As the arrogant-looking witch Cristane guided Baron Harkonnen through the maze of shadowy passageways, his walking stick clicked like gunshots on the cold flagstone floor. With his six guards behind him, he hobbled forward, trying to keep up.

“Your Mother Superior has no choice but to listen,” the Baron said in a strident voice. “If I don’t get the cure I need, the Emperor will learn of the Sisterhood’s crimes!” Cristane ignored him; she tossed her short, chestnut hair and never looked back.

It was a damp night on Wallach IX, the outside silence broken only by cold breezes. Yellow globes illuminated the corridors of the complex of school buildings. No Sisters stirred, and only shadows moved. The Baron felt as if he were walking into a tomb— which it would be if he ever brought his case before the Landsraad. Breaking the Great Convention was the most serious offense the witches could commit. He held all the cards.

Haloed by pulsing light from poorly tuned glowglobes, Cristane marched ahead until she seemed to fade from view. The young witch glanced back, but did not wait for him. When one of the guards tried to assist the Baron, he responded by shoving the arm away and continuing on his own, as best he could manage. A shiver ran up his spine, as if someone had whispered a curse in his ear.

The Bene Gesserit had hidden fighting skills, and there must be swarms of them in this lair. What if the Mother Superior didn’t care about his accusations? What if the old hag thought he was bluffing? Even his armed Harkonnen troopers could do nothing to keep the witches from killing him in their own nest, should they choose to attack.

But the Baron knew they dared not act against him.

Where are all the witches hiding? Then he grinned. They must be afraid of me.

With an angry huff, the Baron reviewed the demands he would make, three simple concessions and he would not file formal charges in the Landsraad: a cure for his disease, delivering Gaius Helen Mohiam to him intact and ready for utter humiliation . . . and the return of the two daughters he’d been coerced into fathering. The Baron was curious about how his offspring fit into the witches’ plans, but he supposed he could back off on that demand, if necessary. He didn’t really want a couple of female brats anyway, but it gave him negotiating room.

Sister Cristane moved ahead, while the guards hung back to match the Baron’s painful, plodding pace. She turned a corner into shadows ahead of him. The pulsing glowglobes seemed too yellow, too filled with static. They began to give him a headache, and he wasn’t seeing clearly.

When the Baron’s entourage turned the corner, they saw only an empty hall. Cristane was gone.

The cool stone walls echoed with the disconcerted gasps of the Harkonnen escort. A weak breeze, like cadaverous breath, oozed across the air and stole under the Baron’s clothing. Involuntarily, he shivered. He heard a faint whisper, like scuttling rodent feet, but saw no movement.

“Run ahead and check it out!” He nudged the squad leader in the side. “Where did she go?”

One of the troopers unshouldered his lasrifle and ran along the glowglobe-illuminated corridor. Moments later he shouted back, “Nothing here, my Lord Baron.” His voice had an eerie, hollow quality, as if this place sucked sound and light from the air. “No one in sight anywhere.”

The Baron waited, his senses alert. Cold sweat trickled down his back, and he narrowed his spider-black eyes, more in consternation than in terror. “Check all passageways and rooms in the vicinity, and report back to me.” The Baron looked down the corridor, refusing to step deeper into the trap. “And don’t be so edgy that you shoot each other.”

His men disappeared from view, and he no longer heard their shouts or footsteps, either. This place felt like a mausoleum. And damned cold. He hobbled into an alcove and stood silently with his back to a wall, ready to protect himself. He unholstered a personal flèchette pistol, checked its charge of poisoned needles . . . and held his breath.

A glowglobe flickered over his head, dimmed. Hypnotic.

With a sound of running boots, one of his men reappeared, short of breath. “Please come with me, my Lord Baron. You need to see this.”

Unsettled, the man led the way down a short set of stairs and past a library where filmbooks were still playing, their whispering voices droning into empty air, with no listeners. Cushion indentations remained on some of the chairs, where patrons had sat only moments ago. Everyone had disappeared without bothering to shut off the programs. The muffled speakers sounded like the voices of fading ghosts.

The Baron’s distress grew as he hobbled from room to room with the troopers, then finally from building to building. They found no one, not even when his men used primitive life-tracer scanners. Where were the witches? In catacombs? Where had his escort Cristane gone?

Anger made the Baron’s cheeks hot. How could he present his demands to the witch mother if he couldn’t find her? Was Harishka trying to buy time? By avoiding the confrontation, she had short-circuited his revenge. Did she think he would just go away?

He hated to feel helpless. Swinging his walking stick, the Baron smashed the nearest library reader, then flailed about, breaking everything he could find. With glee, the guards set about overturning tables, knocking down shelves, tossing heavy volumes through glass windows.

It accomplished nothing. “Enough,” he said, then led the way down the corridor again.

Presently he stood in a large office; gold lettering on the door marked it as the workroom of the Mother Superior. The dark, highly polished desk was clear of objects, no files or records anywhere; its chair sat at an angle, as if pushed back abruptly. On a ceramic dish, incense still burned, imparting a faint odor of cloves. He knocked it onto the floor in a flurry of aromatic ash.

Damned witches. The Baron shivered. He and his men backed out of the room.

Outside again, he became disoriented, a disconcertingly alien feeling of being lost. Neither he nor his guards could agree upon the correct route back to the shuttle. The Baron strode across an outdoor park and into a passageway that skirted a large stucco-and-timber building where lights burned inside.

In the grand dining hall, hundreds of still-steaming meals rested on long plank tables, benches arranged neatly in place. No other people were in the room. No one.

With his finger, one of the troopers nudged a chunk of meat in a bowl of stew. “Don’t touch that,” the Baron barked. “Could be subdermal poison.” It would be just the sort of thing the witches would try. The trooper recoiled.

The squad leader’s pale-eyed gaze darted around; his uniform was damp with perspiration. “They must have been here only minutes ago. You can still smell the food.”

The Baron cursed and swung his wormhead cane across the table, knocking plates, cups, and food to the floor. The clatter echoed off the walls and ceiling of the hall. But there was no other sound.

His men used detection equipment to check under the floors, in the walls and ceilings, sweeping in all directions without success.

“Check the calibration on those life-tracers. The witches are here somewhere, damn them!”

As he watched his men work feverishly, the Baron fumed. His skin crawled. He thought he heard a faint, smothered laugh, but it vanished into the haunted silence.

“Do you want us to torch this place, my Baron?” the squad leader asked, eager for the conflagration.

He imagined the entire Mother School in flames, the convoluted wisdom and history and breeding records consumed in an inferno. Perhaps the black-clad witches would be trapped inside their hidden bolt-holes and roasted alive. That would be worth seeing.

But he shook his head, angry at the answer forced upon him. Until the witches gave him the cure he desperately needed, Baron Harkonnen dared not strike against the Bene Gesserit.

Afterward, however . . . he would make up for lost time.