Sheeana stopped her dance. She clenched both fists at her sides and stared back at the monster she had summoned.
Odrade took timed breaths, the controlled pacing of a Reverend Mother gathering all of her powers. If this was the end — well, she had obeyed Taraza’s orders. Let the Mother Superior learn what she would from the watchers overhead.
“Hello, Shaitan,” Sheeana said. “I have brought a Reverend Mother and a man of the Tleilaxu with me.”
Waff slumped to his knees and bowed.
Odrade slipped past him to stand beside Sheeana.
Sheeana breathed deeply. Her face was flushed.
Odrade heard the click-ticking of their overworked stillsuits. The hot, cinnamon-drenched air around them was charged with the sounds of this meeting, all dominated by the murmurous burning within the quiescent worm.
Waff came up beside Odrade, his trancelike gaze fixed on the worm.
“I am here,” he whispered.
Odrade silently cursed him. Any unwarranted noise could attract this beast onto them. She knew what Waff was thinking, though: No other Tleilaxu had ever stood this close to a descendant of his Prophet. Not even the Rakian priests had ever done this!
With her right hand, Sheeana made a sudden downward gesture. “Down to us, Shaitan!” she said.
The worm lowered its gaping mouth until the internal firepit filled the rocky defile in front of them.
Her voice little more than a whisper, Sheeana said: “See how Shaitan obeys me, Mother?”
Odrade could feel Sheeana’s control over the worm, a pulse of hidden language between child and monster. It was uncanny.
Her voice rising in impudent arrogance, Sheeana said: “I will ask Shaitan to let us ride him!” She scrambled up the slipface of the dune beside the worm.
Immediately, the great mouth lifted to follow her movements. “Stay there!” Sheeana shouted. The worm stopped.
It’s not her words that command it, Odrade thought. Something else . . . something else . . .
“Mother, come with me,” Sheeana called.
Thrusting Waff ahead of her, Odrade obeyed. They scrambled up the sandy slope behind Sheeana. Dislodged sand spilled down beside the waiting worm, piling up in the defile. Ahead of them, the worm’s tapering tail curved along the dune crest. Sheeana led them at a sand-clotted trot to the very tip of the thing. There, she gripped the leading edge of a ring in the corrugated surface and scrambled up onto her desert beast.
More slowly, Odrade and Waff followed. The worm’s warm surface felt non-organic to Odrade, as though it were some Ixian artifact.
Sheeana skipped forward along the back and squatted just behind its mouth where the rings bulged thick and wide.
“Like this,” Sheeana said. She leaned forward and clutched beneath the leading edge of a ring, lifting it slightly to expose pink softness underneath.
Waff obeyed her immediately but Odrade moved with more caution, storing impressions. The ring surface was as hard as plascrete and covered with tiny encrustations. Odrade’s fingers probed the softness under the leading edge. It pulsed faintly. The surface around them lifted and fell with an almost imperceptible rhythm. Odrade heard a tiny rasping with each movement.
Sheeana kicked the worm surface behind her.
“Shaitan, go!” she said.
The worm did not respond.
“Please, Shaitan,” Sheeana pleaded.
Odrade heard the desperation in Sheeana’s voice. The child was so confident of her Shaitan but Odrade knew that the girl had been allowed to ride only that first time. Odrade had the full story from death-wish to priestly confusion but none of it told her what would happen next.
Abruptly, the worm lurched into motion. It lifted sharply, twisted to the left and made a tight curve out of the rocky defile, then moved directly away from Dar-es-Balat into the open desert.
“We go with God!” Waff shouted.
The sound of his voice shocked Odrade. Such wildness! She sensed the power in his faith. The thwock-thwock of following ornithopters came from overhead. The wind of their passage whipped past Odrade full of ozone and the hot furnace odors stirred up by the friction of the rushing behemoth.
Odrade glanced over her shoulders at the ‘thopters, thinking how easy it would be for enemies to rid this planet of a troublesome child, an equally troublesome Reverend Mother and a despised Tleilaxu — all in one violently vulnerable moment on the open desert. The priestly cabal might attempt it, she knew, hoping that Odrade’s own watchers up there would be too late to prevent it.