Terrible Purpose (Dune Fanfiction)

Chapter Four

This chapter is brought to you by: Crossfire - Stephen

Nyla lay on her bed in Arrakis feigning sleep. It had been easy to palm Dr. Yueh's sleeping tablet, to pretend to swallow it. Nyla suppressed a laugh. Even her mother had believed her asleep. She had wanted to jump up and ask her permission to go exploring the house, but had realized she wouldn't approve. Things were too unsettled yet. No, this way was best.

If I slip out without asking I haven't disobeyed orders. And I will stay in the house where it's safe.

She heard her mother and Yueh talking in the other room. Their words were indistinct - something about the spice...the Harkonnens. The conversation rose and fell.

Nyla's attention went to the carved headboard of her bed - a false headboard attached to the wall and concealing the controls for this room's functions. A leaping fish had been shaped on the wood with thick brown waves beneath it. She knew if she pushed the fish's one visible eye that would turn on the room's suspensor lamps. One of the waves, when twisted, controlled ventilation. Another changed the temperature.

Quietly, Nyla sat up in bed. A tall bookcase stood against the wall to her left. It could be swung aside to reveal a closet with drawers along one side. The handle on the door into the hall was patterned on an ornithopter thrust bar.

It was as though the room had been designed to entice her.

This room and this planet.

She thought of the filmbook Yueh had shown her - "Arrakis: His Imperial Majesty's Desert Botanical Testing Station." It was an old filmbook from before discovery of the spice. Names flitted through Nyla's mind, each with its picture imprinted by the book's mnemonic pulse: saguaro, burro bush, date palm, sand verbena, evening primrose, barrel cactus, incense bush, smoke tree, creosote bush . . . kit fox, desert hawk, kangaroo mouse . . .

Names and pictures, names and pictures from man's terranic past - and many to be found now nowhere else in the universe except here on Arrakis.

So many new things to learn about - the spice.

And the sandworms.

A door closed in the other room. Nyla heard her mother's footsteps retreating down the hall. Dr. Yueh, she knew, would find something to read and remain in the other room.

Now was the moment to go exploring.

Nyla slipped out of the bed, and headed for Paul's room next door, rapping on the door, wanting to know if he aimed to join her. When she didn't hear a response, she opened it.

Paul's right hand shot out and down, gripping a small, bug-like apparatus in his hand. It hummed and twisted in his hand, but his muscles were locked on it in desperation. With a violent turn and thrust, he slammed the thing's nose against the metal doorplate. The nose eye smashed and the seeker went dead in his hand.

Paul's eyes came up, and met his sister's wide stare of shock.

"Is that a hunter-seeker?" she asked, and Paul nodded. "It would've killed me had you not done anything, no?"

Paul swallowed before he spoke. "I...was its target."

"But it was coming for me."

"Because you were moving."

"Then you saved my life"

"I saved both our lives."

Nyla wrapped her brother in a quick embrace, feeling his fear swirling and mingling around her own.

Through the open door, an odd woman in a sack-like dress of bondsman brown came in. "Good, you're both here."

"Who are you?" Paul asked.

"The Shadout Mapes, housekeeper."

"How did you know where to find me?"

"Your mother told me. I met her at the stairs to the weirding room down the hall." She pointed to her right. "Your father has sent for you two. There are men in the hall to escort you."

Those will be Hawat's men, Nyla thought. We must find the operator of this thing.

"Go to my father's men," Paul said. "Tell them I've caught a hunter-seeker in the house and they're to spread out and find the operator. Tell them to seal off the house and its grounds immediately. They'll know how to go about it. The operator's sure to be a stranger among us."

Nyla wondered for a brief moment: Could it be her? But she knew it wasn't. The seeker had been under control when she entered.

"Before I do your bidding, manling," Mapes said, "I must cleanse the way between us. You've put a water burden on me that I'm not sure I care to support. But we Fremen pay our debts - be they black debts or white debts. And it's known to us that you've a traitor in your midst. Who it is, we cannot say, but we're certain sure of it. Mayhap there's the hand guided that flesh-cutter."

Nyla absorbed this in silence: a traitor. Before she or Paul could speak, the odd woman whirled away and ran back toward the entry.

"Should we call her back?" she asked.

Paul shook his head. "There's an air about her that tells me she would resent it. She's told us what she knew and now she's going to do my bidding. The house will be swarming with Hawat's men in a minute."

Nyla's mind went to other parts of that strange conversation: weirding room. She looked to her left where she had pointed. We Fremen. So that was a Fremen. She paused for the mnemonic blink that would store the pattern of her face in her memory - prune-wrinkled features darkly browned, blue-on-blue eyes without any white in them. She attached the label: The Shadout Mapes.

Still gripping the shattered seeker, Paul turned back into his room, scooped up his shield belt from the bed with his left hand, swung it around his waist and buckled it as he ran back out and down the hall to the left, his sister in tow. She said our mother was someplace down here - stairs...a weirding room.

~~~~~

Sorry that this chapter is a bit short. Based on what happens in the next chapter, I felt the pacing would be better to chop it up like this.

Feel free to comment any questions/thoughts!

-Marten