“And the inner ring looks directly down on you. How do you enter the plaza?”

“A presentation stage rises from the centre to display me to my people.”

“Do they cheer?” Idaho looked directly into Leto’s eyes.

“They are permitted to cheer.”

“You Atreides always did see yourselves as part of history.”

“How astute of you to understand a cheer’s meaning.”

Idaho returned his attention to the city map. “And the Fish Speaker schools are here?”

“Under your left hand, yes. That’s the academy where Siona was sent to be educated. She was ten at the time.”

“Siona… I must learn more about her,” Idaho mused.

“I assure you that nothing will get in the way of your desire.”

As he marched along in the Royal peregrination, Idaho was lifted from his reverie by awareness that the Fish Speaker chant was diminishing. Ahead of him, the Royal Cart had begun its descent into the chambers beneath the plaza, rolling down a long ramp. Idaho, still in sunlight, looked lip and around at the glistening spires—this reality for which the charts had not prepared him. People crowded the balconies of the great tiered ring around the plaza, silent people who stared down at the procession.

No cheering from the privileged, Idaho thought. The silence of the people on the balconies filled Idaho with foreboding.

He entered the ramp-tunnel and its lip hid the plaza. The Fish Speaker chant faded away as he descended into the depths. The sound of marching feet all around him was curiously amplified.

Curiosity replaced the sense of oppressive foreboding. Idaho stared around him. The flat-floored tube was artificially illuminated and wide, very wide. Idaho estimated that seventy people could march abreast into the bowels of the plaza. There were no mobs of greeters here, only a widely-spaced line of Fish Speakers who did not chant, contenting themselves to stare at the passage of their God.

Memory of the charts told Idaho the layout of this gigantic complex beneath the plaza—a private city within the City, a place where only the God Emperor, the courtiers and the Fish Speakers could go without escort. But the charts had told nothing of the thick pillars, the sense of massive, guarded spaces, the eerie quiet broken by the tramping of feet and the creaking of Leto’s cart.

Idaho looked suddenly at the Fish Speakers lining the way and realized that their mouths were moving in unison, a silent word on their lips. He recognized the word:

“Siaynoq.”

CHAPTER XXI

“Another Festival so soon?” the Lord Leto asked.

“It has been ten years,” the majordomo said.

Do you think by this exchange that the Lord Leto betrays an ignorance of time’s passage?

—The Oral History

During the private audience period preceding the Festival proper, many commented that the God Emperor spent more than the allotted time with the new Ixian Ambassador, a young woman named Hwi Noree.

She was brought down at mid-morning by two Fish Speakers who were still full of first-day excitement. The private audience chamber beneath the plaza was brilliantly illuminated. The light revealed a room about fifty metres long by thirty-five wide. Antique Fremen rugs decorated the walls, their bright patterns worked in jewels and precious metals, all combined in weavings of priceless spice-fibres. The dull reds of which the old Fremen had been so fond predominated. The chamber’s floor was mostly transparent, a setting for exotic fishes worked in radiant crystal. Beneath the floor flowed a stream of clear blue water, all of its moisture sealed away from the audience chamber, but excitingly near Leto, who rested on a padded elevation at the end of the room opposite the door.