“You remember that you should never be in company that you wouldn’t want to die with.”

Moneo put his hands palms down on the surface of his table. A wolfish smile came over Idaho’s face.

“Then what are you doing here?” Moneo asked.

“I suspect that you may be good company, Moneo. And I ask myself why Leto would choose you as his closest companion?”

“I passed his test.”

“The same one your daughter passed?”

So he has heard they are back. It meant some of the Fish Speakers were reporting things to him… unless the God Emperor had summoned the Duncan… No, I would have heard.

“The tests are never identical,” Moneo said. “I was made to go alone into a cavern maze with nothing but a bag of food and a vial of spice essence.”

“Which did you choose?”

“What? Oh… if you are tested you will learn.”

“There’s a Leto I don’t know,” Idaho said.

“Have I not told you this?”

“And there’s a Leto you don’t know,” Idaho said.

“Because he’s the loneliest person this universe has ever seen,” Moneo said.

“Don’t play mood games trying to arouse my sympathy,” Idaho said.

“Mood games, yes. That’s very good.” Moneo nodded. “The God Emperor’s moods are like a river—smooth where nothing obstructs him, foaming and violent at the least suggestion of a barrier. He is not to be obstructed.”

Idaho looked around at the brightly lighted workroom, turned his gaze to the outside darkness and thought about the tamed course of the Idaho River somewhere out there. Bringing his attention back to Moneo, he asked: “What do you know of rivers?”

“In my youth I travelled for him. I have even trusted my life to a floating shell of a vessel on a river and then on a sea whose shores were lost in the crossing.”

As he spoke, Moneo felt that he had brushed against a clue to some deep truth in the Lord Leto. The sensation dropped Moneo into reverie, thinking of that far planet where he had crossed a sea from one shore to another. There had been a storm on the first evening of that passage and, somewhere deep within the ship, an irritating non-directional “sug-sug-sug-sug-sug” of labouring engines. He had stood on deck with the captain. His mind had kept focusing on the engine sound, retreating and coming back to it like the oversurging of the watery green-black mountains which passed and came, repeating and repeating. Each down crash of the keel opened the sea’s flesh like a fist smashing. It was insane motion, a sodden shaking, up… up, down! His lungs had ached with repressed fear. The lunging of the ship and the sea trying to put them down—wild explosions of solid water, hour after hour, white blisters of water spilling off the decks, then another sea and another…

All of this was a clue to the God Emperor.

He is both the storm and the ship.

Moneo focused on Idaho seated across the table from him in the workroom’s cold light. Not a tremor in the man, but a hungering was there.