House Of Harkonnen by Kevin J. Anderson & Brian Herbert

Author:Kevin J. Anderson & Brian Herbert [Anderson, Kevin J. & Herbert, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 0553897837
Publisher: Paw Prints
Published: 2008-06-25T21:00:00+00:00

In the days of Old Terra there were experts in poisons, deviously clever persons who dealt in what were known as “the powders of inheritance.”

— Filmbook excerpt, Royal Library of Kaitain

Grinning with pride, Court Chamberlain Beely Ridondo marched through the doorway. “Your Imperial Majesty, you have another new daughter. Your wife has just delivered a fine and healthy girl.”

Instead of rejoicing, Emperor Shaddam IV cursed under his breath and sent the man away. That makes three! What use is another daughter to me?

He was in a foul mood, worse than any since the struggles to remove his decrepit father from the Golden Lion Throne. At a brisk pace Shaddam entered his private study, passing beneath an ancient plaque that read, “Law is the ultimate science”— some nonsense from Crown Prince Raphael Corrino, a man who’d never even bothered to wear the Imperial crown. He sealed the door behind him and thumped his angular frame into the textured, high-backed suspensor chair at his desk.

A man of middle height, Shaddam had a loosely muscled body and an aquiline nose. His long nails were carefully manicured, his pomaded red hair combed straight back. He wore a gray Sardaukar-style uniform with epaulets and silver-and-gold trim, but the military trappings no longer comforted him as they once had.

In addition to the birth of yet another daughter, he had much on his mind. Recently, at a gala concert in one of the inverted-pyramid stadiums on Harmonthep, someone had released a giant inflated effigy of Shaddam IV. Obscenely insulting, the gaudy caricature made him look like a buffoon. The inflatable construction had drifted over the vast laughing crowds until the Harmonthep dragoon guards had shot it down in flaming tatters— and any fool could see the symbolism in that act! Despite the most rigorous crackdown and interrogation, even Sardaukar investigators were not able to determine who’d been responsible for creating or releasing the effigy.

In another incident, hundred-meter-high letters had been scrawled across the granite wall of Monument Canyon on Canidar II: “Shaddam, does your crown rest comfortably on your pointy head?” In scattered worlds across the Imperium, dozens of his new commemorative statues had been defaced. Nobody had ever seen the perpetrators.

Someone hated him enough to do this. Someone. The question kept gnawing at his Imperial heart, along with other worries . . . including an impending visit from Hasimir Fenring to report on the secret synthetic spice experiments being conducted by the Tleilaxu.

Project Amal.

Initiated during his father’s reign, this research was known to only a few. Perhaps the most closely guarded secret in the Imperium, Project Amal could, if successful, give House Corrino a reliable, artificial source of melange, the most precious substance in the universe. But the damned Tleilaxu experiments were taking years too long, and the situation upset him more and more with each passing month.

And now . . . a third cursed daughter! He didn’t know when— or if— he would bother to gaze upon this useless new girl-child.

Shaddam’s gaze moved along the

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