Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [136]
Had Kailea Vernius departed with her family, fleeing the destruction? C’tair hoped so, for her sake. Otherwise, she would have been a target for the angry revolutionaries. She was a beautiful young woman bred for Court functions and finery and palace intrigues, never for tooth-and-nail survival.
It made him sick to think of his beloved city, pillaged and trampled. He remembered the crystal walkways, the stalactite buildings, the magnificent achievements of the Heighliner construction, a craft that could be whisked away like magic by the powers of a Guild Navigator. How often had he and D’murr explored long tunnels, looked out at the massive grottoes, watched prosperity spread to all Ix’s inhabitants? Now the suboids had ruined everything. And for what? He doubted even they understood.
Possibly C’tair could find a passage to the surface, contact a transport ship, use stolen credits to buy a passage off of Ix and make his way to Kaitain, where he would contact his father. Was Cammar Pilru even still the Ambassador? Of a government in exile? Probably not.
No, C’tair could not leave here and abandon his world to its fate. This was Ix, his home, and he refused to run. He did vow to survive, though . . . somehow. He would do whatever it took. Once the dust settled, he could wear old clothes and meekly pretend to be one of the disaffected Ixians coping with new planetary masters. He doubted he would ever be safe, however.
Not if he intended to continue the fight . . .
In ensuing weeks, C’tair was able to sneak out of his hideout late in the programmed subterranean nights, utilizing an Ixian life-tracer to avoid Tleilaxu guards and other enemy personnel. With disgust he watched magnificent Vernii crumble in front of his eyes.
The Grand Palais was now occupied by the ugly gnome-men, treacherous gray-skinned usurpers who had stolen an entire world under the indifferent eyes of the Imperium. They had flooded the underground city with their furtive, robed representatives. Ferretlike invader teams scoured the stalactite buildings in search of any nobles in hiding. Face Dancer troops proved much more efficient than the reckless lower classes.
Far below, suboids reveled in the streets . . . but they didn’t know what else to do. Soon, they grew bored and went sullenly back to their old jobs. Without Face Dancer instigators to tell them what to want or demand, the suboids had no organized meetings, no way to make their own decisions. Their lives became the same again, under different masters, with tighter production quotas. C’tair realized that the new Tleilaxu overseers would have to begin making enormous profits in order to pay the material costs of this takeover.
On the streets of the underground city, C’tair shuffled unnoticed among the defeated populace—shift supervisors and families of mid-ranked workers who had survived the purges and had nowhere to go. Dressed in drab clothes, he crossed damaged walkways into the ruined upper city and took lift tubes down to the rubble of the manufacturing centers. He couldn’t hide forever, but he couldn’t be seen yet either.
C’tair refused to accept that the battle was already lost. The Bene Tleilax had few friends among the Landsraad, and they certainly couldn’t withstand a coordinated resistance. Yet, Ix seemed to offer none.
Standing in a small, cowed group of pedestrians on a sidewalk made of interlocked tiles, he watched blond, chiseled-featured soldiers march by. They wore gray-and-black uniforms—definitely not Ixians or suboids, and certainly not Tleilaxu. Tall and erect, the haughty soldiers carried stunners, wore black riot-control