“It’s the na-Baron … Baron now that the old man’s dead,” Gurney said. “He’ll do for what I’ve in—”
“Can you take him, Gurney?”
“M’Lord jests!”
“That argument between the Emperor and his witch has gone on long enough, don’t you think, Mother?”
She nodded. “Indeed.”
Paul raised his voice, called out to the Emperor: “Majesty, is there a Harkonnen among you?”
Royal disdain revealed itself in the way the Emperor turned to look at Paul. “I believe my entourage has been placed under the protection of your ducal word,” he said.
“My question was for information only,” Paul said. “I wish to know if a Harkonnen is officially a part of your entourage or if a Harkonnen is merely hiding behind a technicality out of cowardice.”
The Emperor’s smile was calculating. “Anyone accepted into the Imperial company is a member of my entourage.”
“You have the word of a Duke,” Paul said, “but Muad’Dib is another matter. He may not recognize your definition of what constitutes an entourage. My friend Gurney Halleck wishes to kill a Harkonnen. If he—”
“Kanly!” Feyd-Rautha shouted. He pressed against the barrier lance. “Your father named this vendetta, Atreides. You call me coward while you hide among your women and offer to send a lackey against me!”
The old Truthsayer whispered something fiercely into the Emperor’s ear, but he pushed her aside, said: “Kanly, is it? There are strict rules for kanly.”
“Paul, put a stop to this,” Jessica said.
“M’Lord,” Gurney said, “You promised me my day against the Harkonnens.”
“You’ve had your day against them,” Paul said and he felt a harlequin abandon take over his emotions. He slipped his robe and hood from his shoulders, handed them to his mother with his belt and crysknife, began unstrapping his stillsuit. He sensed now that the universe focused on this moment.
“There’s no need for this,” Jessica said. “There are easier ways, Paul.”
Paul stepped out of his stillsuit, slipped the crysknife from its sheath in his mother’s hand. “I know,” he said. “Poison, an assassin, all the old familiar ways.”
“You promised me a Harkonnen!” Gurney hissed, and Paul marked the rage in the man’s face, the way the inkvine scar stood out dark and ridged. “You owe it to me, m’Lord!”
“Have you suffered more from them than I?” Paul asked.
“My sister,” Gurney rasped. “My years in the slave pits—”
“My father,” Paul said. “My good friends and companions, Thufir Hawat and Duncan Idaho, my years as a fugitive without rank or succor … and one more thing: it is now kanly and you know as well as I the rules that must prevail.”
Halleck’s shoulders sagged. “M’Lord, if that swine… he’s no more than a beast you’d spurn with your foot and discard the shoe because it’d been contaminated. Call in an executioner, if you must, or let me do it, but don’t offer yourself to—”
“Muad’Dib need not do this thing,” Chani said.
He glanced at her, saw the fear for him in her eyes. “But the Duke Paul must,” he said.
“This is a Harkonnen animal!” Gurney rasped.
Paul hesitated on the point of revealing his own Harkonnen ancestry, stopped at a sharp look from his mother, said merely: “But this being has human shape, Gurney, and deserves human doubt.”
Gurney said: “If he so much as—”
“Please stand aside,” Paul said. He hefted the crysknife, pushed Gurney gently aside.
“Gurney!” Jessica said. She touched Gurney’s arm. “He’s like his grandfather in this mood. Don’t distract him. It’s the only thing you can do for him now.” And she thought: Great Mother! What irony.
The Emperor was studying Feyd-Rautha, seeing the heavy shoulders, the thick muscles. He turned to look at Paul—a stringy whipcord of a youth, not as desiccated as the Arrakeen natives, but with ribs there to count, and sunken in the flanks so that the ripple and gather of muscles could be followed under the skin.
Jessica leaned close to Paul, pitched her voice for his ears alone: “One thing, Son. Sometimes a dangerous person is prepared by the Bene Gesserit, a word implanted into the deepest recesses by the old pleasure-pain methods. The word-sound most frequently used is Uroshnor. If this one’s been prepared, as I strongly suspect, that word uttered in his ear will render his muscles flaccid and—”
“I want no special advantage for this one,” Paul said. “Step back out of my way.”
Gurney spoke to her: “Why is he doing this? Does he think to get himself killed and achieve martyrdom? This Fremen religious prattle, is that what clouds his reason?”
Jessica hid her face in her hands, realizing that she