sounded sour.

Those touching fingers!
Leto watched the fat hands, the glittering jewels on baby-fat hands—their compulsive wandering.

The sounds of agony coming through the door behind him gnawed at the Duke's nerves.
Who is it they caught?
he wondered.
Could it have been Idaho?

“Believe me, cher cousin,” the Baron said. “I do not want it to come to this.”

“You think of nerve couriers racing to summon help that cannot come,” Piter said. “There's an artistry in this, you know.”

“You're a superb artist,” the Baron growled. “Now, have the decency to be silent.”

Leto suddenly recalled a thing Gurney Halleck had said once, seeing a picture of the Baron:
“‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea... and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. '”

“We waste time, Baron,” Piter said.

“Perhaps.”

The Baron nodded. “You know, my dear Leto, you'll tell us in the end where they are. There's a level of pain that'll buy you.”

He's most likely correct, Leto thought.
Were if not for the tooth... and the fact that I truly don't know where they are.

The Baron picked up a sliver of meat, pressed the morsel into his mouth, chewed slowly, swallowed.
We must try a new tack,
he thought.

“Observe this prize person who denies he's for hire,” the Baron said. “Observe him, Piter.”

And the Baron thought:
Yes! See him there, this man who believes he cannot be bought. See him detained there by a million shares of himself sold in dribbles every second of his life! If you took him up now and shook him, he'd rattle inside. Emptied! Sold out! What difference how he dies now?