The Mentat paused in his stride. “The son of a Duke will face mental, physical, and political challenges. The young man must be ready for all of them.” His stained lips turned downward in concern.
Jessica thought of Paul’s future. “Has there been any response from Duke Verdun about a possible betrothal? I am glad we found at least one name we could all agree on, but we dispatched the inquiry some time ago.”
“No response at all.”
“Strange. Why the delay, do you think?”
Thufir pondered as they approached the side of the castle. “Difficult to say. With the turmoil in the Landsraad and the many open holdings after Otorio, perhaps Verdun isn’t so quick to marry off his daughter.” He added with a hint of unguarded pride, “Duke Verdun could not find a better match than young Master Paul.”
Jessica smiled. “You’ll get no argument from me.”
Together, they reached the northern wing and entered through a side doorway to avoid drawing a flood of attention.
The Mentat bent down to rub his scarred leg. “I sense something very different about Paul, my Lady. As he learns more and more, he has a kind of inner balance, a deep calmness beyond his years.”
She had noticed that herself, not just as a mother seeing her son through a fog of expectations. “Yes, Paul is extraordinary, and our guidance can make him even more so.”
The difference between delirium and insight is only a matter of perspective.
—DR. WELLINGTON YUEH, private medical journals
Paul awoke out in the cold wilderness, twisting in pain. In the darkness, he heard the sounds of buzzing insects and night-hunting birds, though they were drowned out by the roaring in his head and the pain of cramps. The sickness struck him as swiftly as the charge of a maddened bull.
Paul rolled off his cushioned blanket, curled into a fetal position, then pushed himself to his hands and knees on the sandy ground. Waves of pain jabbed his guts like a serrated blade. He rolled and began vomiting violently.
The driftwood campfire had burned down to dull red embers. Gurney Halleck was instantly alert, springing from the ground. “Young Master! What is it?”
“Paul!” His father lurched up from the blanket beside him. “Yueh, get over here!”
Paul sensed something toxic was inside him. A poison. His body rejected whatever was in his stomach, and he vomited again. He tried to speak, but only a ragged gasp came out. He choked. His mind was aflame. He felt people grabbing his shoulders and shaking him. Someone, perhaps Yueh, touched his forehead.
Paul began to shake and thrash. He dropped and rolled onto his back, staring upward. The stars grew brighter, then dimmer, like diamonds burning out. As his eyes filled with tears of agony, he squeezed the lids shut, went inward.
He lost more and more awareness of the world around him … the trees, the shouts, the forest shadows. A roaring in his ears reminded him of the grumble of the ocean, but there was no ocean here.
Paul shivered and opened his eyes to see pounding sunlight and sinuous dunes that extended like a different kind of sea. He’d seen long expanses of beaches before, but nothing like this. He convulsed, but his mind seemed far away, barely aware of his body.
As he looked at the barren landscape that was gentle and stark at the same time, he saw people moving, lines of hooded figures in mottled tan capes. Paul was able to see them through his third eye, which had now opened even as his physical eyes clenched shut with pain. The figures ran forward and struck an outpost. He heard the piercing screams of the dying, saw blood and orange flags, emblazoned with stylized griffins … the sign of House Harkonnen, mortal enemies of the Atreides.
Scouring sand blew in his unreal face and obscured the images. Paul felt a rumbling beneath him in the sunbaked sand, not the forest floor of Caladan.
The dunes split open as a rolling wave crest shuddered across the expanse, and an enormous monster emerged, like a lamprey with a mouth the size of a massive sea cave. The creature roared upward in an explosion of sand that engulfed the view, the vision, and Paul himself.
* * *
“WHAT IS HAPPENING to my son?” Leto stood ready to fight any foe to protect Paul, but there was nothing he could do. “Give me answers, Yueh!”
The Suk doctor held down the convulsing young man, who had vomited several more times until his stomach was empty. Yueh had already injected him with stabilizers from his medkit, strapped on a fluid pack. With instruments in hand, he worked with whipsaw movements, like a battlefield surgeon. “I am running tests, my Lord. I can treat the symptoms, but I cannot cure him until I know what’s wrong. I am confident this will help in the meantime.”
“Seven hells, he’s been poisoned somehow,” Gurney said. He had drawn his kindjal. Leto felt confident in Gurney’s ability to protect them all against an overt attack, but this was not an enemy that any sword could defeat.
“How could he have been poisoned?” Leto demanded. “How is that possible? We caught our own fish, have not touched the pack food.”
Gurney turned slowly as if expecting assassins to sweep in out of the wooded darkness. “I am not an imaginative man, Sire, but even I can think of ways—something slipped into our equipment perhaps, contact poison sprayed on his bedding.”
Leto resisted the urge to deny each possibility, but saw Paul shaking and pale, his eyes red. He had wanted to get away from countless retainers and guards, for this time of bonding with Paul on their customary retreat. And now … “This has to be part of some plot. He looks like Wellan when he died from the ailar. Save him!”
Yueh continued to work at a measured but frantic pace. “There are some similarities in the symptoms, my Lord, but there are many possibilities.”
The young man’s back arched as if he were trying to throw off a crushing weight.
“Paul—” Leto gasped. He meant it as a shout, but the word came out as a desperate whisper.
Gurney said, “I’m activating the emergency comm to summon rescue ships. They can be here in…” His voice trailed off.
Leto looked at him in stark silence. It would probably take much too long for help to arrive. “Yueh, will he be all right?”
The Suk doctor continued to work. “I do not know, Sire, but we’ll know in the next few minutes if my treatment has any effect. If not…” He peeled Paul’s eyelids back, took his pulse. He’d taken blood samples, and the chemical analyzers were already offering a first approximation. “I see no traces of ailar in his bloodstream. He has not been drugged, that I can tell.”
“Some other poison, then!”
“How can you give him an antidote if you don’t know what the toxin is?” Gurney asked.
“I have already done the obvious—fluids, electrolytes, saline,” Yueh said. “In the past few minutes, his pulse has already slowed, grown more stable. That is a good sign. His body reacted violently to some substance, but he is driving it off.” He glanced at where Paul had vomited on the ground. “Because we all had the same food for dinner, I have to assume it’s not anything he ate.”
Leto struggled to understand. “But how could someone have slipped poison in—” He looked at Yueh and Gurney. Could either of these men have done something so treacherous? And why out here? Both of them had had ample opportunity to poison Paul for years if they were going to do so. Such suspicions were insane.