The lift slid silently downward with its superb Ixian dependability. Once, just once, the God Emperor had cried out to his majordomo: “Moneo! Sometimes I think you were made by the Ixians!”

Moneo felt the lift stop. The door opened and he looked out across the crypt at the shadowy bulk on the Royal Cart. There was no indication that Leto had noticed the arrival. Moneo sighed and began the long walk through the echoing gloom. There was a body on the floor near the cart. No need for déjà vu. This was merely familiar.

Once, in Moneo’s early days of service, Leto had said: “You don’t like this place, Moneo. I can see that.”

“No, Lord.”

With just a little prodding of memory, Moneo could hear his own voice in that naive past. And the voice of the God Emperor responding:

“You don’t think of a mausoleum as a comforting place, Moneo. I find it a source of infinite strength.”

Moneo remembered that he had been anxious to get off this topic. “Yes, Lord.”

Leto had persisted: “There are only a few of my ancestors here. The water of Muad’Dib is here. Ghani and Harq al-Ada are here, of course, but they’re not my ancestors. No, if there’s any true crypt of my ancestors, I am that crypt. This is mostly the Duncans and the products of my breeding programme. You’ll be here someday.”

Moneo found that these memories had slowed his pace. He sighed and moved a bit faster. Leto could be violently impatient on occasion but there was still no sign from him. Moneo did not take this to mean that his approach went unobserved.

Leto lay with his eyes closed and only his other senses to record Moneo’s progress across the crypt. Thoughts of Siona had been occupying Leto’s attention.

Siona is my ardent enemy, he thought. I do not need Nayla’s words to confirm this. Siona is a woman of action. She lives on the surface of enormous energies which fill me with fantasies of delight. I cannot contemplate those living energies without a feeling of ecstasy. They are my reasons for being, the justification for everything I have ever done… even for the corpse of this foolish Duncan in front of me now.

Leto’s ears told him that Moneo had not yet crossed half the distance to the Royal Cart. The man moved slower and slower, then picked up his pace.

What a gift Moneo has given me in this daughter, Leto thought. Siona is fresh and precious. She is the new while I am a collection of the obsolete, a relic of the damned, of the lost and strayed. I am the waylaid pieces of history which sank out of sight in all of our pasts. Such an accumulation of riffraff has never before been imagined.

Leto paraded the past within him then to let them observe what had happened in the crypt.

The minutiae are mine!

Siona, though… Siona was like a clean slate upon which great things might yet be written.