Heretics of Dune

Odrade read the word silently and then aloud.

"Arafel."

She knew this word. Reverend Mothers of the Tyrant's time had impressed it into the Bene Gesserit consciousness, tracing its roots out to the most ancient sources.

"Arafel: the cloud darkness at the end of the universe."

Odrade felt the gasping accumulation of her warning sense. It focused on that single word.

"The Tyrant's holy judgment," the priests called that word. "The cloud darkness of holy judgment!"

She moved out along the word, staring down at it, noting the curling at the end that trailed off into a small arrow. She looked where the arrow pointed. Someone else had seen the arrow and had cut into the ledge where it pointed. Odrade crossed to where the searcher's burner had left a darker pool of melted rock on the chamber floor. Streams of melted stone ran out in fingers away from the ledge, each finger trailing from a deep hole burned into the rock of the ledge.

Bending, Odrade peered into each hole with her light: Nothing. She sensed the treasure hunter's excitement riding on her warning-fear. The extent of the wealth this chamber had once held staggered imagination. In the worst of the old times, a hand-carried luggage case could hold enough spice to buy a planet. And the Fish Speakers had squandered this hoard, losing it in squabbles and shattering misjudgments and ordinary foolishness too picayune for history to record. They had been glad to accept Ixian alliance when the Tleilaxu broke the melange monopoly.

Did the searchers find it all? The Tyrant was superbly clever.

Arafel.

At the end of the universe.

Had he sent a message down the eons to the Bene Gesserit of today?

She cast the beam of her light once more around the chamber and then upward.

The ceiling described an almost perfect half globe overhead. It had been intended, she knew, as a model of the night sky seen from the entrance to Sietch Tabr. But even by the time of Liet Kynes, the first planetologist here, the original stars painted on that ceiling had been gone, lost in the tiny rock chippings of small quakes and the everyday abrasions of life.

Odrade's breath quickened. The sense of peril had never been greater. The danger beacon shone within her! Quickly, she trotted directly across to the steps where she had descended to this floor. Turning there, she cast backward in her mind for Other Memories to limn this place. They came slowly, forcing past that heart-pounding sense of doom. Pointing the beam of her light upward and peering along it, Odrade placed those ancient memories over the scene in front of her.

Bits of reflected brilliance! '

Other Memories positioned them: indicators of the stars in a long-gone sky and right there! The silvery-yellow half circle of the Arrakeen sun. She knew it for a sunset sign.

The Fremen day starts at night.

Arafel!

Keeping her light on that sunset marker, she mounted the steps backward and went around the chamber on the ledge to the exact position she had seen in Other Memories.

Nothing remained of that ancient sun arc.

Searchers had chipped at the wall where it had been. Stone bubbles glistened where a burner had been passed along the wall. No breaks entered the original rock.

By the tightness in her chest, Odrade knew she teetered on the edge of a dangerous discovery. The beacon had led her here!

Arafel... at the edge of the universe. Beyond the setting sun!

She swept her light right and left. Another passage entrance opened on her left. Stones that had blocked it lay scattered on the ledge. Her heart pounding, Odrade slipped through the opening and found a short hall plugged with melted stone at the end. On her right, directly behind where the sunset marker had been, she found a small room thick with the smell of melange. Odrade entered the room and saw more signs of chipping and burning on walls and ceiling. The danger sense was oppressive here. She chanted the Litany Against Fear silently while she swept the beam of her light over the room. The place was almost square, about two meters on a side. The ceiling was less than half a meter above her head. Ci

More marks of that ancient search?

Bending close with her light held at a sharp angle on one side, she saw that she had glimpsed only the shadow of something etched deeply into the rock. Dust concealed most of it. She knelt and brushed the dust aside. Very thin etching and very deep. Whatever this was, it had been meant to endure. The last message of a lost Reverend Mother? This was a known Bene Gesserit artifice. She pressed sensitive fingertips against the etching and reconstructed its tracery in her mind.

Recognition leaped into her awareness: one word - inscribed in ancient Chakobsa, "Here."

This was no ordinary "here" to mark an ordinary place but the accented and emphatic "here" that said: "You have found me!" Her hammering heart emphasized it.

Odrade rested her handlight on the floor near her right knee and let her fingers explore the threshold beside that ancient summons. The stonework appeared unbroken to the eye but her fingers detected a tiny discontinuity. She pressed the discontinuity, twisted, turned, changed the angle of pressure several times and repeated her effort.

Nothing.

Sitting back on her heels, Odrade studied the situation.

"Here."

The warning sense had grown even more acute. She could feel it as a pressure on her breathing.

Withdrawing slightly, she pulled her light back and lay full length on the floor to stare narrowly along the base of the threshold. Here! Could she place a tool there beside that word and lever the threshold? No... a tool was not indicated. This thing had the smell of the Tyrant, not of a Reverend Mother. She tried to push the threshold sideways. Nothing moved.

Feeling the tensions and danger sense accentuated by frustration, Odrade stood and kicked at the threshold beside the etched word. It moved! Something grated roughly against sand over her head.

Odrade dodged backward as sand cascaded onto the floor in front of her. A deep rumbling sound filled the tiny chamber. The stones shook under her feet. The floor tipped downward in front of her toward the doorway, opening a space under the door and its wall.

Once more, Odrade found herself precipitated forward and down into an unknown. Her light tumbled with her, its beam rolling over and over. She saw mounds of dark reddish brown in front of her. Ci

She fell beside her light onto a soft mounding of melange. The opening through which she had fallen lay out of reach some five meters overhead. She grabbed up her light. Its beam picked out wide stone steps cut into the rock beside the opening. Something written on the risers but she saw only that there was a way out. Her first panic subsided, but the sense of danger left her almost breathless, forcing the movements of her chest muscles.

Left and right she sent the beam of her light into this place where she had fallen. It was a long room directly beneath the passage she had taken from the great chamber. The entire length of it was piled with melange!

Odrade probed upward with her light and saw why no searcher tapping on that passage floor overhead had detected this chamber. Criss-crossed rock bracings transferred all strain deep into the stone walls. Anyone tapping overhead would get back the sounds of solid rock.

Once more, Odrade looked at the melange around her. Even at today's tank-deflated prices, she knew she was standing on a treasure. This hoard would measure many long tons.

Is that the danger?

The warning sense within her remained just as acute as ever. The Tyrant's melange was not what she should fear. The triumvirate would make an equitable distribution of this lot and that would be the end of it. A bonus in the ghola project.