Dune: List 2

Aged. It showed in the rheumy shine of the brown eyes, in the cheeks cracked and burned by exotic weathers, in the rounded curve of the shoulders and the thin set of his lips with the cranberry-colored stain of sapho juice.

The Fremen themselves sent us a courier to warn of the false band. In the attack, however, we found the Harkonnens had waylaid the Fremen courier—badly wounded him.

It ended up in confusion, Paul thought, staring at the backs of the last men to leave. Always before, Staff had ended on an incisive air.

"My Lord, I don't quite know how to broach this."
"We've suffered many a scar for each other, Thufir," the Duke said. "You know you can broach any subject with me."

"Your mother's response must not be an act. Oh, she's capable of a supreme act...but too much rides on this. I hope to smoke out a traitor. It must seem that I've been completely cozened. She must be hurt this way that she does not suffer greater hurt."

He had never seen his father this despondent.

His father's words carried futility, a sense of fatalism that left the boy with an empty feeling in his chest.

"Power and fear," he said. "The tools of statecraft..."

An unmarked ornithopter squatted nearby, humming softly on standby like a somnolent insect.

The Fremen escort Kynes had left in the shade of the administration building leaped up from their squatting repose, muttering in open agitation.

Paul's question had been direct and pertinent.

Beyond the shelf, fingernail crescents of dunes marched toward the horizon with here and there in the distance a dull smudge, a darker blotch to tell of something not sand. Rock outcroppings, perhaps.

The timbre of Kynes' voice held Paul's attention.

Worm specimens we've examined lead us to suspect complicated chemical interchanges within them. We find traces of hydrochloric acid in the ducts, more complicated acid forms elsewhere. I'll give you my monograph on the subject.

But he was remembering the words of the legend: "The Lisan al-Gaib shall see through all subterfuge."

Beneath these talismans, white linen shone around the burnished reflections of the Atreides silver, which had been placed in precise arrangements along the great table—little archipelagos of service waiting beside crystal glasses, each setting squared off before a heavy wooden chair.

You can plumb us by our language—the precise and delicate delineations for ways to administer treacherous death.

Beside each plate on the long table stood a flagon of water.

He realized she had done this to taunt him subtly, a reproof against his recent pose of coldness.

"My toast is one of those maxims so dear to our hearts: 'Business makes progress! Fortune passes everywhere!'"

When our time ends on its rictus smile, we'll pass the lure of fortune.

A carryall's complement usually is four men—two pilots and two journeymen attachers.

A carryall's complement usually is four men—two pilots and two journeymen attachers.

You will find it fairly simple to determine the root languages of your subjects, of course, both through voice inflection and speech pattern.

"It was not an odd question," Paul said, and Jessica noted the brittle riposte quality of her training exposed in his voice.

This planet has much oxygen without its usual concomitants—widespread plant life and large sources of free carbon dioxide from such phenomena as volcanoes.

"The interesting thing about this man was the wounds on his shoulders—made by another fisherman's claw-boots. This fisherman was one of several in a boat—a craft for traveling on water—that foundered...sank beneath the water. Another fisherman helping recover the body said he'd seen marks like this man's wounds several times. They meant another drowning fisherman had tried to stand on this poor fellow's shoulders in the attempt to reach up to the surface—to reach air."

Her son had probably been the first to see it—his training hadn't overlooked that obvious gambit.

"If you're innocent, you'll have my most abject apologies."

Logic said the traitor was Yueh, but he held final decision in abeyance.

Paul stared around them, saw the rock scarp lifting out of the desert like a beach rising from the sea, wind-carved palisades beyond.

And he remembered sunrise here on Arrakis—colored strata of the Shield Wall mellowed by dust haze.

But he felt nothing except: Here's an important fact. It was one with all the other facts. All the while his mind was adding sense impressions, extrapolating, computing.

The sense of terrible purpose he'd first experienced in his ordeal with the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam pervaded him.

He took a deep breath, looked up through the transparent end of the tent at the rock escarpment outlined against the stars.

She heard the change in his voice, felt coldness in her entrails at the sound.

Abruptly, as though he had found a necessary key, Paul's mind climbed another notch in awareness. He felt himself clinging to this new level, clutching at a precarious hold and peering about.

The implacable part of him recorded this as an interesting emotional datum and fed it into computation.

The terrifying presence of his voice brooked no dispute.

He looked up, staring across the green-lighted tent at the inbred, patrician lines of her face.