Dune Messiah Read Free Page B

demanded.
    “You wish to draw me into this fools’ fight?” Scytale asked. “Very well. We’re dealing with a potential messiah. You don’t launch a frontal attack upon such a one. Martyrdom would defeat us.”
    They all stared at him.
    “You think that’s the only danger?” the Reverend Mother demanded, voice wheezing.
    Scytale shrugged. He had chosen a bland, round-faced appearance for this meeting, jolly features and vapid full lips, the body of a bloated dumpling. It occurred to him now, as he studied his fellow conspirators, that he had made an ideal choice—out of instinct perhaps. He alone in this group could manipulate fleshly appearance across a wide spectrum of bodily shapes and features. He was the human chameleon, a Face Dancer, and the shape he wore now invited others to judge him too lightly.
    “Well?” the Reverend Mother pressed.
    “I was enjoying the silence,” Scytale said. “Our hostilities are better left unvoiced.”
    The Reverend Mother drew back, and Scytale saw her reassessing him. They were all products of profound prana-bindu training, capable of muscle and nerve control that few humans ever achieved. But Scytale, a Face Dancer, had muscles and nerve linkages the others didn’t even possess plus a special quality of sympatico , a mimic’s insight with which he could put on the psyche of another as well as the other’s appearance.
    Scytale gave her enough time to complete the reassessment, said: “Poison!” He uttered the word with the atonals which said he alone understood its secret meaning.
    The Guildsman stirred and his voice rolled from the glittering speaker globe which orbited a corner of his tank above Irulan. “We’re discussing psychic poison, not a physical one.”
    Scytale laughed. Mirabhasa laughter could flay an opponent and he held nothing back now.
    Irulan smiled in appreciation, but the corners of the Reverend Mother’s eyes revealed a faint hint of anger.
    “Stop that!” Mohiam rasped.
    Scytale stopped, but he had their attention now, Edric in a silent rage, the Reverend Mother alert in her anger, Irulan amused but puzzled.
    “Our friend Edric suggests,” Scytale said, “that a pair of Bene Gesserit witches trained in all their subtle ways have not learned the true uses of deception.”
    Mohiam turned to stare out at the cold hills of her Bene Gesserit homeworld. She was beginning to see the vital thing here, Scytale realized. That was good. Irulan, though, was another matter.
    “Are you one of us or not, Scytale?” Edric asked. He stared out of tiny rodent eyes.
    “My allegiance is not the issue,” Scytale said. He kept his attention on Irulan. “You are wondering, Princess, if this was why you came all those parsecs, risked so much?”
    She nodded agreement.
    “Was it to bandy platitudes with a humanoid fish or dispute with a fat Tleilaxu Face Dancer?” Scytale asked.
    She stepped away from Edric’s tank, shaking her head in annoyance at the thick odor of melange.
    Edric took this moment to pop a melange pill into his mouth. He ate the spice and breathed it and, no doubt, drank it, Scytale noted. Understandable, because the spice heightened a Steersman’s prescience, gave him the power to guide a Guild heighliner across space at translight speeds. With spice awareness he found that line of the ship’s future which avoided peril. Edric smelled another kind of peril now, but his crutch of prescience might not find it.
    “I think it was a mistake for me to come here,” Irulan said.
    The Reverend Mother turned, opened her eyes, closed them, a curiously reptilian gesture.
    Scytale shifted his gaze from Irulan to the tank, inviting the Princess to share his viewpoint. She would, Scytale knew, see Edric as a repellent figure: the bold stare, those monstrous feet and hands moving softly in the gas, the smoky swirling of orange eddies around him. She would wonder about his sex habits, thinking how odd it would be to mate with such a one. Even the