TVFTOS: Chapter Two

Chapter Two

His thoughts moved with the sluggish precision of machinery long unused, each synapse firing with deliberate care.

The first data arrived through his senses in an ordered sequence: A rhythm. A body moving under him—no, carrying him—his own weight slung in the crook of another’s arm. Each footfall transmitted through coarse fabric into the meat of his side. There was the scrape of rough-woven cloth against his bare skin, the faint rasp of thread like sand on stone. Air moved thin and dry over his face, a steady gust that worried at his lips and scoured the salt from them. The world smelled of heat-baked mineral and old dust. Not cinnamon. Not the faintest trace of melange. The truth—the remembrance of it—was immediate, irrevocable: I am not on Arrakis.

Before the world could impose its reality upon his eyes, Paul retreated inward. Prana-bindu assessment. Know the tool. He sent his awareness through the vessel he inhabited, a meticulous cataloguing of its state: heartbeat—elevated by exertion not his own—lungs—desiccated bellows—musculature—undernourished—endocrine—stressed—hydration—catastrophic deficit. The internal mixture was agitated, a storm of unfamiliar chemistry. He noted the desperate need for moisture; this new body was beyond parched, a desert within a desert. The muscles were underdeveloped, the bones slight. A child’s frame. The wrongness of it settled deep in his core, a dissonant chord in the symphony of his being.

He opened his eyes.

The world was a blur of ochre and burnt sienna, the landscape streaming past with dizzying velocity. The horizon tilted and righted in time with a powerful, elastic gait.  Ahead, two figures resolved through a halo of heat: one to the left and slightly forward, one to the right and further ahead. Another presence ghosted their flank behind and left. Counting himself and his bearer, four. Three men and one woman. 

All were clothed alike: black underlayers swallowed by beige flak vests; cream headwraps and neck covers, a pale half-veil that left only a narrow eye-slit. Over it all, cream cloaks that snapped and streamed in the wind of their passage. Strapped to their brows were plates of dark metal that caught a brief flare of the sun, each engraved with the same peculiar symbol: a lidded, hourglass-shaped gourd. 

Soldiers, or their local analogue.

Only the woman ahead-left bore a conventional weapon—short, straight sword in a back-scabbard, the hilt positioned for a draw across the shoulder. The right-hand runner carried a folded thing the size of a man’s torso: metal ribs bound in cloth—some manner of fan. His own bearer had a swaddled, stout, cigar-shaped burden cinched to his back, half his height and heavy enough to bite into the cloth where it pressed. The fourth, behind and left, appeared unarmed, his hands empty save for the promise of them.

Despite the load, they moved at speeds a human frame should not own. Some two hundred and ten miles an hour, Paul computed with detached accuracy, watching the blur of rock outcrops draw near and collapse behind them, the world rearranging itself in long, single-foot leaps. The wind generated by their passage was a constant, frigid assault, chilling him despite the late afternoon sun hanging low in the sky. No suspensors. No jets. No visible mechanism. The bodies themselves provided the force.

Superhuman. The word lodged in his thoughts, sharp and cold. Superhuman soldiers. What Great House could command such power, yet conceal it so utterly from the Landsraad, from the Imperium itself? Leave no trace in the skein of commerce and rumour? The thought tilted the inner balance toward wariness.

He raised his gaze and found the masked eyes of his bearer already upon him. Paul had moved nothing more than his eyes, made no sound, given no obvious indication of consciousness. Yet the man had known. How? A keener look at the man’s face revealed what was largely an exercise in occlusion—cloth and hard lines—but micro-movements betrayed him: a slight easing at the eyelids—curiosity; a fractional stiffening at the jawline—concern; the minimal co-contraction at the nasal root—suspicion. He has training to bury reaction and fails by the width of a hair.

Paul schooled his own features and tested the environment with speech. “Water,” he said in the lingua of the Imperium, the word emerging as a dry rasp in his throat.

Confusion flickered in the man: the bare widening of the eyes; the quick set of mouth. Not understood. For an instant, Paul shared it, until memory supplied the answer. The sounds he had heard upon his discovery before falling unconscious again, the guttural tones of his rescuers—it was not Galach. Rather, a bastardisation of High Toyan, a language he knew through Dr. Yueh. The Suk doctor’s native tongue, Kanshan, had its roots in the dialect. 

I must be far from the heartlands of the Imperium for the locals of this planet to be unable to even understand Galach, Paul noted clinically. A backwater fringe world, perhaps; light-years from Arrakis or Caladan.

The implications were staggering. A more pressing inquiry, Paul knew, was how was he alive? He remembered his death, the spice-induced vision, his mother’s final touch. How, then, was he here, in a different body, on a world unknown? The questions were a vortex, threatening to pull his rational mind under. He fought back, imposing order on the chaos. One problem at a time. Language.

He retasked his subconscious, searching his memory for the relevant tones and shapes. Yueh’s Kanshan—that liquid consonant drift—its ancestry in High Toyan’s old lines. He pulled the threads through his Mentat engine and fed them sound: a few phrases he had heard earlier, before he succumbed—samples. With the Chusukian dialect as a substrate, he began the work: hypothesising phoneme correspondences, generating a sufficient pool of candidate lexicons, assembling grammar from stress placement and word order, scoring against breath and pacing, before sorting according to probability cascades.

“Water,” Paul spoke, shaping the alien syllables. He watched the man’s eyes. Nothing.

He tried again, shaping the request along an inferred vowel, flattening the terminal consonant as the dialect seemed to favour.

A shake of the head.

He pivoted to a different morphologic evolution, adjusting for a vowel backness he had undervalued.

No spark of comprehension.

He altered the stress and clipped the article as his calculus suggested.

The man’s eyes softened by a fraction; the head tilt was not refusal but attention.

Fourth attempt: he collapsed the word to its core and folded in a hand-sign, palm to lips, then downward—meaning made in movement.

Understanding registered in the minute release of tension at the corners of the man’s eyes. He spoke to the others—sharper consonants than Kanshan, with a wind-dry cadence—and Paul parsed enough of the syntax to extract a gloss: The boy is thirsty.

The bearer halted mid-stride with the instant economy of one used to speed—the other three came to stillness without wasted motion, the formation compacting around him in a wind-whipped triangle. Reaching into a pouch at his hip, the man produced a small metal flask. Still held in the powerful arm, Paul was allowed to drink. The water was cool and hard-edged. He drank until the burn at the back of his throat eased and the dizzy shimmer at the edges of his vision retreated.  

When the flask emptied, the man retrieved it and spoke again. The rhythm and angle of his utterance placed it as instruction: remain still; camp soon. He set Paul higher in the crook of his arm, adjusted his grip to avoid chafing ribs, and launched forward. The formation re-knit, and the sand resumed its long flow beneath.