The Winds of Dune (35 page)

Gurney lowered his head. “As you wish, my Lady.” She knew she was asking a great deal from him, but she expected his full acceptance. Jessica had come to Dune to honor Paul, to strengthen the name of their Great House, and to revere a fallen leader—her son. But she could do no less for her daughter. Alia was as much an Atreides as Paul.

Jessica tapped the scrap of spice paper and the words she had written there. “These are the three names. You know what to do. We can’t trust anyone, even those in Alia’s inner circle, but I trust you, Gurney.”

“I will take care of it.” His fists were clenched, his muscles bunched.
As he departed, Jessica let out a long, slow sigh, fully aware of what she had set in motion.

That evening, after Isbar completed his service in the Fane of the Oracle, celebrating St. Alia of the Knife, the priest bowed to the cheering congregants, raised his hands in benediction, and stepped back behind the altar. His skin gleamed with scented oils. Isbar’s neck had begun to thicken with soft flesh, a plumpness that resulted from unlimited access to water for the first time in his life.

Parting the rust-orange curtains of spice-fiber fabric, he entered his private alcove and was surprised to find a man there waiting for him. “Gurney Halleck?” Recognizing him, Isbar did not call for the guards. “How may I help you?”

Gurney’s hands moved in a blur, fingers clenched around a thin cord of krimskell fiber, which he flashed around the priest’s neck and yanked tight. Isbar flailed and clawed at the garrote, but Gurney’s grip remained firm. He twisted and pulled tighter, and the cord swiftly cut off the priest’s breath, broke his hyoid bone, and silenced his larynx. As Gurney sawed deeper with the cord, Isbar’s eyes bulged; his lips opened and closed like a beached, gasping fish. In a fleeting thought, Gurney wondered if the desert man had ever seen a fish.

He spoke quietly into the priest’s ear. “Don’t pretend to wonder why I am here. You know your guilt, what you intended to do. Any plot against Alia is a plot against all Atreides.” He jerked the garrote tighter still. Isbar was beyond hearing, his throat nearly severed now. “And therefore it must be dealt with.”

Outside, the worshippers continued to file out of the temple, some still praying. They hadn’t even seen the hanging fabric panels stir.

When he was absolutely certain the traitor was dead, Gurney let him slide to the dusty floor. He peeled the krimskell fiber out of the deep indentation in the priest’s neck. Coiling the strand once more into a neat loop, he left silently through the back entrance. He had two more men to visit this night.

When she learned of the murders of her three supposedly loyal priests, Alia was outraged. Without being summoned, Jessica came into the Regent’s private office, ordered the amazon guards to wait outside, and sealed the door.

Seated at her writing table, Alia wanted to lash out at some target, any target. She had laid out a pattern of the new Dune Tarot cards, though the reading had not gone as well as she’d hoped. When her mother entered, Alia scattered the cards on the table, a panoply of ancient icons modified to have relevance to Dune—a Coriolis storm of sand, an Emperor resembling Paul, a goblet overflowing with spice, a sandworm instead of a dragon, and an eerie Blind Man, rather than Death.

Jessica withstood the brunt of her daughter’s buffeting rage, then spoke calmly. “Those priests are dead for good reason. Gurney Halleck killed them.”

That stopped Alia in midsentence. The willowy girl raised herself to her feet from behind the desk, the clutter of tarot cards before her. Her face turned pale, her eyes widening. “What did you just say to me, Mother?”

“Gurney only followed my orders. I saved your life.”

While her daughter listened, astonished and scowling, Jessica revealed the full details of the plot that would have assassinated both Alia and Duncan at their wedding ceremony. She extended the recordings, letting her daughter listen to the schemes of Isbar and the other two priests. There could be no denying their guilt. “It seems your priests would rather speak as surrogates for dead prophets than for live rulers.”

Alia sat down heavily, but after only a moment’s pause, her mood shifted once more. “So you’ve set spies on me, Mother? You don’t trust my security, so you have your own inside sources?” She jabbed a finger at the surreptitious recordings and her voice grew louder, more shrill. “How dare you secretly keep watch on me and my priests? Who among my—”

As Alia began to lose control of her temper, Jessica took a step closer and slapped her like a mother disciplining an unruly child. Calmly. Once, hard. “Stop this nonsense and think. I did it to
protect
you, not to weaken you. Not to spy on you. Sometimes it is beneficial to have an independent set of sources—as this proves.”

Alia rocked backward, shocked that her mother had struck her. Her lips tightened until they turned pale; the red mark stood out on her cheek. With great effort, she composed herself. “There are always plots, Mother. My own people would have uncovered this one in time—and I would much rather have publicly executed the traitors, rather than killing them in secret. The wedding ceremony would have been an obvious opportunity for someone to move against me, and I’ve already taken security measures—measures that even your ‘sources’ don’t know about.”

“I am not your enemy, nor am I your rival,” Jessica insisted. “Can you fault a mother for wanting to prevent harm to her daughter?”

Alia sighed and tossed her hair back behind her shoulders. “No, Mother, I cannot. By the same token, don’t fault me for saying that I will feel less . . . unsettled, when you return to Caladan.”

Even when I feel love, it is so complex that others may not recognize it as such. While I admit this freely, I do so only on these pages that are for me alone.

—
LADY ALIA
, private journals, intentionally written in a style to imitate Princess Irulan

W
hen yet another of Bronso’s manifestos appeared only days before the wedding, Alia reacted swiftly and angrily, ordering the destruction of all copies. She demanded that anyone who was found distributing, or even carrying, the document be executed without further ado.

Deeply concerned and hoping to mitigate any damage, Jessica rushed to meet with her daughter in private. “Such bloodshed will backfire on you. In two days you and Duncan will be married—do you want the people to hate and fear you?”

After expressing her disgust at the situation, Alia relented. “All right, Mother—if only to appease you. Amputating the perpetrators’ hands should be harsh enough to get the message across, I suppose.” Her mother departed, not entirely satisfied.

Alia spent the rest of the day in the throne room, then left through a guarded doorway and pushed aside a Fremen wall hanging, just as she had seen her brother do many times. It was difficult to believe he was gone. She churned with a feeling of helplessness that only made her angry. Why had he left
her
with such a messy state of affairs? Did Paul expect
her
to act as the mother of his twin babies? Or perhaps
Harah could do it? Or Princess Irulan? Or Jessica? How could the most important man in the known universe simply turn his back and . . . leave?

She wished her brother could be here now.

A terrible sensation of sadness and longing threatened to make her cry, but Alia had not shed tears for him, and doubted she ever would, especially on Dune. Yet she had loved Paul in life . . . and might love him even more now in death.

His presence was like a supergiant star whose gravitational pull affected everything that came within his sphere of influence. Paul shone so brightly that he blinded all other individual stars and constellations. The Emperor Muad’Dib, the Fremen messiah Lisan al-Gaib. He had overthrown an Emperor, conquered a galaxy, and used a Jihad to sweep aside the clutter of ten thousand years of history.

But without his charismatic personality dominating the daily workings of government and the Atreides family, Alia was beginning to see her brother from a different perspective, actually getting a chance to know and respect him in new ways.

After Chani’s water was mysteriously stolen—and no blackmail threats had ever emerged, thankfully—she had sealed off Paul’s private quarters in the Citadel, and allowed no one into these rooms. Alia liked to come here alone, just to think, imagining that he might still be there.

Paul-Muad’Dib had left a remarkable legacy, and she was its custodian as Regent and as his
sister.
That was not a duty she took lightly. Given time and the proper circumstances, Alia might stand one day as the equal to Muad’Dib in the histories. She already had chroniclers compiling records of her achievements, just in case.

Standing on stone floor tiles just inside the room’s entrance, she smelled the lingering odors of the former inhabitants, a bit of staleness in the air. Not so long ago, Paul and Chani had filled these rooms with their personalities, their dreams, their hopes, and secret words for each other. They had made love here and conceived the twins, Leto and Ghanima.

Oil murals painted on the walls depicted common Fremen scenes: a woman counting water rings for her hair, children out in the sand catching sandtrout, a robed Naib standing high on a promontory. Everything
was exactly as the occupants had left it, Chani’s shoes and clothing were laid about casually as if she had expected to come back, just like any other day . . . but Paul’s clothes were neatly put away. Seeing this, Alia felt a chill, wondering if her brother had known he would not return.

Ultimately, Alia contemplated what to do with these private quarters. The hallowed place reached beyond her own feelings of devotion for her brother. She felt the sacredness in the still shadows of the sietch-like suite with its austere wall tapestries, the bed Paul and Chani had shared, the jasmium spice-coffee service that had once belonged to Jamis.

After long deliberation, Alia decided that she needed to share this place with others. But with whom? A place limited to herself and a few invited guests, only those who had been close to Paul, and to Chani? What about a museum that only Fremen could visit . . . or should it be something more accessible that drew pilgrims from all over the Imperium?

Valefor’s voice called to her from the other side of the closed door. “Regent Alia, your mother requests entrance.”