He pointed to the steps beneath his feet, a stiff and quivering finger. "This is no lost djedida which is no more inhabited forever! Here have we eaten the bread of heaven. And here the noise of strangers drives us from our homes! They breed for us a desolation, a land wherein no man dwelleth, nor any man pass thereby."
The crowd stirred uncomfortably, refugees and town Fremen peering about, looking at the pilgrims of the Hajj who stood among them.
He could start a bloody riot! Alia thought. Well, let him. My Priests can grab him in the confusion.
She saw the five Priests then, a tight knot of yellow robes working down the steps behind The Preacher.
"The waters which we spread upon the desert have become blood," The Preacher said, waving his arms wide. "Blood upon our land! Behold our desert which could rejoice and blossom; it has lured the stranger and seduced him in our midst. They come for violence! Their faces are closed up as for the last wind of Kralizec! They gather the captivity of the sand. They suck up the abundance of the sand, the treasure hidden in the depths. Behold them as they go forth to their evil work. It is written: 'And I stood upon the sand, and I saw a beast rise up out of that sand, and upon the head of that beast was the name of God!' "
Angry mutterings arose from the crowd. Fists were raised, shaken.
"What is he doing?" Farad'n whispered.
"I wish I knew," Alia said. She put a hand to her breast, feeling the fearful excitement of this moment. The crowd would turn upon the pilgrims if he kept this up!
But The Preacher half turned, aimed his dead sockets toward the Temple and raised a hand to point at the high windows of Alia's aerie, "One blasphemy remains!" he screamed. "Blasphemy! And the name of that blasphemy is Alia!"
Shocked silence gripped the plaza.
Alia stood in unmoving consternation. She knew the mob could not see her, but she felt overcome by a sense of exposure, of vulnerability. The echoes of calming words within her skull competed with the pounding of her heart. She could only stare down at that incredible tableau. The Preacher remained with a hand pointing at her windows.
His words had been too much for the Priests, though. They broke the silence with angry shouts, stormed down the steps, thrusting people aside. As they moved the crowd reacted, breaking like a wave upon the steps, sweeping over the first lines of onlookers, carrying The Preacher before them. He stumbled blindly, separated from his young guide. Then a yellow-clad arm arose from the press of people; a crysknife was brandished in its hand. She saw the knife strike downward, bury itself in The Preacher's chest.
The thunderous clang of the Temple's giant doors being closed broke Alia from her shock. Guards obviously had closed the doors against the mob. But people already were drawing back, making an open space around a crumpled figure on the steps. An eerie quiet fell over the plaza. Alia saw many bodies, but only this one lay by itself.
Then a voice screeched from the mob: "Muad'Dib! They've killed Muad'Dib!"
"Gods below," Alia quavered. "Gods below."
"A little late for that, don't you think?" Jessica asked.
Alia whirled, noting the sudden startled reaction of Farad'n as he saw the rage on her face. "That was Paul they killed!" Alia screamed. "That was your son! When they confirm it, do you know what'll happen?"
Jessica stood rooted for a long moment, thinking that she had just been told something already known to her. Farad'n's hand upon her arm shattered the moment. "My Lady," he said, and there was such compassion in his voice that Jessica thought she might die of it right there. She looked from the cold, glaring anger on Alia's face to the sympathetic misery on Farad'n's features, and thought: Perhaps I did my job too well.
There could be no doubting Alia's words. Jessica remembered every intonation of The Preacher's voice, hearing her own tricks in it, the long years of instruction she'd spent there upon a young man meant to be Emperor, but who now lay a shattered mound of bloody rags upon the Temple steps.
Ghafla blinded me, Jessica thought.
Alia gestured to one of her aides, called: "Bring Ghanima now."
Jessica forced herself into recognizing these words. Ghanima? Why Ghanima now?
The aide had turned toward the outer door, motioning for it to be unbarred, but before a word could be uttered the door bulged. Hinges popped. The bar snapped and the door, a thick plasteel construction meant to withstand terrible energies, toppled into the room. Guards leaped to avoid it, drawing their weapons.
Jessica and Farad'n's bodyguards closed in around the Corrino Prince.
But the opening revealed only two children: Ghanima on the left, clad in her black betrothal robe, and Leto on the right, the grey slickness of a stillsuit beneath a desert-stained white robe.
Alia stared from the fallen door to the children, found she was trembling uncontrollably.
"The family here to greet us," Leto said. "Grandmother." He nodded to Jessica, shifted his attention to the Corrino Prince. "And this must be Prince Farad'n. Welcome to Arrakis, Prince."
Ghanima's eyes appeared empty. She held her right hand on a ceremonial crysknife at her waist, and she appeared to be trying to escape from Leto's grip on her arm. Leto shook her arm and her whole body shook with it.
"Behold me, family," Leto said. "I am Ari, the Lion of the Atreides. And here -" Again he shook Ghanima's arm with that powerful ease which set her whole body jerking. "- here is Aryeh, the Atreides Lioness. We come to set you onto Secher Nbiw, the Golden Path."
Ghanima, absorbing the trigger words, Secher Nbiw, felt the locked-away consciousness flow into her mind. It flowed with a linear nicety, the inner awareness of her mother hovering there behind it, a guardian at a gate. And Ghanima knew in that instant that she had conquered the clamorous past. She possessed a gate through which she could peer when she needed that past. The months of self-hypnotic suppression had built for her a safe place from which to manage her own flesh. She started to turn toward Leto with the need to explain this when she became aware of where she stood and with whom.
Leto released her arm.
"Did our plan work?" Ghanima whispered.
"Well enough," Leto said.
Recovering from her shock, Alia shouted at a clump of guards on her left: "Seize them!"
But Leto bent, took the fallen door with one hand, skidded it across the room into the guards. Two were pinned against the wall. The others fell back in terror. That door weighed half a metric ton and this child had thrown it.
Alia, growing aware that the corridor beyond the doorway contained fallen guards, realized that Leto must have dealt with them, that this child had shattered her impregnable door.
Jessica, too, had seen the bodies, seen the awesome power in Leto and had made similar assumptions, but Ghanima's words touched a core of Bene Gesserit discipline which forced Jessica to maintain her composure. This grandchild spoke of a plan.
"What plan?" Jessica asked.
"The Golden Path, our Imperial plan for our Imperium," Leto said. He nodded to Farad'n. "Don't think harshly of me, cousin. I act for you as well. Alia hoped to have Ghanima slay you. I'd rather you lived out your life in some degree of happiness."
Alia screamed at her guards cowering in the passage: "I command you to seize them!"
But the guards refused to enter the room.
"Wait for me here, sister," Leto said. "I have a disagreeable task to perform." He moved across the room toward Alia.
She backed away from him into a corner, crouched and drew her knife. The green jewels of its handle flashed in the light from the window.
Leto merely continued his advance, hands empty, but spread and ready.
