Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [143]
“It is your own fault,” Rikka snapped back. “We brought this fate on ourselves. We provoked the Enemy of Many Faces.”
“We are Honored Matres! We are in control. We take what we wish. The stolen Weapons will make us invincible.”
“Really? Look what we reaped from it.” Rikka held up her bare arms to show dark lesions covering her skin. “Look well, for you will all experience it soon.”
“Execute her!” someone cried. “The Long Death.”
Rikka bared her teeth in a feral grin. “To what purpose? You know I will die soon anyway.” She showed the lesions on her arms again. “So will all of you.”
Instead of responding to the question, an ancient female judge called for a vote, and Rikka was indeed sentenced to the Long Death. Sheeana could only imagine what that meant. Honored Matres were vile enough: What could they conceive of as the worst possible death?
“Why didn’t they believe her?” Garimi said. “If the plague was spreading before their eyes, the whores must have known Rikka was right.”
Sheeana shook her head sadly. “Honored Matres would never admit weakness or mortality. Better to lash out at a perceived enemy, than to concede that they were all going to die anyway.”
“I do not understand these women,” the Proctor Superior said. “I am glad we did not stay behind on Chapterhouse.”
“We may never know where the whores originally came from,” Sheeana said. “But I have no desire to live in their tomb.” As far as she could tell, the plague seemed to have burned itself out, devouring every available victim and then leaving nothing else to infect.
“I wish to leave this place as well.” Garimi suppressed a shudder, then seemed embarrassed by it. “Even I would not consider this place as a new home for us. The remnants of death will stay in the atmosphere for centuries to come.”
Sheeana agreed. Reinforcing their opinions, Teg reported from the no-ship that the satellites generating the planetary field of invisibility were failing. Within a few years, the cloak would fade away entirely. And, since the Enemy had already found and destroyed this world, she and her followers would not be safe and invisible from the hunters here.
Gathering the documentation they had found, Sheeana and Garimi left the detention center and records vault, and hurried back to the lighter in the gathering darkness.
Information is always available, if one is willing to go to extreme lengths to obtain it.
—The Mentat Handbook
T
he Honored Matres wanted everything, and Uxtal feared that the eight new axlotl tanks in Bandalong would not be enough. Soon—as ordered by Hellica and Navigator Edrik—he would decant eight gholas of the Tleilaxu Master Waff, the Masheikh, the Master of Masters, who had been stored in Hellica’s chamber of horrors. Eight chances to recover the lost knowledge of melange production.
If that didn’t work, he would make eight more, and more again, a constant stream of possible reincarnations, all to obtain one set of memories, one key to knowledge that Uxtal could not figure out for himself.
The Matre Superior had given the Lost Tleilaxu researcher everything he needed, and the Navigators had paid her well for his efforts. But the problem was not so simple. After he removed the identical Waff copies from those wombs, Uxtal would have to bring them to maturity, and then break loose their memories and knowledge from past lives, like a man with a crowbar smashing open a sealed crate.
But that was no easy process, either. Even the twelve-year-old Baron Harkonnen ghola had still not awakened. Thankfully, that was no longer his problem, since Khrone had decided to perform the task himself on Dan.
Now, on his regular inspection walk among the pasty axlotl tanks, Uxtal felt satisfaction as he surveyed the rounded fleshy bellies, the atrophied limbs, the faces so slack they looked like cauls of skin. Female bodies could be such useful things.
Uxtal had already forced reckless speed upon the creation of the Tleilaxu Master gholas. Aware of the constant slippage of time and the growing desperation of the Guild Navigators and Matre Superior