But were those days natural?

There was a blockage in his mind. He could sense intrusions, a finality… the fatality of what might have been and now would never be.

Leto would arrive up there tomorrow.

Idaho felt perspiration run down his face around the place where he pressed a cheek against the rock.

Leto.

I will defeat you, Leto. I will defeat you for myself, not for Hwi, but only for myself.

A sensation of cleansing began to spread through him. It was like the thing which had happened in the night while he prepared himself mentally for this climb. Siona had sensed his sleeplessness. She had begun to talk to him, telling him the smallest details of her desperate run through the Forbidden Forest and her oath at the edge of the river.

“Now I have given an oath to command his Fish Speakers,” she said. “I will honour that oath, but I hope it will not happen in the way he wants.”

“What does he want?” Idaho asked.

“He has many motives and I cannot see them all. Who could possibly understand him? I only know that I will never forgive him.”

This memory brought Idaho back to the sensation of the wall’s rock against his cheek. His perspiration had dried in the light breeze and he felt chilled. But he had found his centre.

Never forgive.

Idaho felt the ghosts of all his other selves, the gholas who had died in Leto’s service. Could he believe Siona’s suspicions? Yes. Leto was capable of killing with his own body, his own hands. The rumour which Siona recounted, had a feeling of truth in it. And Siona, too, was Atreides. Leto had become something else… no longer Atreides, not even human. He had become not so much a living creature as a brute fact of nature, opaque and impenetrable, all of his experiences sealed off within him. And Siona opposed him. The real Atreides turned away from him.

As I do.

A brute fact of nature, nothing more. Just like this wall.

Idaho’s right hand groped upward and found a sharp ledge. He could feel nothing above the ledge and tried to remember a wide crack at this place in the pattern. He could not dare to allow himself into the belief that he had reached the top… not yet. The sharp edge cut into his fingers as he put his weight on it. He brought his left hand up to that level, found a purchase and pulled himself slowly upward. His eyes reached the level of his hands. He stared across a flat space which reached outward… outward into blue sky. The surface where his hands clutched showed ancient weather cracks. He crawled his fingers across that surface, one hand at a time, seeking out the cracks, dragging his chest up… his waist… his hips. He rolled then, twisting and crawling until the wall was far behind him. Only then did he stand and tell himself what his senses reported.