"Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson - Dune 09 - House Corrino" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

Dune

House Corrino

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

The axis of spin for the planet Arrakis is at right angles to the radius of its orbit. The world itself is
not a globe, but more a spinning top somewhat fat at the equator and concave toward the poles.
There is a sense that this may be artificial, the product of some ancient artifice.

тАФ Report of the Third Imperial Commission on Arrakis

UNDER THE LIGHT OF TWO MOONS IN A DUSTY SKY, the Fremen raiders flitted across the
desert rocks. They blended into the rugged surroundings as if cut from the same cloth, harsh men in
a harsh environment.

Death to Harkonnens. All members of the armed razzia squad had sworn the same vow.

In the quiet hours before dawn, Stilgar, their tall and black-bearded leader, stalked catlike ahead of
a score of his best fighters. We must move as shadows in the night. Shadows with hidden knives.

Lifting a hand, he commanded the silent squad to halt. Stilgar listened to the pulse of the desert, his
ears probing the darkness. His blue-within-blue eyes scanned towering rock escarpments profiled
against the sky like giant sentinels. As the pair of moons moved across the heavens, patches of
darkness shifted moment by moment, living extensions of the mountain face.

The men picked their way up a rock buttress, using dark-adapted eyes to follow a steep, tool-hewn
trail. The terrain seemed hauntingly familiar, though Stilgar had never been here before. His father
had described the way, the route their ancestors had taken into Hadith Sietch, once the greatest of
all hidden settlements, abandoned long ago.

"Hadith"тАФa word taken from an old Fremen song about the patterns of survival in the desert. Like
many living Fremen, he carried the story etched into his psyche ... a tale of betrayal and civil
conflict during the first generations of the wandering Zensunni here on Dune. Legend held that all
meanings originated here, in this holy sietch. , ,i .,

Now, though, the Harkonnens have desecrated our ancient place.

Every man in Stilgar's commando squad felt revulsion at such sacrilege, lack in Red Wall Sietch, a
flat stone held tally marks of all the enemies hiese Fremen had slain, and tonight more enemy blood
would be shed.
The column followed Stilgar as he picked up the pace down the rocky trail. It would be dawn soon,
and they still had much killing to do.

Here, far from prying Imperial eyes, Baron Harkonnen had been sing the empty caves of Sietch
Hadith to conceal one of his illegal spice oards. The embezzled stockpile of valuable melange
appeared on no in' ;ntory sheet ever submitted to the Emperor. Shaddam suspected nothing "тАв the
ruse. But the Harkonnens could not hide such activities from the 'es of the desert people.

In the squalid village of Bar Es Rashid at the base of the ridge, the arkonnens had a listening post