"Bless the Maker and His comings. Bless the Maker and His goings. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people."
Pardot Kynes paused in the midst of his ascent, body trapped in the riggings the Fremen guide had put into the rock like a spider muddled in its own web. "Sorry?"
Fesia stood as stone for a moment, then only her head turned slightly, acknowledging him in her peripheral vision. "The Maker. Lord Kynes does not know of the prayers that must be made to the Maker?"
"Er... no?" Kynes adjusted himself on the abseil as he felt the harness dig in uncomfortably. "Do you mean the worm?"
Fesius regarded him with silent, grave solemnity, but honestly it didn't strike Kynes as much of a change. It was more or less the default expression of every Fremen Kynes had met so far. Those blue-in-blue eyes were inscrutable.
The Fremen turned and began plodding up the cliff face. Beneath them, the 'Maker' continued its slow cyclic turnings just beneath the surface of the sand in an endless tide of low-frequency sine waves, a simple pattern made magnificent due to the sheer size of the creature.
"This planet is beautiful," Kynes mused. "Terrifying, yet beautiful." Magnificent really was the right word for it.
The day was not going very well at all. Kynes had set out originally to obtain a few rock samples from the deep desert. That alone had taken a few weeks of endless haggling with Harkonnen bureaucrats, until eventually he had managed to convince enough important people that he couldn't very well do his job as a Planetologist unless he saw more of the planet than just the cities. The deep desert, where the worms truly lived, had been calling to him since he'd arrived. No satellite images? No settlements of any kind? Nothing was out there?
Kynes had been a Planetologist, that curious blend of geologist, geographer, and ecological engineer for some time. He'd never seen anywhere, on any planet, that truly held nothing. The prospect had honestly been rather enticing.
Of course, it had also turned out to be completely wrong. Beneath them, the worm turned with slow meandering precision. Kynes had never seen one that large before until he'd come out here. There was a curious inversion of scale out here, in the deep otherness of the desert, that left him feeling like an insect would crawling along his back. Alien geometries, stretched and expanded until they filled the horizon, glorious and intimidating in their sheer vastness.
Fesia, above him, motioned that he should make speed. Kynes sighed to himself and tried once again to pull himself up using the curious gerrymandering of rope and knots that was supposed to let him ascend the rope. It clearly was meant to be used by hands far less scrawny than his own. Above him, Fesia scrambled as easily across the rock face as the mountain goats that Dune didn't have. Periodically, she'd stop and fumble for a moment with the rope and the next time Kynes looked an anchor would have magically appeared for him, a knot embedded tight in a cranny of the face. If he fell the rope knot would take the weight, and if Fesia had made the knot right and found a good place for it to rest against the rock he wouldn't die. It was Kynes' job to pull them out and un-knot them as he went past them, as they had done for the past several hours. Since the worm had got between them and their ornithopter, and Fesia had led him on a twisting path to higher ground. A twisting path up increasingly vertical terrain.
Kynes reached another rope knot. Fesia had found a little gap between two slate-shaped rocks, a little v-groove maybe a handsbreadth wide that she'd jammed a knot on top of. When the rope was pulled down by Kynes' weight, it jammed in the slot between the rocks, but with the barest twitch of his body he could pull the rope out and away from the rock instead...
The knot slipped off like a ball rolling downhill and fell into his hands without any resistance at all. Kynes looked down the rock face, already a hundred meters of smooth sandstone that curved laterally in a gentle parabolic profile as it went straight down like a vertical highway into the sand trap where the worm waited, and gulped.
Low rumbling, like a 'thopter overhead. Kynes glanced up, hoping.
Of course he wouldn't be so lucky. The rockfall came down bouncing rhythmically against the cliff face; evidently Fesia had managed to find a pocket of not-so-stable rock and had thoughtfully sent it down to him. A boulder the size of his torso soared past his head, and Kynes suddenly found himself wishing he was climbing on the face instead of just ascending the rope that Fesia left hanging down for him, was able to move, able to do anything but watch and wait. All he could picture was Fesia coming back to town alone, deflecting concern and questions with typical Fremen stoicism. The Planetologist? Yes, he's dead. We had to climb up a cliff, he was hit by rockfall, and Shai-Hulud ate his corpse.
Sorry.
When the tumult finally stopped, Kynes dared to raise his head. Next to him, Fesia looked back. She'd slipped on the face and, evidently, the entire section she'd been climbing on had been rotten and unstable. She'd come down with the rocks, had fallen maybe twenty feet, cat's-grace movements keeping her inches above the collapsing debris instead of in it. Now they both hung pendulously, maybe 10 feet below the only knot left in the rope that had held.
Another damn v-groove. Fesia could twitch the wrong way and it would be over. Beneath them, the rock struck near the worm, irritating it. Kynes heard it make a low, irritated huffing noise that had the volume of another rockslide.
Fesia's mouth crooked. "Please remain here, my Lord, while I tend to the rope."
It occurred to Kynes later that Fesia might have been using his overly-formal title somewhat ironically. At the time, he just gasped out breaths and tried to stumble onto some semblance of reason.
"Isn't there-shouldn't we-" Fesia watched him as if curious. Above them, the sun watched them both, and he felt like a flailing insect trapped in the vision of a terrible and incomprehensible god. Kynes felt its heat even through the stillsuit.
"I suppose this happens to you every other day," Kynes tried finally, in a hazarded attempt at humor. Fesia only shrugged.
"Not all days." She swerved up the rock, Kynes eyeing the knot nervously as she swayed back and forth, dancing across the cliff face, now five feet above the knot, now ten. God's balls, woman, put in another damned knot! "But I used to do this for fun as a child..."