“As long as the Beast dies, it matters not who wields the blade.” He turned back to the storm. “While you waste water distracting him with your bladeplay, I’ll slit his throat from behind.”Īrak roared with laughter and clasped the shorter man by the shoulders. His voice barely rose over the rumble of the wind. My crysknife will taste his blood!”Ĭueshma appeared next to him, fluid and silent as a firelit shadow, and put a hand on Arak’s arm. “ Bring me the Beast!” Arak screamed into the hissing sandstorm outside the cavern mouth. She would need to be the heinali if she was to survive. Fremen walked without rhythm, but she lived without it. Her sietch had named her Heinali, the manpusher wind, for her inspired, sometimes reckless, often crazy plans. An idea began to coalesce in her mind.Īn utterly insane idea. She stopped, hefted the maker hooks at her belt, glanced over at the unexploded bomb. If it was trapped in this small bowl of rock, then it was stunted, no more than three or four meters at most. In here? She watched the ground ripple as the creature burrowed through the sand and was gone. She reached down to pick it up when a sheet of static electricity sparkled across the basin below her. If such a small device had caused the cave-in and the other craters around the basin, it might even be an atomic. It had no writing on it, and she couldn’t guess the type of explosive. She climbed the slope until she reached a small metal cylinder the size of her fist. Then her eyes caught the glint of metal nearby. She turned in a slow circle, shoving the brief stab of pain in her side to the back of her mind, and searched for the best route over the walls of rock enclosing the basin. Step one, get out of the basin and onto the bled. And the next and the next until she reached safety, or she died. She just had to think about the next step to survive. Injured, no water, only a handful of supplies and hundreds of kilometers to the nearest sietch. She would waste most of her strength and water reaching them. She briefly considered digging to recover more equipment, maybe even replace her stillsuit, but her brothers were beneath more than two meters of rock. Even if she made it out of the basin to summon a worm, she didn’t know if she could mount one. She found no other injuries beyond a cracked rib, but that was bad enough. Her maula pistol and crysknife were still intact. Only the maker hooks had survived from her fremkit. She made one final check of her remaining supplies. Now was no time to wallow in her failures, much less give water to the dead. The corners of her eyes trembled, and she blinked away the emotion. The raid had cost them ten of their finest warriors, including her husbands Arak and the thoughtful, quiet Cueshma. Stedding was certain to challenge her if she somehow managed to survive he had been the sand in her boot since she took leadership of sietch Duaman. The raid had ended in disaster despite their planning and initial success, and that failure rested on her shoulders. She lifted her hand to shield her eyes, felt a sharp pain stab her left side, and cut that already dismal assessment in half. She recalled where she was in the deep desert and calculated her chances of survival, alone and with a damaged stillsuit. The Fremen with her, two of them her husbands, hadn’t been lucky enough to dig their way out at all. No surprise that the suit wasn’t functional after a cavern collapsed on her. ![]() The water from her stillsuit’s catchtube was brackish and scarcely enough to whet her tongue. Perhaps ten kilometers of smooth sand filled the basin’s interior. Their explosives had left the oval ring of rock around the basin largely intact, with dark smoke belching from several craters along its length. The basin below appeared the same as it had before the Harkonnen attack. She blinked her blue in blue eyes against the burning glare of the sun, then swept them over the expanse of baking sand before her. Heinali dragged herself free from the tumble of stones that had crushed her Fremen sietch-mates.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |