Despite the fact that Liet-Kynes had no medicines other than a simple first-aid pack in his Fremkit, Warrick survived.

Blinded by grief and guilt, Liet lashed the near-dead man high onto the back of a worm. During the long journey back to the sietch, Liet shared his own water, did his best to repair Warrick’s ravaged stillsuit.

Within Red Wall Sietch, there was much wailing and weeping. Faroula, who had considerable skill in the uses of healing herbs, never left her husband’s side. She tended him hour after hour as he lay in a blind stupor, clinging to the threads of life.

Though his face was bandaged, Warrick’s skin could never regrow. Liet had heard that the genetic wizards of the Bene Tleilax could create new eyes, new limbs, new flesh, but the Fremen would never accept such a healing miracle, not even for one of their own. Already, the sietch elders and fearful children made warding signs near the curtain hangings of Warrick’s chambers, as if to fend off an ugly demon.

Heinar, the old one-eyed Naib, came to see his disfigured son-in-law. Kneeling beside her husband’s pallet, Faroula looked stricken; her elfin face, once so quick to flash a smile or snap a witty retort, was now drawn; her intense and curious eyes were wide with helplessness. Though Warrick had not died, she wore a yellow nezhoni scarf, the color of mourning.

Proud and grieving, the Naib called a council of sietch elders, at which Liet-Kynes told the stern men exactly what had happened, giving his testament so that the Fremen could understand and honor the great sacrifice Warrick had made. The young man should have been considered a hero. Poems should have been written and honorific songs sung about him. But Warrick had made one terrible mistake.

He had not died when he should have.

Heinar and the council somberly made preparations for a Fremen funeral. It was only a matter of time, they said. The mutilated man could not possibly survive.

Nonetheless, he did.

Covered with salves, Warrick’s wounds stopped bleeding. Faroula fed him, often with Liet looking on, desperately wishing he could do something helpful. But even the son of Umma Kynes could not perform the miracle his friend needed. Warrick’s son Liet-chih, too young to understand, remained in the care of his mourning grandparents.

Though Warrick looked like a half-rotted carcass, there was no smell of infection about him, no yellowish suppuration of wounds, no gangrene. In a most curious manner he was healing, leaving patches of exposed bone. His staring, lidless eyes could never close in a peaceful sleep, though the night of blindness was always with him.

Standing with Faroula in the midst of her vigil, Liet whispered to his friend, telling stories of Salusa Secundus, recalling the times the two had raided Harkonnen troops, when they had acted as bait to kill the enemy scouts who’d poisoned the wells of Bilar Camp.

Still, Warrick lay unmoving, day after day, hour after hour.

Faroula bowed her head and said in a voice that barely managed to escape her throat, “What have we done to offend Shai-Hulud? Why are we punished like this?”

During the heavy silence in which Liet tried to find an answer for her, Warrick stirred on the pallet. Faroula gasped and took a half step back. Then her husband sat up. His lidless eyes flickered, as if focusing on the far wall.

And he spoke, moving the sinews that held his jaws together. His teeth and his corrugated tongue stirred, forming harsh words.

“I have seen a vision. Now I understand what I must do.”

For days Warrick shambled, slow but determined, through the passageways of the sietch. Blinded by the sand, he found his way by touch, seeing with inner mystical eyes. Keeping to the shadows, he looked like a mockery of a corpse. He spoke in a low, papery voice, but his words had a compelling edge.

People wanted to run, but could not tear themselves away as he intoned, “When I was engulfed by the storm, at the moment I should have encountered death, a voice whispered to me from the sand-laden wind. It was Shai-Hulud himself, telling me why I must endure this tribulation.”

Faroula, still wearing yellow, tried to drag her husband back to their quarters.

Though the Fremen avoided speaking to him, they were drawn to listen. If ever a man could receive a holy vision, might it not be Warrick, after what he had endured in the maw of a storm? Was it just a coincidence that he had lived through what no other man had ever survived? Or did it prove that Shai-Hulud had plans for him, a thread in a cosmic tapestry? If ever they had seen a man touched by the fiery finger of God, Warrick was such a one.

Staring ahead, he walked compulsively into the chambers where Heinar sat on a mat with the Council of Elders. The Fremen fell silent, unsure how to respond. Warrick stood just inside the chamber doorway.

“You must drown a Maker,” he said. “Call the Sayyadina, and have her witness the ceremony of the Water of Life. I must transform it . . . so that I may proceed with my work.” He turned away with his shuffling gait, leaving Heinar and his companions appalled and confused.

No man had ever taken the Water of Life and survived. It was a substance for Reverend Mothers, a magical, poisonous concoction that was fatal to anyone not prepared.

Unswerving, Warrick walked into a common chamber where adolescents trampled raw spice in tubs; unmarried women curded melange distillate for the production of plastics and fuel. Against the walls, the whing and slap of a power loom made a hypnotic rhythm. Other Fremen labored meticulously on stillsuits, repairing and checking the intricate mechanisms.

Solar-powered cookstoves heated a healthy gruel and mash, which the sietch members ate for a light midday meal; larger feasts occurred only after sundown, when dusk had cooled the desert. An old man with a nasal voice sang a sad lament, recounting the centuries of aimless journeys the Zensunni had endured before finally arriving on the desert planet. Liet-Kynes sat listlessly with two of Stilgar’s guerrilla fighters, drinking spice coffee.

All activity stopped when Warrick arrived and began to talk. “I have seen a green Dune, a paradise. Even Umma Kynes does not know the grandeur that Shai-Hulud revealed to me.” His voice was like a cold wind through an open cave. “I have heard the Voice from the Outer World. I have had a vision of the Lisan al-Gaib, for whom we have waited. I have seen the way, as promised by legend, as promised by the Sayyadina.”

The Fremen murmured at his audacity. They had heard the prophecy, knew that such a one was foretold. The Reverend Mothers had taught it for centuries, and legend had passed from tribe to tribe, generation to generation. The Fremen had waited so long that some were skeptical, but others were convinced— and fearful.

“I must drink the Water of Life. I have seen the path.”

Liet led his friend away from the communal chamber, back to his own rooms, where Faroula sat talking with her father. Looking up at her husband as he entered, her face was drawn with resignation and her eyes red with weeks of tears. On a carpet nearby, her baby son began to cry.

Seeing Warrick and Liet together, the old Naib turned back to his daughter. “This is as it must be, Faroula,” Heinar said. “The elders have decided. It is a tremendous sacrifice, but if . . . if he is the one, if he is truly the Lisan al-Gaib, we must do as he says. We will give him the Water of Life.”

Liet and Faroula both tried to talk Warrick out of his obsession, but the scarred man persisted in his belief. He stared with lidless eyes, but could not meet their gaze. “It is my mashhad and my mihna. My spiritual test and my religious test.”

“How do you know it wasn’t just strange sounds you heard in the wind?” Liet insisted. “Warrick, how do you know you’re not being deceived?”

“Because I know.” And in the beatific face of his conviction, they had no choice but to believe him.

Old Reverend Mother Ramallo journeyed from a distant sietch to preside over the ceremony, to prepare. Fremen men took their captive small worm, only ten meters in length, and wrestled it down, drowning it in water taken from a qanat. As the worm died and exhaled its poisonous bile, the Fremen gathered the liquid into a flexible jug and prepared it for the ceremony.

In the midst of the commotion, Planetologist Kynes returned from his plantings, but was so focused on his own concerns that he did not grasp the significance of the event, only that it was important. He voiced awkward apologies to his son, expressing sadness over what had happened to Warrick . . . but Liet could see that planet-scale calculations and assessments continued in the back of his mind. His terraforming project could not rest for one moment, not even for the chance that Warrick might be the long-foretold messiah who would unify the Fremen into a fighting force.

The population of Red Wall Sietch gathered in their huge meeting chamber. High above, on the open platform where Heinar addressed his tribe, Warrick stepped forth. The disfigured man was accompanied by the Naib and the powerful Sayyadina who had served these people for several generations. Old Ramallo looked as toughened and hard as a desert lizard who would hold her own against a hunting hawk.

The Sayyadina summoned the watermasters and intoned the ritual words; the Fremen repeated them, but with a greater anxiety than usual. Some truly believed Warrick was everything he claimed to be; others could do no more than hope.

Murmurs filled the chamber. Under normal circumstances, partaking in the tau orgy was a joyous event, celebrated only at times of great import: after a victory against Harkonnens or the discovery of a huge spice deposit or surviving a natural disaster.

This time, though, the Fremen knew what was at stake.

They looked at the mutilated face of Warrick as he stood, impassive and determined. They watched with hope and fear, wondering if he would change their lives . . . or fail horribly, as had other men in generations past.

In the audience Liet stood beside Faroula and her baby, observing from the foremost tiers. Her lips were tight in a tense frown, her eyes closed in fearful anticipation. Liet could sense fear radiating from her, and he wanted to comfort her. Was she afraid that the poison would kill her husband . . . or rather afraid that he might survive and continue his painful daily life?

Sayyadina Ramallo finished her benediction and handed the flask to Warrick. “Let Shai-Hulud judge now if your vision is true— if you are the Lisan al-Gaib, whom we have sought for so long.”

“I have seen the Lisan al-Gaib,” Warrick said, then lowered his voice so that only the old woman could hear. “I did not say it was me.”

The exposed bones and tendons on Warrick’s hands moved as he grasped the flexible nozzle and tilted it toward his lips. Ramallo squeezed the sides of the bag, squirting a gush of poison into Warrick’s mouth.

He swallowed convulsively, then swallowed again.

The Fremen audience fell silent, a humming mass of humanity who tried to comprehend. Liet thought he could hear their hearts beating in unison. He experienced the whisper of each indrawn breath, sensed the blood pounding in his own ears. He waited and watched.

“The hawk and the mouse are the same,” Warrick said, peering into the future.

Within moments, the Water of Life began to do its work.

All of Warrick’s previous suffering, all the terrible anguish he had endured in the storm and afterward, were only prelude to the horrific death that awaited him. The poison pervaded the cells of his body, setting them afire.

The Fremen believed that the disfigured man’s spiritual vision had deluded him. He raved and thrashed. “They do not know what they have created. Born of water, dies in sand!”

Sayyadina Ramallo stepped back, like a predatory bird seeing prey turn on her. What does this mean?

“They think they can control him . . . but they are deluded.”

She chose her words carefully, interpreting them through her ancient, half-forgotten filter of the Panoplia Propheticus. “He says he can see where others cannot. He has seen the way.”

“Lisan al-Gaib! He will be everything we dreamed.” Warrick retched so hard that his ribs cracked like kindling. Blood came from his mouth. “But nothing like we expected.”

The Sayyadina raised her clawlike hands. “He has seen the Lisan al-Gaib. He is coming, and he will be everything we dreamed.”

Warrick screamed until he had no more voice to utter a sound, twitched and kicked and thrashed until he had no more muscle control, until his brain was eaten away. The villagers of Bilar Camp had consumed heavily diluted Water of Life, and had still died in terrible agony. For Warrick, even such an insane death would have been a mercy.

“The hawk and the mouse are the same!”

Unable to help him, the Fremen could only watch in appalled dismay. Warrick’s death convulsions lasted for hours and hours . . . but Ramallo took far longer to interpret the disturbing visions he had seen.