Dune (Page 72)

Yueh .

Drug-fogged memory of seeing a limp corpse dragged past him in this room hung like a vapor in Leto’s mind. He knew it had been Yueh.

"Do you hear that noise, Duke Leto?" the Baron asked.

Leto grew conscious of a frog sound, the burred mewling of someone’s agony.

"We caught one of your men disguised as a Fremen, " the Baron said. "We penetrated the disguise quite easily: the eyes, you know. He insists he was sent among the Fremen to spy on them. I’ve lived for a time on this planet, cher cousin. One does not spy on those ragged scum of the desert. Tell me, did you buy their help? Did you send your woman and son to them?"

Leto felt fear tighten his chest. If Yueh sent them to the desert fold . . . the search won’t stop until they ‘re found .

"Come, come," the Baron said. "We don’t have much time and pain is quick. Please don’t bring it to this, my dear Duke." The Baron looked up at Piter who stood at Leto’s shoulder. "Piter doesn’t have all his tools here, but I’m sure he could improvise."

"Improvisation is sometimes the best, Baron."

That silky, insinuating voice! Leto heard it at his ear.

"You had an emergency plan," the Baron said. "Where have your woman and the boy been sent?" He looked at Leto’s hand. "Your ring is missing. Does the boy have it?"

The Baron looked up, stared into Leto’s eyes.

"You don’t answer," he said. "Will you force me to do a thing I do not want to do? Piter will use simple, direct methods. I agree they’re sometimes the best, but it’s not good that you should be subjected to such things."

"Hot tallow on the back, perhaps, or on the eyelids," Piter said. "Perhaps on other portions of the body. It’s especially effective when the subject doesn’t know where the tallow will fall next. It’s a good method and there’s a sort of beauty in the pattern of pus-white blisters on naked skin, eh, Baron?"

"Exquisite," the Baron said, and his voice sounded sour.

Those touching fingers! Leto watched the fat hands, the glittering jewels on baby-fat hands – their compulsive wandering.

The sounds of agony coming through the door behind him gnawed at the Duke’s nerves. Who is it they caught? he wondered. Could it have been Idaho ?

"Believe me, cher cousin," the Baron said. "I do not want it to come to this."

"You think of nerve couriers racing to summon help that cannot come," Piter said. "There’s an artistry in this, you know."

"You’re a superb artist," the Baron growled. "Now, have the decency to be silent."

Leto suddenly recalled a thing Gurney Halleck had said once, seeing a picture of the Baron: " ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea . . . and upon his heads the name of blasphemy .’ "

"We waste time, Baron," Piter said.

"Perhaps." The Baron nodded. "You know, my dear Leto, you’ll tell us in the end where they are. There’s a level of pain that’ll buy you."

He’s most likely correct , Leto thought. Were if not for the tooth . . . and the fact that I truly don’t know where they are .

The Baron picked up a sliver of meat, pressed the morsel into his mouth, chewed slowly, swallowed. We must try a new tack , he thought.

Chapter Twelve

"Observe this prize person who denies he’s for hire," the Baron said. "Observe him, Piter."

And the Baron thought: Yes! See him there, this man who believes he cannot be bought. See him detained there by a million shares of himself sold in dribbles every second of his life! If you took him up now and shook him, he’d rattle inside. Emptied! Sold out! What difference how he dies now?

The frog sounds in the background stopped.

The Baron saw Umman Kudu, the guard captain, appear in the doorway across the room, shake his head. The captive hadn’t produced the needed information. Another failure. Time to quit stalling with this fool Duke, this stupid soft fool who didn’t realize how much hell there was so near him – only a nerve’s thickness away.

This thought calmed the Baron, overcoming his reluctance to have a royal person subject to pain. He saw himself suddenly as a surgeon exercising endless supple scissor dissections – cutting away the masks from fools, exposing the hell beneath.

Rabbits, all of them!

And how they cowered when they saw the carnivore!

Leto stared across the table, wondering why he waited. The tooth would end it all quickly. Still – it had been good, much of this life. He found himself remembering an antenna kite updangling in the shell-blue sky of Caladan, and Paul laughing with joy at the sight of it. And he remembered sunrise here on Arrakis – colored strata of the Shield Wall mellowed by dust haze.

"Too bad," the Baron muttered. He pushed himself back from the table, stood up lightly in his suspensors and hesitated, seeing a change come over the Duke. He saw the man draw in a deep breath, the jawline stiffen, the ripple of a muscle there as the Duke clamped his mouth shut.

How he fears me! the Baron thought.

Shocked by fear that the Baron might escape him, Leto bit sharply on the capsule tooth, felt it break. He opened his mouth, expelled the biting vapor he could taste as it formed on his tongue. The Baron grew smaller, a figure seen in a tightening tunnel. Leto heard a gasp beside his ear – the silky-voiced one: Piter.

It got him, too!

"Piter! What’s wrong?"

The rumbling voice was far away.

Leto sensed memories rolling in his mind – the old toothless mutterings of hags. The room, the table, the Baron, a pair of terrified eyes – blue within blue, the eyes – all compressed around him in ruined symmetry.

There was a man with a boot-toe chin, a toy man falling. The toy man had a broken nose slanted to the left: an offbeat metronome caught forever at the start of an upward stroke. Leto heard the crash of crockery – so distant – a roaring in his ears. His mind was a bin without end, catching everything. Everything that had ever been: every shout, every whisper, every . . . silence.