On Ix, even after their numbers had been more than halved, the Sardaukar fought on. Oblivious to pain or grievous wounds, the drug-frenzied Imperial fighters showed no fear for their own lives.

One of the uniformed Sardaukar drove a young Atreides fighter to the ground, reached a gloved hand through his shield, and switched off the controls. Then, like a D-wolf, he bared his teeth and ripped out the man’s throat.

Duncan Idaho could not understand why the Emperor’s elite corps would so ferociously defend the Tleilaxu. Clearly, young Commander Cando Garon would never surrender, not even if he were the last man alive atop a mountain of dead comrades.

Duncan reassessed his strategy, focusing on the goal of his mission. While projectile fire spattered around him like sparks from a bonfire, he raised a hand and bellowed in Atreides battle language, “To the Grand Palais!”

The Duke’s men disengaged from the maddened Sardaukar and pushed around them, forming a phalanx with Duncan at the lead. He carried the Old Duke’s sword and slashed at any enemy who came within reach.

Boots slapping on stone, they raced through the ceiling tunnels, negotiating honeycombed passageways toward the stalactite administrative buildings. A lone, defiant Sardaukar soldier, his uniform torn and bloodied, stood in the middle of a skyway bridge that spanned the open grotto. When he saw Duncan’s men charging toward him, he clasped a grenade to his chest and detonated it, blowing up the bridge. His body tumbled through the enclosed sky, along with a rain of fire and structural wreckage.

Appalled, Duncan signaled for his men to back away from the severed bridge, while he looked for another route to the inverted pyramid of the Ixian palace. How do we fight against men like this?

Trying to spot a new aerial walkway, he watched as a transport barge crashed into one of the Grand Palais balconies, obviously driven by a madman. Rebels surged off the platform and into the royal structure, shouting defiance.

Duncan led his men over a second bridge and finally entered the upper levels of the Grand Palais. Tleilaxu bureaucrats and scientists fled for shelter, wailing and pleading for mercy in Imperial Galach. A few Atreides soldiers took potshots at the unshielded forms, but Duncan called his men together. “Don’t waste your efforts. We can clean up the garbage later.” They ran ahead through the once-grand but now spartan rooms.

Atreides fighters had spread into the crustal levels of the city, and some had taken lift tubes down to the cavern floor, where fierce fighting continued. Battle cries and screams echoed through the cavern, mixing in the air with the stomach-twisting stench of death.

Duncan’s squad reached the main reception chamber and marched onto an inlaid checkerboard floor. There they encountered a surprising confrontation between ragtag passengers from the crashed cargo barge and furious Sardaukar guards. Broken crystalplaz and synstone wreckage lay strewn around the grounded barge in the middle of the reception floor.

At the center of it all, he saw Rhombur’s unmistakable cyborg form, along with the troubadour Gurney Halleck, both men struggling to hold their own. Gurney’s fighting style had no finesse, nothing that would have impressed the Swordmasters of Ginaz, but the former smuggler had an instinctive prowess with a weapon.

When Duncan’s men rushed forward, howling the names of Duke Leto and Prince Rhombur, the desperate battle turned in their favor. Suboids and Ixian citizens fought with renewed strength.

A side passage burst open, and several blood-spattered Sardaukar ran forward, firing weapons and shouting. Their hair was in disarray and their faces streaked with scarlet, but they kept coming. Commander Cando Garon led them in a suicide attack.

Through the bloodlust, Garon noticed the cyborg Prince and charged directly at him with blind fury. In each hand, the Commander carried a sharp blade, already slicked with thick crimson fluid.

Duncan recognized the son of the Emperor’s Supreme Bashar, saw murder in his eyes, and launched himself into motion. Years ago, he had failed to stop the attack of the frenzied Salusan bull that had killed Old Duke Paulus, and he had sworn not to let himself fail again.

Rhombur stood beside the crashed barge, directing the freedom fighters, and didn’t see Garon rushing toward him. Rebels streamed off the barge platform, picking their way over the rubble, grabbing weapons dropped by fallen Sardaukar. Behind Rhombur, the blasted-open wall of the Grand Palais was a yawning hole that overlooked the city grotto.

Running at full speed, Duncan crashed into Garon, striking him on the side. Their body shields collided with a report like a thunderclap and a momentum exchange that hurled Duncan backward.

But the impact also diverted Garon, who staggered toward the gaping hole in the window wall, slipping on debris on the floor. Deflected from his target, the ravening Sardaukar Commander saw a chance to kill more of the enemy and collided with three shouting Ixian rebels who stood too close to the edge of the smashed balcony. He spread his strong arms and, like a bulldozer, swept the astonished victims over the precipice.

Garon went over the side, too— but he managed to grab a broken protruding girder that had once separated broad sheets of crystalplaz. He caught himself and dangled, his face pulled into a rictus of ferocious effort, his lips skinned back from his teeth. The tendons in his neck stood out like cords ready to snap. He held on with one hand, as if sheer defiance could counteract the relentless pull of gravity.

Seeing the leader of the Sardaukar and knowing Garon was the son of Shaddam’s Supreme Bashar, Rhombur bounded over to the brink on his cyborg legs. He bent down, grasping the broken wall for support and reached down with his prosthetic mechanical arm. Garon merely snarled up at the proffered assistance.

“Take it!” Rhombur said. “I can pull you to safety— and then you must surrender your troops. Ix is mine.”

The Sardaukar Commander made no move to grab his hand. “I would rather die than be rescued by you. My shame would be a far worse death, and facing my father in disgrace would be greater pain than you could imagine.”

The cyborg Prince anchored himself with his legs and reached down to grab Cando Garon by the wrist, squeezing a viselike hold. He remembered losing his entire family, and his own body in flames during the skyclipper explosion. “There is no pain I cannot imagine, Commander.” He began to haul the struggling man up, despite his protestations.

But the Sardaukar used his free hand to grab at his own waist, and drew a razor-knife. “Why don’t you let yourself fall with me, and we’ll die together?” Garon smiled wickedly, then slashed with the thrumming blade. It struck sparks off of Rhombur’s mechanical wrist tendons, hitting the metallic, synthetic bone cylinders, but could not cut deeply enough.

Undaunted, Rhombur lifted the young officer close to the edge where he could be saved. Duncan rushed forward to help.

His face insane with determination, Cando Garon slashed again with the powerful cutting tool— this time cutting cleanly through Rhombur’s pulleys and support joints, severing the cyborg hand. As Rhombur reeled backward, looking at the sparking and smoking stump of his artificial arm, the Sardaukar Commander tumbled away without a scream, without so much as a whisper.

Rapidly, the remaining Atreides forces and the enthusiastic rebels secured the Grand Palais. Duncan breathed a sigh of relief, but remained wary.

After witnessing Cando Garon’s suicidal plunge, the suboids and rebels delighted in throwing captured Tleilaxu over the brink, a grim reflection of the days when the hated overlords had so ruthlessly executed alleged resistors.

Catching his breath, Duncan shook with exhaustion. The battles continued below, but he took a moment to greet his companion. “Well met, Gurney.”

The lumpy-faced man shook his head. “A rather messy meeting, if you ask me.” He swiped sweat from his brow.

Too weary and ragged to celebrate the long-awaited victory, C’tair Pilru sat on a lump of broken plastone and touched the checkerboard floor, as if trying to recapture childhood memories. “I wish my brother could be here.” Recalling the last time he had stood inside the Grand Palais, the son of a respected ambassador, he wished for the stolen years back. It had been a time of elegance and finery, of grand receptions, and of flirtations and intrigues for the hand of Kailea Vernius.

“Your father still lives,” Rhombur said. “I would be most pleased to have him restored to service as a respected Ambassador for House Vernius.” Gently, with precise control of his intact cyborg hand, he squeezed C’tair’s sagging shoulders. The Prince looked at his still-glowing stump, as if dismayed that he would have to be repaired and face rehabilitation again. But Tessia would help him. He couldn’t wait to see her once more.

Haggard but grinning, C’tair looked up. “First we must find the sky controls so that you can make an announcement and put your final mark on this day.” Breaking into the Tleilaxu-controlled palace, he had done the same thing many years before, transmitting sky-images of Rhombur’s defiant words. Now he led the way with the Prince, Duncan, and a dozen men accompanying them. Outside the control room, they discovered two Tleilaxu dead on the floor, their throats cut….

Rhombur did not know how to operate the equipment, so C’tair helped him scan his face into the system. Moments later, they projected the Prince’s giant image from the grotto ceiling. His amplified voice boomed out, “I am Prince Rhombur Vernius! I now hold the Grand Palais, my ancestral home, my rightful home. Here I intend to stay. Ixians, throw off your shackles, subdue your oppressors, take back your freedom!”

When he finished, Rhombur heard a roar of renewed cheers from below, while the battle continued to rage.

Gurney Halleck met him in a hallway. “Look what we’ve found.” He led the Prince to an immense armored storage room, which the Atreides had cut open with lasguns. “We had hoped to root out incriminating records, but instead we discovered this.”

Cases were stacked from floor to ceiling. One had been pried open to reveal an orange-brown powder, a dusty substance that reeked of cinnamon. “It looks and tastes like melange, but look at the label. It says AMAL, in the Tleilaxu alphabet.”

Rhombur glanced from Duncan to Gurney. “Where did they get so much spice, and why are they hoarding it?”

In a low voice, C’tair murmured, “I have already… seen what occurs in the research pavilion.” He looked haggard. Realizing that the others had not heard him, he repeated it, louder, then added, “Now it begins to make sense. Miral and Cristane… and the spice odors.”

His companions looked at him, quizzically. C’tair’s eyes and the slump of his body showed the effects of the years on him. Men of less determination would have given up long ago.

He shook his head vigorously, as if to clear a buzzing from his ears. “The Tleilaxu were using Ixian laboratories to attempt to create some form of synthetic melange. Amal.”

Duncan glowered. “This scheme is more than just Tleilaxu villainy. Its shadow extends all the way to the Golden Lion Throne. House Corrino has been behind the suffering of all Ixians and the destruction of House Vernius.”

“Artificial spice…” Rhombur considered this, and it made him angry. “Ix was destroyed— my family murdered— for that?” He recoiled at the very idea, realizing the vast economic and political implications.

Scratching his inkvine scar, Gurney Halleck frowned. “D’murr said something about tainted spice in his tank— was this what killed him?”

Voice throbbing with excitement, C’tair said, “I suspect the answers are in the research pavilion.”