God Emperor of Dune

Every thought fed his desperation, forced him into the immediate remembrance of the climbs of his childhood. The more he remembered consciously, the more his abilities were blocked. He was forced to pause, breathing deeply in the attempt to center himself, to go back to the natural ways of his past.

But were those ways 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. 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 honor 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 center.

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 rumor 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.

The top. And he had not required pitons or hammer.

A faint sound reached him. Cheering?

He walked back to the edge and looked down, waving to them. Yes, they were cheering. Turning back, he strode to the center of the roadway, letting elation still the trembling of his muscles, soothe the aching of his shoulders. Slowly, he turned full circle, examining the top while he let his memories at last estimate the height of that climb.

Nine hundred meters... at least that.

The Royal Roadway interested him. It was not like what he had seen on the way to Onn. It was wide, wide... at least five hundred meters. The roadbed was a smooth, unbroken gray with its edge some one hundred meters from each lip of the Wall. Rock pillars at man height marked the road's edge, stretching away like sentinels along the path Leto would use.

Idaho walked to the far side of the Wall opposite the Sareer and peered down. Far away in the depths, a hurtling green flow of river battered itself into foam against buttress rocks. He looked to the right. Leto would come from there. Road and Wall curved gently to the right, the curve beginning about three hundred meters from the place where Idaho stood. Idaho returned to the road and walked along its edge, following the curve until it made a returning "S" and narrowed, sloping gently downward. He stopped and looked at what was revealed for him, seeing the new pattern take shape.

About three kilometers away down the gentle slope, the roadway narrowed and crossed the river gorge on a bridge whose faery trusses appeared insubstantial and toy like at this distance. Idaho remembered a similar bridge on the road to Onn, the substantial feel of it beneath his feet. He trusted his memory, thinking about bridges as a military leader was forced to think about them-passages or traps.

Moving out to his left, he looked down and outward to