When Sheeana again missed her footing and uttered another small sound of complaint, Odrade said: “Don’t favor yourself, child!”
Odrade saw Waff’s shoulders stiffen. He did not like that peremptory manner with his “Blessed One.” There was backbone in the little man. Odrade recognized it as the strength of fanaticism. Even if the worm came to kill him, Waff would not flee. Faith in God’s will would carry him directly into his own death — unless he were shaken out of his religious security.
Odrade suppressed a smile. She could follow his thinking process: God will soon reveal His Purpose.
But Waff was thinking about his cells growing in the slow renewal at Bandalong. No matter what happened here, his cells would carry on for the Bene Tleilax . . . and for God — a serial Waff always serving the Great Belief.
“I can smell Shaitan, you know,” Sheeana said.
“Right now?” Odrade looked up at the causeway ahead of them. Waff already was a few steps onto that arching surface.
“No, only when he comes,” Sheeana said.
“Of course you can, child. Anyone could.”
“I can smell him a long way off.”
Odrade inhaled deeply through her nose, sorting the smells from the background of burnt flint: faint whiffs of melange . . . ozone, something distinctly acid. She motioned for Sheeana to precede her single-file onto the causeway. Waff was holding his steady twenty paces ahead. The causeway dipped down to the desert some sixty meters ahead of him.
I will taste the sand at the first opportunity, Odrade thought. That will tell me many things.
As she mounted the causeway over the water moat, she looked off to the southwest at a low barrier along the horizon. Abruptly, Odrade was confronted by a compelling Other Memory. There was none of the crispness in it of actual vision, but she recognized it — a mingling of images from the deepest sources within her.
Damn! she thought. Not now!
There was no escape. Such intrusions came with purpose, an unavoidable demand upon her awareness.
Warning!
She squinted at the horizon, allowing the Other Memory to superimpose itself: a long-ago high barrier far away out there . . . people moving along the top of it. There was a faery bridge in that memory-distance, insubstantial and beautiful. It linked one part of that vanished barrier to another part and she knew without seeing it that a river ran beneath that long-gone bridge. The Idaho River! Now, the superimposed image provided movement: objects falling from the bridge. They were too far away to identify but she had the labels for this image projection now. With a sense of horror and elation, she identified that scene.
The faery bridge was collapsing! Tumbling into the river below it.
This vision was not some random destruction. This was classical violence carried in many memories, which had come down to her in the moments of spice agony. Odrade could classify the finely tuned components of the image: Thousands of her ancestors had watched that scene in imaginative reconstruction. Not a real visual memory but an assemblage of accurate reports.
That is where it happened!
Odrade stopped and let the image projections have their way with her awareness. Warning! Something dangerous had been identified. She did not try to dig out the warning’s substance. If she did that, she knew it could fall apart in skeins, any one of which might be relevant, but the original certainty would vanish.
This thing out there was fixed in the Atreides history. Leto II, the Tyrant, had fallen to his dissolution from that faery bridge. The great worm of Rakis, the Tyrant God Emperor himself, had been tumbled from that bridge on his wedding peregrination.
There! Right there in the Idaho River beneath his destroyed bridge, the Tyrant had been submerged in his own agony. Right there, the transubstantiation from which the Divided God was born — it all began there.
Why is that a warning?
Bridge and river had vanished from this land. The high wall that had enclosed the Tyrant’s dryland Sareer was eroded into a broken line on a heat-shimmering horizon.
If a worm came now with its encapsulated pearl of the Tyrant’s forever-dreaming memory, would that memory be dangerous? So Taraza’s opposition in the Sisterhood argued.