Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [26]
The lift door opened and a frantic Duncan Idaho charged onto the navigation bridge. Seeing Teg at the controls, he stuttered to a halt and looked out the viewing plaz, astonished to see the new starfield.
“The net is gone.” Panting, he turned his question-filled eyes toward Teg. “Miles, how did you get here? What happened?”
“I folded space—thanks to your warning. I ran to a different lift tube, which took me here immediately. It must have been faster than yours.” He wiped perspiration off his forehead. When Duncan clearly remained skeptical of the explanation, the Bashar searched for a way to distract the other man. “Have we gotten away from the web?”
Duncan looked out at the emptiness around them. “This is bad, Miles. So soon after we popped back into normal space, the hunters have picked up our scent again.”
Is there a more terrifying sensation than to stand on the brink and peer into the void of an empty future? Extinction not only of your life, but of all that has been accomplished by your forefathers? If we Tleilaxu plunge into the abyss of nothingness, does our race’s long history signify anything at all?
TLEILAXU MASTER SCYTALE,
Wisdom for My Successor
A
fter the funeral in space and the emergency with the unseen net, the last original Tleilaxu Master sat in his cell and contemplated his own mortality.
Scytale had been trapped aboard the no-ship for more than a decade before Sheeana and Duncan escaped from Chapterhouse. No longer was he simply a captive shielded from the hunting Honored Matres. The ship had been flung off into . . . he knew not where.
Of course, the whores swarming into Chapterhouse would surely have killed him as soon as they learned of his existence. Both he and Duncan Idaho were marked for death. At least out here, Scytale was safe from Murbella and her minions. But other threats abounded.
While back on Chapterhouse, he had been held in his inner chambers and prevented from seeing outside. Therefore, the witches could easily have modified the onboard diurnal cycles, creating some sort of insidious deception to throw off his bodily rhythms. They could have made him forget the holy days and misjudge the passage of time, though they paid lip service to the Tleilaxu Great Belief, claiming to share the sacred truths of the Islamiyat.
Scytale drew his thin legs up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his bony shins. It didn’t matter. Though he was now allowed to move about in a large section of the huge ship, his incarceration had become an unendurable expanse of days and years, regardless of how it was cut up into smaller segments.
And the spaciousness of his austere quarters and confinement areas could not make him forget that he was still imprisoned. Scytale was permitted to leave this deck only under close supervision. After so much time, what did they think he might do? If the Ithaca was going to wander forever, they would eventually have to let down their barriers. Still, the Tleilaxu man preferred to remain apart from the other passengers.
No one had spoken with Scytale for a long time. Dirty Tleilaxu! He thought they were afraid of his taint . . . or maybe they simply enjoyed isolating him. No one would explain their plans to him, or tell him where this great ship was going.
The witch Sheeana knew he was holding something back. He couldn’t lie to her—it did no good. At the beginning of this journey, the Tleilaxu Master had grudgingly revealed the method for making spice in axlotl tanks. With the ship’s melange supplies obviously insufficient for the people aboard, he had offered a solution. That initial revelation—one of his most valuable bargaining chips—had been self-serving, since Scytale, too, feared spice withdrawal. He had bargained vigorously with Sheeana, finally agreeing on access to the library database and confinement in a much larger