Out here, we Fremen have none of your comforts, Lady Fenring,” the Shadout Mapes said as she scurried ahead on short legs. Her steps were so precise and careful that she did not even kick up dust on the moonlit hardpan. In contrast with the humid conservatory, the bone-dry night retained very little of the day’s heat. “You are cold?”

She glanced back at willowy, blonde-haired Margot, who walked proudly in front of the Rutii priest. Mapes wore her jubba hood. Stillsuit filters dangled beside her face, and her dark eyes reflected the light of Second Moon.

“I am not cold,” Margot said, simply. Wearing only her glitterslick housedress, she adjusted her metabolism to compensate.

“And those thin-soled slippers you wear,” the priest scolded from behind her. “Unsuited for desert travel.”

“You did not give me time to dress for our journey.” Like all Reverend Mothers, she maintained thick calluses on her feet from the fighting exercises they were required to perform each day. “If the shoes wear out, I will go barefoot.”

Both Fremen smiled at her calm audacity. “She does maintain a good pace,” Mapes admitted. “Not like other water-fat Imperials.”

“I can go faster,” Margot offered, “if you like.”

Taking this as a challenge, the Shadout Mapes trotted along at a military cadence, not breathing hard at all. Margot followed every footstep, barely perspiring. A nightbird streaked overhead with a piercing cry.

The unpaved road led out of Arrakeen toward the village of Rutii in the distance, nestled within knuckled foothills of the Shield Wall. Avoiding the town lights, Mapes turned onto a faint path that climbed into the rocky elevations.

Rimwall West loomed before them, a craggy megalith that marked this boundary of the Shield Wall. The small party began to climb, at first over a gentle slope of rock, then up a steep, narrow path that skirted an immense slide area.

The Fremen moved with speed and surefootedness in the shadows. Despite her training in balance and endurance, Margot tripped twice on the unfamiliar terrain and had to be steadied by the others. This seemed to please the guides.

More than two hours had passed since leaving the comfort and safety of the Residency at Arrakeen. Margot began to tap her bodily reserves, but still showed no sign of weakness. Did our lost Sisters travel this way?

Mapes and the priest spoke strange words in a language that Margot’s deep memories told her was Chakobsa, a tongue spoken by Fremen for dozens of centuries, since their arrival on Arrakis. As she recognized one of the Shadout’s phrases, Margot responded, “The power of God is indeed great.”

Her remark agitated the priest, but his short-statured companion smiled wisely. “The Sayyadina will speak with her.”

The path forked several times, and the Fremen woman led the way up, then down, or laterally in tight switchbacks, before ascending again. Margot identified the same places in the frosty moonlight, and realized they were guiding her back and forth in an effort to confuse and disorient her. With her Bene Gesserit mental skills, Margot would remember the way back, in exact detail.

Impatient and curious, she wanted to scold the Fremen for taking her on such an unnecessarily tedious route, but decided not to reveal her ability. After years of waiting, she was being led into their secret world, into a place where no outsiders were ever taken. Mother Superior Harishka would want her to observe every detail. Perhaps Margot would finally acquire the information she had sought for so long.

On a ledge, Mapes pressed her chest against the cliff and inched along a narrow path over a sheer dropoff, clinging with fingertips. Without hesitation, Margot did the same. The lights of Arrakeen twinkled in the distance, and the village of Rutii huddled far below.

Several meters ahead now, Mapes suddenly disappeared into the rock face. Margot discovered a small cave entrance, barely large enough for a person to enter. Inside, the space grew broader to the left, and in the dim light she saw tool marks on the walls where Fremen had widened the cavern. The dense odors of unwashed bodies touched her nostrils. Ahead, the Shadout beckoned.

When the priest caught up, Mapes unfastened a doorseal and swung a camouflaged door inward. Now, unmuffled by seals and doors, voices could be heard, mixed with the hum of machinery and the rustle of many people. Glowglobes tuned to dim yellow bobbed in the air currents.

Mapes passed through a fabric-covered doorway into a room where women worked power looms, weaving long strands of hair and desert cotton into fabrics. The warm air held a heavy human musk and waftings of melange-incense. All eyes watched the regal, blonde visitor.

The weaving room opened into another chamber, where a man tended a metal pot suspended over a cooking fire. Firelight danced on the Shadout’s wrinkled face and imparted a feral look to her deep blue eyes. Margot observed everything, storing details for her later report. She had never imagined the Fremen could hide such a population, such a settlement.

Finally, they emerged into a larger, dirt-floored chamber filled with desert plants, sectioned off by paths. She recognized saguaro, wild alfalfa, creosote, and poverty grasses. An entire botanical testing ground!

“Wait here, Lady Fenring.” Mapes strode ahead, accompanied by the priest. Alone, Margot bent to examine the cacti, saw glossy ears, firm flesh, pale new growth. Somewhere in another cavern she heard voices and resonating chants.

At a slight sound she looked up to see an ancient woman in a black robe. Standing by herself on one of the garden pathways, arms folded over her chest, the strange woman was withered and wiry, as tough as shigawire. She wore a necklace of sparkling metal rings, and her dark eyes looked like shadowed pits gouged into her face.

Something about her demeanor, her presence, reminded Margot of a Bene Gesserit. On Wallach IX, Mother Superior Harishka was approaching the two-century mark, but this woman looked even older, her body saturated with spice, her skin aged by climate more than years. Even her voice was dry. “I am Sayyadina Ramallo. We are about to begin the Ceremony of the Seed. Join us, if you are truly who you say you are.”

Ramallo! I know that name. Margot stepped forward, ready to cite the secret code phrases to identify her awareness of the Missionaria Protectiva work. A woman named Ramallo had disappeared into the dunes a full century ago . . . the last of a series of Reverend Mothers to vanish.

“No time for that now, child,” the old woman interrupted her. “Everyone is waiting. With you among us, they are as curious as I am.”

Margot followed the Sayyadina into a vast cavern that thronged with thousands upon thousands of people. She had never imagined such a huge enclosure within the high rocks— how had they eluded detection from the constant Harkonnen patrols? This wasn’t just a squalid settlement, but an entire hidden city. The Fremen had far more secrets, and far greater plans, than even Hasimir Fenring suspected.

A wall of unpleasant scents assailed her. Crowded close, some of the Fremen wore dusty cloaks; others were in stillsuits, open at the collars within the body-humid cave. Off to one side stood the priest who had brought her from Arrakeen.

I’m certain they left no sign of our departure from the conservatory. If they mean to kill me now, no one will ever know what happened— just like the other Sisters. Then Margot smiled to herself. No, if I am harmed, Hasimir will find them. The Fremen might think their secrets were safe, but even they could be no match for her Count, should he focus his efforts and intellect on tracking them down.

The Fremen might doubt that, but Margot did not.

As the last of the desert people streamed into the cavern from several entrances, Ramallo took Margot’s hand in her sinewy grip. “Come with me.” The withered Sayyadina led the way up stone steps to a rock platform, where she faced the crowd.

The cavern fell silent except for a rustle of clothes, like bat wings.

With some trepidation, Margot took a position beside the old woman. I feel like a sacrifice. She used breathing exercises to calm herself. Wave upon wave of impenetrable Fremen eyes stared at her.

“Shai-Hulud watches over us,” Ramallo said. “Let the watermasters come forward.”

Four men made their way through the crowd. Each pair carried a small skin sack between them. They placed the sloshing containers at the feet of the Sayyadina.

“Is there seed?” Ramallo asked.

“There is seed,” the men announced, in unison. They turned and departed.

Opening the top of one of the sacks, Ramallo splashed liquid onto both hands. “Blessed is the water and its seed.” She brought her hands out, trickling blue fluid as if the droplets were liquid sapphires.

The words and the ceremony startled Margot, for they resembled the Bene Gesserit poison ordeal through which a Sister was transformed into a Reverend Mother. A few chemicals— all deadly poisons— could be used to induce the terrible agony and mental crisis upon a Sister. Adapted from the Missionaria Protectiva? Had the vanished Bene Gesserit brought even this secret to the Fremen? If so, what else did the desert people know about the Sisterhood’s plans?

Ramallo unfastened the sack’s coiled spout and pointed its end toward Margot. Showing no glimmer of doubt, Margot dropped to her knees and took the tube in her hands, then hesitated.

“If you are truly a Reverend Mother,” Ramallo whispered, “you will drink this exhalation of Shai-Hulud without harm to yourself.”

“I am a Reverend Mother,” Margot said. “I have done this before.”

The Fremen maintained their deep, reverent silence.

“You have never done this before, child,” the old woman said. “Shai-Hulud will judge you.”

The sack reeked of familar spice odor, but with an underlying bitterness. The acrid blue liquid seemed to roil with death. Though she had passed the Agony to become a Reverend Mother, Margot had nearly died in the process.

But she could do it again.

Beside her, the Sayyadina uncoiled the drinking tube on the second sack. She took a sip from the tube, and her eyes rolled back in her head.

I must not fear, Margot thought. Fear is the mind-killer . . . In her mind she recited the entire Litany Against Fear, then sucked on the straw, drawing in just a drop. The barest bit of moisture, touching the tip of her tongue.

It struck her with a shockingly vile taste, like a hammer, all the way to the back of her skull. Poison! Her body recoiled, but she forced herself to concentrate on her own chemistry, altered a molecule here, added or subtracted a radical there. It required all of her skills.

Margot released the tube. Her consciousness floated, and time stopped its eternal, cosmic progression. She let her body, her trained Bene Gesserit abilities take over and begin to alter the chemistry of the deadly poison. Margot understood what she had to do, breaking the chemical down into something useful, creating a catalyst that would transform the rest of the liquid in the sacks. . . .

The taste changed to sweetness in her mouth.

Every action she had taken up to that point in her life lay spread like a tapestry for her to observe. Sister Margot Rashino-Zea, now Lady Margot Fenring, examined herself in minute detail, every cell of her body, every nerve fiber . . . every thought she’d ever experienced. Deep in her core, Margot found that terrible dark place she could never see, the place that fascinated and terrified all of her kind. Only the long-anticipated Kwisatz Haderach could look there. The Lisan al-Gaib.

I will survive this, she told herself.

Margot’s head reverberated as if a gong had been struck inside it. She saw a distorted image of Sayyadina Ramallo wavering in front of her. Then one of the watermasters came forward and pressed the tip of the tube into Margot’s mouth, collecting the drop of transformed liquid, which he then dipped into the contents of the sack. Beside her, the ancient woman released her grip on the second tube, and other watermasters spread the transformed poison from one container to another like firestarters touching flaming brands to a field of dry grass.

People thronged to the sacks to receive droplets of the catalyzed drug, brushing the moistness against their lips. Ramallo said, somewhere in Margot’s consciousness, “You have helped make it possible for them.”

Strange. This was so different from anything in her experience . . . but not so different after all.

Slowly, like a dreamer dancing inside her own consciousness, Margot felt herself return to the stone-walled chamber, with the drug-induced vision only a flickering memory. Fremen continued to touch their fingers to the hanging droplets, tasting, moving to the side so that others could partake. Euphoria spread like dawnlight in the cavern.

“Yes, once I was a Reverend Mother,” Ramallo told her, at long last. “Many years ago I knew your Mother Superior.”

Still fogged by reverberations of the powerful drug, Margot couldn’t even act shocked, and the old woman nodded. “Sister Harishka and I were classmates . . . long, long ago. I joined the Missionaria Protectiva and was sent here with nine other Reverend Mothers. Many of our order had been lost before, absorbed into the Fremen tribes. Others simply died in the desert. I am the last. It is a harsh life on Dune, even for a trained Bene Gesserit. Even with melange, which we have come to understand, and appreciate, in new ways.”

Margot looked deeply into Ramallo’s eyes and saw understanding there.

“Your message spoke of the Lisan al-Gaib,” Ramallo said, her voice quavering. “He is close, is he not? After these thousands of years.”

Margot kept her voice low as the Fremen became wilder with the ecstasy of their ritual. “We hope within two generations.”

“These people have waited a long time.” The Sayyadina surveyed the euphoria in the room. “I can reveal Bene Gesserit matters to you, child, but I have a dual allegiance. I am also a Fremen now, sworn to uphold the values of the desert tribes. Certain confidences cannot be revealed to any outworlder. One day I must choose a successor— one of the women here, no doubt.”

Ramallo bowed her head. “The sietch tau orgy is a merging point of Bene Gesserit and Fremen. Long before the Missionaria Protectiva arrived here, these people had discovered how to partake of the awareness-spectrum narcotic in primitive, simple ways.”

In the shadows of the great chamber the Fremen moved apart, and together, fogged with the drug, some raised to an inner peace and ecstasy, some driven to members of the opposite sex in frenzied coupling. A sloppily painted canvas of reality settled over them, turning their harsh lives into a dream image.

“Over the centuries, Sisters like myself guided them to follow new ceremonies, and we adapted the old Fremen ways to our own.”

“You’ve accomplished a great deal here, Mother. Wallach IX will be eager to learn of it.”

While the Fremen orgy continued, Margot felt as if she were floating, numb and separate from it all. The ancient woman raised a clawlike hand in benediction, to release her back into the outside world. “Go and report to Harishka.” Ramallo displayed a wispy smile. “And give her this gift.” She removed a small boundbook from a pocket of her robe.

Opening the volume, Margot read the title page: Manual of the Friendly Desert. Beneath that, in smaller letters, it read, “The place full of life. Here are the ayat and burhan of Life. Believe, and al-Lat shall never burn you.”

“This is like the Azhar Book,” Margot exclaimed, surprised to see an edition adapted to Fremen ways. “Our Book of Great Secrets.”

“Give my sacred copy to Harishka. It will please her.”

Awed now by her presence, the Rutii priest took Margot back to the Residency at Arrakeen. She arrived shortly before dawn, just as the sky began to pale into soft orange pastels, and slipped into her bed. No one in the household— other than the Shadout Mapes— knew she had ever gone. Excited, she lay awake for hours. . . .

Several days later, her head full of questions, Margot climbed the trail back to the cave, following her crystal-clear memory map. In bright sunlight she traversed the steep trail into Rimwall West, made her way across the narrow ledge to the opening of the sietch. The heat slowed her.

Slipping inside the cool cave shadows, she found that the doorseal had been removed. She walked through the chambers, finding them empty. No machinery, no furnishings, no people. No proof. Only odors lingered. . . .

“So, you don’t entirely trust me after all, Sayyadina,” she said aloud.

For a long while Margot remained in the cavern where the tau orgy had taken place. She knelt where she had consumed the Water of Life, feeling the echoes of long habitation there. All gone now. . . .

The next day Count Hasimir Fenring returned from his desert inspections with the Baron Harkonnen. At dinner, basking in her presence, he asked his lovely wife what she had done in his absence.

“Oh nothing, my love,” she responded with a carefree toss of her honey-gold hair. She brushed her lips across his cheek in a tender kiss. “I just tended my garden.”