Chapter Text
You abuse your freedoms. You complain in the safety of speculation, you claim foresight in disasters that never happen, and you are weak in your vices because your rank affords you privacy and deference. You've made yourself miserable, and distant, and hard to love, and you blame the world for it.
THE TERROR (2018)
Deep within the Heighliner’s innards, a navigator toiled in its tank. Its body had long since evolved, but the fundamental human armature remained beneath those strata, albeit distorted. It extremities had become webbed, and with the passage of years its extraneous structures receded, leaving the navigator without hair, nails, or eyelids. It swam in an amniotic spice solution outside of which it could no longer survive, as though it were a pre-born child in a mechanical womb.
In less than a day, its unblinking blue-ink eyes gazed out beyond its tank as it folded space between Giedi Prime and Lankiveil, two planets chained together in fiefdom and held apart by lightyears of void. Under the navigator’s guidance, it would not be long before the Guild's chartered spacecraft reached its destination. Its passengers were experienced travelers, but the journey thus far had seemed interminable.
In a private chamber within the Harkonnen vessel, Glossu Rabban regarded his uncle’s Mentat warily, lest the thing attack him without notice. On most occasions he felt assured that Piter’s assassination methods would not be put to the test on him, but things seemed touch-and-go at the moment. Though he was certain he could take him in a fight, the punishment for damaging his uncle’s priceless property would be humiliating at best, and permanently disfiguring at worst. Still, he did not intend to let Piter de Vries get the drop on him if indeed he planned to do so.
Neither spoke, both too agitated to muster civil conversation and equally unaccustomed to conversing with one another under other circumstances. Haughty as ever, Piter’s pride was wounded after being berated by the Baron in front of Rabban, and he seemed determined to ignore him for the duration of their ordeal.
Summoned to the Baron’s crimson-walled conference room early the same morning, Rabban had intruded upon an increasingly tense discussion.
“What, then, would you have me do?” Piter sounded exasperated. “You yourself, my lord, must agree—”
“Do not take that tone with me, Piter. There is nothing I must do at your behest!” The Baron had shouted, interrupting his Mentat mid-sentence. “Have I not warned you? Haven’t I, nephew?”
“You’ve warned him,” Rabban agreed, rather shaken; he had hoped his uncle would be too distracted to notice his own late entrance. “He speaks too freely.”
“To be sure.” The Baron’s suspensors crackled under his velvet tunic. “It might interest you, Rabban, to know that we are discussing—”
Piter opened his mouth to speak, and the Baron halted his own train of thought to bellow: “Silence!”
In the years since his acquisition, it had become quite clear that Piter had a tendency to mouth off. It was this habit that the Baron intended to curb, without success. With his strange eyes and bared teeth, Piter gave the impression of a dangerous animal; he was still adapting to the prevalence of Harkonnen episodes of volume and seemed prepared to dodge a blow that would not come. The Beast had openly laughed at the sight of his discomfiture, only to fall silent as the Baron rounded on him next, huge and imposing with his immense weightlessness.
His feet hung in the air as if en pointe, the toes of his shiny buckled shoes just skimming the floor. It gave him several additional inches of height; he towered around seven feet, looming a head over Rabban and higher over Piter. “Something amuses you, nephew?”
Clearing his throat, Rabban demurred, “No, my lord Baron.”
“No, no,” the Baron pressed. “I am old, not deaf. You find disobedience humorous?”
“I don’t, Uncle—”
“This is no laughing matter. You are far too old for this—both of you." He snapped his fingers. “Mentats live and die by their discipline, Glossu; understand that. When I speak, consider what each word means, if it helps you.” The Baron turned back to Piter. “Discipline does not end the moment such a creature is purchased. You, too, must be capable of enacting it.”
The Baron composed himself, lowering his voice as he spoke once more to Piter: “Well, Mentat? Unless you fancy yourself a jester, select a fitting punishment for your insolent mouth. Or shall I have you return ten grams of spice to me from your private pharmacy?”
At the subtle widening of Piter’s eyes, a smile crept into the Baron’s voice. “Skipping doses to ensure yourself a reserve, eh? Predictable, but of course there is utility in it, when one’s life depends on melange... So I give you a choice, dear Piter.”
Sensing that the Baron required a verbal response, that a nod or a bow would not do, Piter responded, in a careful monotone, “What choice?”
“Deplete your reserve, or earn an additional ten grams.”
Piter squinted; his eyes seemed to glitter with skepticism. “By what means, my Lord?”
“Accompany my nephew to Lankiveil.” His body revolved smoothly with the aid of his suspensors, looking between his nephew and his Mentat, studying their reactions. “As we were discussing, there is much to be done to resolve his predecessor’s failures, and I must see to it that my heir is capable of collaborating with a Mentat.”
“I will fix my father’s mistakes,” Rabban promised.
The Baron remained unimpressed. “If you succeed, you’ll be amply rewarded, both.”
Venturing too far, Rabban insisted, “I can fix them alone.”
The Baron’s eyes narrowed, his brow riven with lines of agitation. “I offer you the unrestricted services of my personal Mentat advisor, and you would spurn me, nephew?”
A thin jolt of panic chilled Rabban’s blood. “No, sire—I am grateful, m’lord, indeed—but he has never been to Lankiveil. He—”
“He will adapt, won’t you, Piter?”
“Assuredly, Baron,” Piter said, his voice all spite and silk.
The Baron shook his head, drumming plump fingers against his temple. “You young men think yourselves invincible. You will learn. At the very least, a Mentat does not stop learning.”
Neither spoke. They inclined their heads and kept them down, displaying their necks as if to an executioner.
“Out of my sight, both of you.” As they bowed and began to withdraw, he added, “Report your progress to me, but do not return to Giedi Prime until I recall you. I will not charter another Heighliner until it is done.”
Rabban exited the conference room, anxiously scratching the thickening fringe of stubble along his jaw.
On Giedi Prime, hair and nails seemed to grow at a slower rate; fractures and wounds healed slowly as well, as if adapting to the planet’s longer-than-standard days. On Arrakis, the Beast had no time to waste preening for the Landsraad and Houses Minor; he allowed his beard to grow as it would not under the sun of Ophiuchi B.
In Rabban’s youth, the Baron enforced that his heir be clean-shaven at all times, often complaining, You look like your father. Unkempt. Unrefined. Facial hair was common on Lankiveil, as if an adaptation to the cold. No doubt the sight of him had set the Baron off, the unpleasant reminder of his least-favorite demi-brother, a ghost in the flesh. But Abulurd had been Feyd-Raytha’s father as well, the only thing for which Vladimir deigned to commend him.
Rabban could ignore his uncle’s pettier qualms. Let the old man feel some discomfort; let him squirm as he made others squirm. Let him see the extent to which Rabban was willing to serve him: to sleeplessness, to self-neglect. Let him see the markers of his homeworld—not of Giedi Prime.
In the hall, the guard captain was escorting Feyd-Rautha to meet one of his tutors in the library. Little Feyd, no older than six, stopped to address his elder brother.
“Uncle yelled at you!” he sang.
Rabban stared at him, unamused. “Quiet down, you.” Was his discomfiture so obvious that a toddler could read it?
Feyd ignored the command. “Uncle is angry at Papa.” Feyd’s cherubic smile had a smug, conspiratorial quality.
“Our father is dead,” Rabban snapped, lunging forward enough to make Feyd topple over onto his backside, his mouth pursed in surprise.
Before Feyd could think to unleash the waterworks, Captain Kudu knelt to Feyd’s height and murmured, “Young master, your lessons.”
His voice was low and soothing, a tone he only used with the little one. If the men under his command had seen him, they might have laughed, if not for the fear of how cruelly he would react. To everyone else, Kudu was known for his merciless efficiency and harsh discipline.
Feyd pouted, but put his tiny hand in the guard’s enormous glove as if he meant to help the grown man to his feet instead of the other way around. “Go away!” he ordered Rabban in an imperious little voice.
“Oh, my! Already the little one takes after his uncle.”
Piter had emerged from the conference room; he was silent and unseen as a shadow until he began laughing, a rapid low cackle like automatic gunfire.
“Silence!” Rabban hissed. “Shut up!”
He laughed harder, melodious and joyful, as if to spite Rabban for his earlier transgression, and strutted off in the opposite direction. He was so arrogant that he would turn his back on a man who wanted to beat him to a pulp.
Rabban had not seen him again until they boarded the Heighliner separately, each attended to by different servants. When the servants left, they had lapsed into a tense unbroken silence.
As the Guild Navigator guided the Heighliner further from Giedi Prime, Piter’s rancid mood began to diffuse. Having licked his wounds to his satisfaction, he emerged from his alienating Mentat-trance and blinked, dark lashes fluttering over flickers of uncanny sapphire.
A tone broadcasted through the assembled frigates, signaling that the Heighliner had entered Lankiveil’s atmosphere. The landing procedure was soon to begin.
Rabban caught Piter’s eye and offered, “All you have to do is learn when to be silent.”
“A skill you evidently lack.” Piter’s brows arched severely. “What possesses you to believe I require your advice? Hm?”
The immediate spike of blood-pressure Piter's tone provoked led Rabban to wonder why he had bothered to extend an olive branch at all. Perhaps because he was as stupid as Uncle claimed. Voice rough and impatient, he snapped, “You are an outsider to our House and our ways.”
Piter rolled his too-blue eyes. “I am a naturalized citizen of Giedi Prime.”
It was a privilege Rabban himself had been denied. Soon, Uncle claimed, soon—but not yet.
“You are one step above a slave,” Rabban growled. “You were reared on Tleilax under their insane rituals.”
The ways of the Bene Tleilax were purposefully ambiguous, such that the layman would be unable to separate rumors from fact. Rabban did not know the truth of that planet or its Mentat training facilities, but there was a simple truth he did understand: Piter was a belonging, yet he did not belong anywhere. His papers from the Bene Tleilaxu handlers had been selectively redacted. The name of his birth-planet and the clan his mother had served as a concubine were lost to time.
"You can read, then!” Piter crowed, giving him a short round of mockingly limp-wristed applause. “I see your uncle deemed you worthy of studying my dossier.”
“Did he tell you otherwise?”
It stung because it was true. Uncle had dangled the information over him, doling out table scraps here and there, until at last he deigned to allow Rabban to comprehend his new pet.
Piter cocked his head, one of his many avian mannerisms. He lifted one long, chrome-nailed finger to his lips and had the unbearable audacity to hush Rabban like he would have done to little Feyd-Rautha. Rabban was of a mind to punch him in his slender throat until a bell rang throughout the Heighliner, distracting him; landing procedure had begun.
The Heighliner touched down and settled into place. Prior to disembarking, passengers took time to gather their baggage and don clothing more appropriate to Lankiveil’s climate.
Piter shrugged on a black fur coat—it lacked the grain and thickness of whalefur, Rabban noted—that draped to his mid-thigh, and set a pair of dark blue-mirrored lenses on the bridge of his nose to protect his increasingly light-sensitive eyes. It occurred to Rabban that the trait Piter was beginning to share with indigenous Fremen served many uses; when the eyes and sockets were fully stained, it dampened the glare of sun on sand—or snow.
Both of the Baron’s begrudging exiles traveled light despite the indefinite stay. Piter's luggage contained enough spice to buy and sell a planet of Lankiveil’s size—but the spice was reserved solely for Piter's personal use. He would die without it, Uncle said, because his eyes had already tinted. He had reached a point of no return. They were not yet full-dark, like the twin ink-stains of the Fremen indigenous to Arrakis, but Piter’s formerly white sclera had gone sapphire around his dark irises. Over time the saturation would become so pronounced that his eyes would look like holes all the time. In the right lighting, they already did.
Rabban donned a heavy whalefur-lined coat and abandoned his Harkonnen military-issue boots in favor of a more rugged pair. It was not long before they disembarked their frigate, then the Heighliner altogether, emerging at last in the crush of the offworld crowd thronging past, breath fogging the sub-zero air of Lankiveil's largest harbor.
When Lankiveil welcomed its son home, it was without fanfare. There was only the frigid water, and the distant whalesong, and the blue-eyed shadow in his wake.
It was a landscape of desolation. Gray water roiled beneath gray clouds, and a ceaseless white tundra sparsely-dotted with coniferous green stretched beyond the horizon. Wind whipped across blankets of ice, sending drifts of powdered snow whirling into the air.
Lankiveil’s primary spaceport was also one of its largest cities. A bastion of civilization, it glowed brightly with light and activity. Guild Heighliners enabled imports and exports to flow freely to the remote planet—whalefur and ambergris exported, pilingitam wood and melange and much more imported. Workers and foremen swarmed the harbor, engrossed in their daily tasks. Buildings of brick and stone crouched along the cliffs surrounding the city.
Rabban had no difficulty using his bulk to cut through the crowd, allowing Piter to follow close behind. Escaping the crowd, Piter quickened his step to walk abreast with Rabban down a narrow side-street. Before he had the chance to open his mouth and sour Rabban's mood further, the low heel of his boot wedged between icy cobblestones and sent him stumbling. In an automatic gesture, Rabban caught him by the arm and hauled him back to his feet, squeezing his bicep hard as he set him right. His arm was so thin in Rabban's hand, he felt as though he could squeeze once more and hear his humerus crack.
“Unhand me.” It might have been the cold putting a flush of color on Piter’s high cheekbones, but Rabban thought he was embarrassed. His uncharacteristic loss of grace improved Rabban's mood significantly.
“You have no traction,” he explained, raising one of his own boots to show the well-used crampons enhancing his tread. “Uncle will never let me hear the end of it if I let you break an ankle.”
Walking arm-in-arm with him was almost intolerable. Rabban continued to contemplate whether he could flex his own arm and snap Piter’s like a twig—but he had seen other lords thus engaged, looking important with a Mentat on their arm, signaling some incomprehensible virtue meant to elevate the value of both parties in proximity. He decided that he did not look nearly so foolish as Leto Atreides did, clinging to his ancient Mentat. Piter was decades younger and able-bodied, unlike Hawat; he carried himself with a sense of grace and dignity that not all Mentats indulged in. He was chosen for his intellect and moral deficits, not his appearance, but he was perhaps the least unappetizing of the Baron's advisors. Rabban had worn uglier things on his arm. It would be one more weapon in his arsenal.
The narrow street opened to connect with a coastal road parallel to the sea. The high tide lapped at the coast. Far in the distance, ships bobbed along the horizon, some unfurling massive sails to catch the wind, others belching dark soot.
"We're expecting two guards, are we not?" Piter slipped his arm out of Rabban's. "Have we been abandoned?"
"Fetching the transport, if they're of any use. They know where to find us. The rendezvous point is nearby."
Looking along the road, he saw no sign of other travelers. Further down the coast, seafoam washed over the black sand, surrounding the enormous beached carcass of a whale.
It was long-dead, its fur stained with decomposition. Even at a distance, the thing was monumental in scale, its silhouette dominating the team of laborers who surrounded its rotting bulk like so many insects. For a moment, Rabban lingered to watch them at work, leaning one shoulder against one of many boulders jutting from the frozen earth like an abscessed tooth. He had seen his first beached whale as a boy, still clinging to life, snorting weak gusts of mists from its blowhole until it expired. Its single glassy eye had been larger than his head.
This one had been dead for some time, judging by the smell. The wind that had carried most of the scent in the opposite direction made an abrupt change, pulling in the crisp sea air as well as the cloying aroma of decay. The odor of death was undercut by a hint of smoke—of something sparking and smoldering.
Realizing what was about to happen, Rabban seized Piter by the shoulders and pulled him behind cover. His immediate reaction was an indignant squawk at being manhandled, but a spray of guts and blubber put his priorities neatly into perspective. Rabban eased his grip and Piter remained pressed against him, a hand on his shoulder, waiting for the detonation to conclude.
Clumps of flesh hit the ground in wet percussive slaps, a hideous hailstorm accompanied by a rain of blood. The overhang of rock was not enough to protect their outerwear from a splash of gore, though it spared them from being covered head-to-toe. The stench was indescribable. It burned the sinuses like acid. Neither man gagged, but Rabban noticed Piter's eyes watering when he lifted his glasses to dab at them with a clean handkerchief.
Once the final chunks of meat had struck the ground and burst open, they stepped apart and surveyed the carnage. Piter watched the sea at Rabban's back while Rabban watched the city at Piter's. A moment too late, he saw a certain glint in Piter's eyes, a tension twitching into his jaw that told him something unpleasant was underway—too late to avoid it, but not too late to brace himself. He turned and sank into a defensive stance as a curved blade glanced off his forearm, cutting through the thick lining of his coat more than his flesh. He felt a thin, stinging cut welling with blood against the absorbent whalefur.
The assailant was clothed in heavy white pelts, their face concealed by layers of scarves. They struck again, perilously quick but too frail to follow through; Rabban knocked their forearm aside, letting the blade grind against solid rock.
Piter surged forward, running the assailant through the neck with a spring-activated stiletto concealed in his sleeve. As he stepped back to pull it free, blood gushed from the wound, soaking through layers of white fabric and fur. The attacker dropped to the frozen earth, gurgling and choking on their own blood as the crimson stain spread down their front. Piter ground the heel of his boot into the wound, spitefully maintaining his balance even as the weakening attacker clawed and grappled at his leg. He whipped his blade through the air once, twice, splattering blood across the snow, before running a cloth over its length and retracting its mechanism back into his gauntlet.
It was an uninhibited, deadly show of force in broad daylight. It was the honed instinct of a killing instrument more precise than any mere attack dog. It compelled Rabban, though he did not know where the compulsion would lead. Though he rather resented having the kill snatched out from under him, he recognized that this, too, was one of Piter's many functions. He had served his master without hesitation. It made dull heat flare in the Beast's core.
The other workers stared anxiously at the aftermath of their colleague's poor judgment. Rabban shouted across the ice, over the ringing in his ears, "What are you looking at!?"—and they dispersed, busy with the whale's imploded remains. Its carcass had bloomed into a garden of putrefaction, its liquefying innards billowing out reeking plumes of steam high overhead.
Unmasking the attempted assassin, Rabban found an old crone’s visage crumpled in agony underneath layers of fur and woolen scarves. He scoffed. Had the hag indulged in tea service with his mother, perhaps? Had she taken umbrage at how he had come by his father's title? It did not matter. She was dead, and so was the old Count of Lankiveil.
"A warm welcome indeed." Below his dark lenses, Piter’s smile was subtle and satisfied. “Long live the Count,” he remarked.
Fresh blood steamed in the frigid air between them.