When Anirul awakened, she discovered that the Medical Sister had been monitoring and adjusting her medication to keep the disturbed clamor of Other Memory from overwhelming her.
“Good color in your skin, alertness in your eyes. Excellent, Lady Anirul.” Yohsa smiled gently, reassuringly.
Anirul managed to sit up on her bed, overcoming a wave of weakness. She felt almost recovered, almost sane. For now.
Margot Fenring and Mohiam scurried into the bedchamber, wearing anxious expressions that would have earned them a scolding rebuke if she had been feeling better.
Margot changed the polarity of the filter field at a private patio door, allowing bright sunlight into the room. Anirul shielded her eyes and sat up straighter in bed so that the warm, golden sunlight splashed across her skin. “I can’t spend my life in darkness.”
To her intent Bene Gesserit listeners, she explained the nightmare of the desert sandworm fleeing an unseen, unknown pursuer. “I must determine what this dream means, while the terror is still fresh in my mind.” The skin on her face began to feel hot in the sunlight, as if she had been sunburned by her vision.
The Medical Sister tried to interrupt, but Anirul shooed her away. Frowning in brittle disapproval, Yohsa left her alone with the other two women, closing the door behind her a bit more forcefully than necessary.
Anirul walked barefoot to the terrace, into full sunlight. Instead of recoiling from the heat, she stood naked and unself-conscious, absorbing the rays of the sun on her bare skin. “I journeyed to the brink of madness, and came back.” She experienced a strange longing to roll on… hot sand.
The three Sisters stood beside a waving immian rosebush at the terrace. “Dreams are always triggered by conscious events,” Mohiam said, paraphrasing a Bene Gesserit teaching.
Contemplating, Anirul picked one of the tiny yellow immian roses from the bush beside her; as the sensitive flower flinched, she lifted it to her nose to smell the delicate scent. “I think it has something to do with the Emperor, spice… and Arrakis… Have you heard of Project Amal? One day I walked into my husband’s study while he was discussing such a project with Count Fenring. They were arguing about the Tleilaxu. Both of them fell awkwardly silent, as guilty men always do. Shaddam told me not to meddle in affairs of state.”
“All men behave strangely,” Reverend Mother Mohiam observed. “That has long been known.”
Margot frowned. “Hasimir keeps trying to hide the fact that he spends so much time on Ix, and I often wonder why. Just an hour ago, he ruined a dress that I wore especially for him, knocked a cup of spice coffee out of my hands before I could sip from it, as if it were poison. I used some melange I found in a secret luggage compartment.” She narrowed her eyes. “It was in a pouch with a marking on it, the Tleilaxu symbol for ‘A.’ Amal, perhaps?”
“Quietly, the Emperor has been sending military resources to Ix, while keeping that information hidden from the Landsraad. Fenring… Ix… Tleilaxu… melange,” Anirul said. “No good can come of this.”
“And Shaddam has declared open war on spice hoarders,” Mohiam said. Even in the brightness of day, her wrinkled face seemed to absorb new shadows. “All roads lead to melange.”
“Perhaps the sandworm in my dream was fleeing from a storm of upheavals in the Imperium.” Still naked in the sunlight, Anirul stared across the Palace grounds. “We must contact Mother Superior right away.”