Free The Winds of Dune by Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson Page B

as souvenirs from Muad’Dib’s memorial. A spice lighter came down to the spaceport, filling the air with a loud roar, but Jessica and the Naib existed in a small universe of their own.
    Stilgar looked at her with his blue-within-blue eyes. “I know how.”
     

     
    At night, listening to the daily hordes of wailing mourners, seeing the pilgrims continue to swarm in from offworld after the death of Muad’Dib (and knowing the Spacing Guild was reaping great profits from each passage), Stilgar concluded that such shameful excesses were decidedly non-Fremen.
    He had been a friend of Paul Atreides from the moment the young man took his sietch name of Usul. He’d seen Paul kill his first man—the hotheaded Jamis, who would have been forgotten by the tribe, except that dying at the right time and by the right hand had given him a certain historical immortality.
    But
this
, Stilgar thought, as he stood on a crowded Arrakeen street, wearing a well-fitted stillsuit (unlike most of these offworlders, who never learned or understood proper water discipline)—
this
was not the Dune he remembered.
    Stilgar had never liked Arrakeen, nor any city for that matter: the shuffle and press of ill-prepared pilgrims, the dark-alley crime, the garbage, noise, and strange odors. Although life in the crowded sietches had changed, it was still more pure than the city. Out there, peopledidn’t pretend to be something they were not, or they would not survive long. The desert sorted the faithful from imposters, but the city did not seem to know the difference, and actually rewarded the impure.
    Hiding his disgust behind noseplugs and a filterscarf, Stilgar walked the streets, listening to atonal music that wafted from a small gathering area where a group of pilgrims from the same planet shared cultural memories. Gutters stank from piled rubbish: The crowds left so much refuse behind that there was no place to put it—even the open desert couldn’t swallow it all. Bad smells were an evil omen to the Fremen, because rotting odors implied wasted moisture. He fitted his noseplugs more tightly.
    In busy Arrakeen, the only place a man could be alone was inside himself. No one paid any attention to the disguised Naib as he made his way toward the Citadel of Muad’Dib. Only when he reached the gates did he reveal his identity and give the countersign. The guards stepped back with a sudden snap of respect, as if they were clockwork mechanisms in tightly wound thumpers.
    For what Stilgar intended, it would have been better if his presence had remained unnoticed, yet without the unwavering authority Muad’Dib had conferred on him, he could never achieve what Jessica had asked of him. Stilgar was breaking supposed rules, following the course of honor instead of someone else’s law. He had to do this quietly and secretly, even if it required several trips, several secret nighttime missions.
    Muad’Dib was not the only one who had died. At least Stilgar and Jessica remembered that. . . .
    He reached the oppressively silent quarters where Usul had lived with his beloved concubine. Sooner or later, members of the Qizarate would convert this wing of the palace into a shrine, but for now the people regarded the rooms with religious awe and left them untouched.
    Atop a sand-etched stone slab, an ornate canopic jar held Chani’s water. Rendered down from her small body by a huanui deathstill after the difficult and bloody birth of the twins, only twenty-two liters of water had been recovered from her body.
    She’d been the daughter of Liet-Kynes before becoming the woman of Muad’Dib. A true Fremen warrior on Dune, she had fought many battles as a member of Stilgar’s troop. With callused fingers, he tracedthe intricate markings on the outside of the jar. A tremor of superstitious fear ran down his spine. Water was just water . . . but could it be that Chani’s ruh-spirit still lingered here?
    Her father Liet, the Imperial planetologist murdered by