Water is life. To say that one drop of water is insignificant is to say that one life is insignificant. That is a thing I cannot accept.

—The Stilgar Commentaries

To Alia, Bronso’s disruptive actions seemed more an insult directed at her, rather than mud thrown at the memory of Paul. She dispatched searchers and spies to locate the perpetrators, rounding up hundreds of suspects in due course.

While Jessica could not approve of what Bronso had done to ruin the solemn ceremony, she did not reject his underlying motives. In fact, she suspected that Paul himself would have disliked the ostentatious nature of the funeral itself. Though her son had voluntarily cultivated a demigod’s image, he had realized his mistake, had tried to alter course in any way he knew how.

On the morning after the funeral ceremony, Jessica found Stilgar at the edge of the Arrakeen Spaceport, supervising the removal of Fremen clan banners, flags of Landsraad Houses, and pennants from conquered worlds.

Jessica tilted her head back to watch a descending water-ship appear like a bright spot of reflected sunlight high above, dropping in a rippling plume of exhaust and ionized air, flanked by armed military craft to defend the cargo. A crackle and boom split the sky with a familiar non-thunder sound as the decelerating ship braked against the atmosphere above the small landing area.

Other vessels had landed at the spaceport, the air rippling with heat around the hulls. Egress doors opened with a hiss of equalizing pressures. A steward checked the ramp and tromped down to hand documents to one of the spaceport administrators who wore the yellow robe of a Qizara. Fuel technicians rushed forward to hook charge linkages to the suspensor engines.

All around, more shuttles, cargo haulers, and frigates were landing, one of them with a bone-jarring shriek of maladjusted engines. Ground-cars whirred up to cargo doors; manual laborers lined up for their shifts and invoked the blessings of Muad’Dib before performing their tasks.

Jessica stood next to Stilgar, who kept his voice low, his gaze straight ahead at all the spaceport activity. “I wanted to attend a farewell ceremony for my friend Usul from Sietch Tabr. But that funeral was not a Fremen thing.” He gestured to the still-milling crowds, the work crews, the heavy equipment. Souvenir vendors still hawked their trinkets, some of them reducing their prices to get rid of leftover merchandise, others raising prices because such items were now more rare and meaningful.

“Your daughter wants to organize a water ceremony for Chani, too.” The stern and conservative Naib shook his head. “After seeing what the Regent arranged for Muad’Dib, I have my concerns that Chani will be honored properly, in the way that she and her tribe would have wished.”

“The situation has been out of control for some time, Stilgar. Paul created and encouraged it himself.”

“But Chani did not, Sayyadina. She was a member of my troop and the daughter of Liet, a Fremen—not a mere symbol, as Alia wants her to be. We Fremen do not have funerals.”

Jessica turned to him, narrowing her eyes. “Maybe it’s time to impose reality again. Chani’s water means more to the Fremen than to any other spectators. The flesh belongs to the person, the water to the tribe. No part of her belongs to an Imperial political show. A true Fremen would make sure that her water is not wasted.”

Stilgar’s expression darkened. “Who can oppose what the Regent has decided?”

“You can, and so can we. If we are careful. It’s what we are obligated to do.”

Stilgar arched his eyebrows and turned his leathery face toward her. “You ask me to defy the wishes of Alia?”

Jessica shrugged. “The water belongs to the tribe. And the Fremen are Chani’s tribe, not the entire Imperium. If we take Chani’s water, we can do the thing right. Let me deal with my daughter. There may be a way for us all to be satisfied. Right now, Alia is engrossed in her search for Bronso and any of his associates. Now is the time to take Chani’s water—for safekeeping.”

Water-sellers walked down the streets chanting their eerie calls. Beggars and pilgrims milled around the workers who removed funeral pennants from high posts. Jessica saw that the orange-garbed foremen were tearing the cloth into scraps and selling the swatches as souvenirs from Muad’Dib’s memorial. A spice lighter came down to the spaceport, filling the air with a loud roar, but Jessica and the Naib existed in a small universe of their own.

Stilgar looked at her with his blue-within-blue eyes. “I know how.”

At night, listening to the daily hordes of wailing mourners, seeing the pilgrims continue to swarm in from offworld after the death of Muad’Dib (and knowing the Spacing Guild was reaping great profits from each passage), Stilgar concluded that such shameful excesses were decidedly non-Fremen.

He had been a friend of Paul Atreides from the moment the young man took his sietch name of Usul. He’d seen Paul kill his first man—the hotheaded Jamis, who would have been forgotten by the tribe, except that dying at the right time and by the right hand had given him a certain historical immortality.

But this, Stilgar thought, as he stood on a crowded Arrakeen street, wearing a well-fitted stillsuit (unlike most of these offworlders, who never learned or understood proper water discipline)—this was not the Dune he remembered.

Stilgar had never liked Arrakeen, nor any city for that matter: the shuffle and press of ill-prepared pilgrims, the dark-alley crime, the garbage, noise, and strange odors. Although life in the crowded sietches had changed, it was still more pure than the city. Out there, people didn’t pretend to be something they were not, or they would not survive long. The desert sorted the faithful from imposters, but the city did not seem to know the difference, and actually rewarded the impure.

Hiding his disgust behind noseplugs and a filterscarf, Stilgar walked the streets, listening to atonal music that wafted from a small gathering area where a group of pilgrims from the same planet shared cultural memories. Gutters stank from piled rubbish: The crowds left so much refuse behind that there was no place to put it—even the open desert couldn’t swallow it all. Bad smells were an evil omen to the Fremen, because rotting odors implied wasted moisture. He fitted his noseplugs more tightly.

In busy Arrakeen, the only place a man could be alone was inside himself. No one paid any attention to the disguised Naib as he made his way toward the Citadel of Muad’Dib. Only when he reached the gates did he reveal his identity and give the countersign. The guards stepped back with a sudden snap of respect, as if they were clockwork mechanisms in tightly wound thumpers.

For what Stilgar intended, it would have been better if his presence had remained unnoticed, yet without the unwavering authority Muad’Dib had conferred on him, he could never achieve what Jessica had asked of him. Stilgar was breaking supposed rules, following the course of honor instead of someone else’s law. He had to do this quietly and secretly, even if it required several trips, several secret nighttime missions.

Muad’Dib was not the only one who had died. At least Stilgar and Jessica remembered that. . . .

He reached the oppressively silent quarters where Usul had lived with his beloved concubine. Sooner or later, members of the Qizarate would convert this wing of the palace into a shrine, but for now the people regarded the rooms with religious awe and left them untouched.

Atop a sand-etched stone slab, an ornate canopic jar held Chani’s water. Rendered down from her small body by a huanui deathstill after the difficult and bloody birth of the twins, only twenty-two liters of water had been recovered from her body.

She’d been the daughter of Liet-Kynes before becoming the woman of Muad’Dib. A true Fremen warrior on Dune, she had fought many battles as a member of Stilgar’s troop. With callused fingers, he traced the intricate markings on the outside of the jar. A tremor of superstitious fear ran down his spine. Water was just water . . . but could it be that Chani’s ruh-spirit still lingered here?

Her father Liet, the Imperial planetologist murdered by Harkonnens, had been the son of Pardot Kynes, who had inspired the Fremen dream of climate change on Dune. Stilgar’s comrade against Harkonnen excesses, Liet had died because he’d dared to help Paul Atreides and his mother.

As Emperor, Muad’Dib had ensured that the dreams of Dr. Kynes endured. By his command, he had accelerated the terraforming process and established a new School of Planetology. If Muad’Dib was indeed the Lisan al-Gaib, the Shortening of the Way, then Liet-Kynes was the catalyst.

And Chani was his daughter.

The Regent and her amazon guards would curse him for what he was about to do, but Stilgar already had the blood of the Reverend Mother Mohiam on his hands, and the blood of others. He would do this.

Unstopping the heavy jar, he drained some of the liquid into liter-jon containers that were easier to handle and hide under his cloak. In order to take it all, he would need to do this at least two more times, but as captain of the guard, Stilgar had ways of avoiding detection. With his precious burden, he slipped out of Muad’Dib’s quarters.

“Why would anyone do such a thing?” Alia was at first genuinely baffled, but that swiftly changed. Jessica watched the emotions sweep across her daughter’s face, one after another—confusion, then outrage, then a hint of fear. “Who could have gotten into my brother’s quarters?”

Ziarenka Valefor, the amazon guard reporting to them now, was a head taller than Alia, but she was so rattled by her accidental discovery that she looked to the young Regent for strength. Alia snapped an order to her guard. “Send for Duncan.” With a quick bow, Ziarenka slipped away.

Shaking her head, Alia looked at her mother. “This must be another outrage committed by Bronso of Ix. After what he did at Paul’s funeral, now he wants to ruin Chani’s water ceremony, too. I’ll denounce him! When the people learn—”

Jessica cut her off. “Better that you speak to no one of this, Alia.”

Alia blinked, eased herself back down. “Chani’s water has been stolen. How can we just ignore it? And what can they possibly want? When a question has no obvious answer, I suspect the worst.”

Jessica had already worked through the possibilities in her mind, choosing the best way to defuse an overreaction, and for Stilgar and the Fremen to get what they needed—what Chani needed—and what Alia needed.

“I didn’t say to ignore the matter, but you can completely defuse it. Whoever committed this crime—one of Bronso’s cronies or some other perpetrator—probably intends to cause panic and unrest. Do they want to ransom it? Threaten to profane the water in some way? Regardless, they’ll expect you to create an uproar over it, but don’t give them the satisfaction. Don’t call attention to what has happened.”

The suggestion did not sit well with Alia. “We’ve got to thwart their plans, whatever they are. Chani’s water is gone. How are we to hold her memorial service now?”

Jessica remained calm, unconcerned. “It was water. Refill the container, and no one will ever know. If Bronso claims to have Chani’s water, how can he prove it?” She didn’t consider the suggestion to be devious or dishonorable. It was a solution that even the Bene Gesserit would have considered acceptable. We both get what we want. “Water is water, and you can hold your memorial service as planned.”

And the Fremen would have their own ceremony to honor Chani in their own way. Stilgar would be satisfied, too. As would Paul, who would know even after his own death that the right thing was being done.

Alia considered, then nodded. “That is an acceptable solution. It renders any threat impotent.”