"Frank Herbert - Dune 1 - Dune (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

tongue. Knife, that's "Death Maker" in Chakobsa. She's getting restive. I must answer now. Delay
is as dangerous as the wrong answer.
Jessica said: "It's a maker --"
"Eighe-e-e-e-e-e!" Mapes wailed. It was a sound of both grief and elation. She trembled so
hard the knife blade sent glittering shards of reflection shooting around the room.
Jessica waited, poised. She had intended to say the knife was a maker of death and then add
the ancient word, but every sense warned her now, all the deep training of alertness that exposed
meaning in the most casual muscle twitch.
The key word was . . . maker.
Maker? Maker.
Still, Mapes held the knife as though ready to use it.
Jessica said: "Did you think that I, knowing the mysteries of the Great Mother, would not know
the Maker?"
Mapes lowered the knife. "My Lady, when one has lived with prophecy for so long, the moment of
revelation is a shock."
Jessica thought about the prophecy -- the Shari-a and all the panoplia propheticus, a Bene
Gesserit of the Missionaria Protectiva dropped here long centuries ago -- long dead, no doubt, but
her purpose accomplished: the protective legends implanted in these people against the day of a
Bene Gesserit's need.
Well, that day had come.
Mapes returned knife to sheath, said: "This is an unfixed blade, my Lady. Keep it near you.
More than a week away from flesh and it begins to disintegrate. It's yours, a tooth of shai-hulud,
for as long as you live."
Jessica reached out her right hand, risked a gamble: "Mapes, you've sheathed that blade
unblooded."
With a gasp, Mapes dropped the sheathed knife into Jessica's hand, tore open the brown bodice,
wailing: "Take the water of my life!"
Jessica withdrew the blade from its sheath. How it glittered! She directed the point toward
Mapes, saw a fear greater than death-panic come over the woman. Poison in the point? Jessica
wondered. She tipped up the point, drew a delicate scratch with the blade's edge above Mapes' left
breast. There was a thick welling of blood that stopped almost immediately. Ultrafast coagulation,
Jessica thought. A moisture-conserving mutation?
She sheathed the blade, said: "Button your dress, Mapes."
Mapes obeyed, trembling. The eyes without whites stared at Jessica. "You are ours," she
muttered. "You are the One."
There came another sound of unloading in the entry. Swiftly, Mapes grabbed the sheathed knife,
concealed it in Jessica's bodice. "Who sees that knife must be cleansed or slain!" she snarled.
"You know that, my Lady!"
I know it now, Jessica thought.
The cargo handlers left without intruding on the Great Hall.
Mapes composed herself, said: "The uncleansed who have seen a crysknife may not leave Arrakis
alive. Never forget that, my Lady. You've been entrusted with a crysknife." She took a deep
breath. "Now the thing must take its course. It cannot be hurried." She glanced at the stacked
boxes and piled goods around them. "And there's work aplenty to while the time for us here."
Jessica hesitated. "The thing must take its course." That was a specific catchphrase from the
Missionaria Protectiva's stock of incantations -- The coming of the Reverend Mother to free you.


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