Terrible Purpose (Dune Fanfiction)

Chapter Thirteen

This chapter is brought to you by: Glitter & Gold by Barns Courtney

Nyla felt that all her past, every experience before this night, had become sand curling in an hourglass. She sat next to her brother and across from her mother, hugging her knees within a small fabric and plastic hutment - a stilltent - that had come, like the Fremen clothing they now wore, from the pack left in the 'thopter.

There was no doubt in Nyla's mind who had put the Fremkit there, who had directed the course of the 'thopter carrying them captive.

Yueh.

The traitor doctor had sent them directly into the hands of Duncan Idaho.

Nyla watched Paul stare out the transparent end of the stilltent at the moonshadowed rocks that ringed this place where Idaho had hidden them.

"Hiding like a child when I'm now the Duke," Paul whispered.

"You cannot deny the wisdom in what we did," Nyla replied.

Something had happened to Nyla's awareness this night - she saw with sharpened clarity every circumstance and occurrence around her. She felt unable to stop the inflow of data or the cold precision with which each new item was added to her knowledge and the computation was centered in her awareness. It didn't feel how she imagined Mentats to process. It felt different...something more. And a glance at her brother and she instantly realized he was going through something similar.

Nyla thought back to the moment of impotent rage as the strange 'thopter dived out of the night onto them, stooping like a giant hawk above the desert with wind screaming through its wings. The thing in Nyla's mind had happened then. The 'thopter had skidded and slewed across a sand ridge toward the running figures – her, her brother, and her mother. Nyla remembered how the smell of burned sulfur from abrasion of 'thopter skids against sand had drifted across them.

Was it the spice, then?

Her mother, she knew, had turned, expected to meet a lasgun in the hands of Harkonnen mercenaries, and had recognized Duncan Idaho leaning out the 'thopter's open door shouting: "Hurry! There's wormsign south of you!"

But Nyla had known as she turned who piloted the 'thopter. An accumulation of minutiae in the way it was flown, the dash of the landing - clues so small even her mother hadn't detected them - had told her precisely who sat at those controls.

Across the stilltent from Paul, Jessica stirred, and said: "There can be only one explanation. The Harkonnens held Yueh's wife. He hated the Harkonnens! I cannot be wrong about that. You read his note. But why has he saved us from the carnage?"

"She is only now seeing it, and poorly at that," Nyla whispered to Paul. The thought was a shock.

Paul grasped Nyla's hand and traced the characters into her palm: "This is fact, it was described in the note that accompanied the ducal signet."

"I loved Father," Nyla traced, and knew this for truth. "I should mourn him. I should feel something."

But she felt nothing except: Here's an important fact.

"It is now merely a fact to me, along with all the others," Paul traced in response.

All the while Nyla watched as his mind was adding sense impressions, extrapolating, computing.

But she felt no letup in the cold precision of her being. She sensed that her new awareness was only a beginning, that it was growing. The sense of terrible purpose she'd first experienced in her ordeal with the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam pervaded her. Her right hand - the hand of remembered pain - tingled and throbbed.