Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [84]
“We can provide certain items immediately from our stockpiles, a few ships, some space mines. One warlord customer recently suffered from . . . um, an assassination. Therefore his completed order remains unclaimed, and we can offer you all of it.”
“I’ll take it with me now,” she said.
THE MOTHER COMMANDER continued to train her troops, honing them into a razor-sharp weapon. Wearing a black singlesuit uniform, Murbella stood beside Janess on a suspensor platform that floated low over the largest training field. Below, in midday sunlight, her handpicked troops went through increasingly difficult personal combat routines, never resting, never tolerating the smallest mistake.
Upon hearing that Murbella’s special squad had crushed the encampment of dissidents on Chapterhouse, her advisors had been shocked at the swift brutality, but the Mother Commander stood firm against the uproar. “I am not Bashar Miles Teg. He could have used his reputation to subtly manipulate the malcontents, and might have reached a compromise that skated past violence. But the Bashar is no longer with us, and I fear his clever tactics will not be effective against the Armageddon forces of the Enemy. Violence will become more and more necessary.”
The women had found no effective counterargument.
After that first decisive battle, the Mother Commander’s crack forces took a new name for themselves: Valkyries.
Murbella challenged her Valkyries to master a type of fighting that Janess had rediscovered in the archives: the techniques of the Swordmasters of Ginaz. By resurrecting that training discipline and arming her Sisters with skills that no one alive remembered, the Mother Commander intended to produce fighters better equipped than any before them to neutralize the entrenched Honored Matres.
At the moment, the squads were executing a complex maneuver in which they fought against mock enemy troops on the ground, attacking them in spinning star formations. Viewed from the high suspensor platform, the show was quite impressive as the five points of each star rotated and surged against the opposing force and sent them fleeing in disarray. It was something Murbella called the “choreography of personal combat.” She could not wait to test it in battle.
Like her mother, Janess plunged into her work with fervor. She had even adopted the surname of her father, calling herself Lieutenant Idaho. It sounded right to her, and to Murbella. Mother and daughter were becoming quite a formidable force. Some Sisters jokingly claimed that they didn’t need an army—those two were dangerous enough on their own.
Wearing a satisfied look, the Mother Commander reviewed the troop formations. Janess, too, was clearly proud of the trained fighters. “I will pit our Valkyries against any army the Honored Matres can raise against us.”
“Yes, Janess, you will—and soon. First, we will conquer Buzzell.”
Muad’Dib could indeed see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light. If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley. Just so, Muad’Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain. He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us “The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.”And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning “That path leads ever down into stagnation.”
—from “Arrakis Awakening” by the
PRINCESS IRULAN
T
he planet Dan was full of Face Dancers. Just by looking at the natives in the settlement near the ruined Atreides castle, Uxtal