From "Manual of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan

Those will be Hawat's men , he thought. We must find the operator of this thing .
"Go to my father's men," he said. "Tell them I've caught a hunter-seeker in the house and they're to spread out and find the operator. Tell them to seal off the house and its grounds immediately. They'll know how to go about it. The operator's sure to be a stranger among us."
And he wondered: Could it be this creature? But he knew it wasn't. The seeker had been under control when she entered.
"Before I do your bidding, manling," Mapes said, "I must cleanse the way between us. You've put a water burden on me that I'm not sure I care to support. But we Fremen pay our debts—be they black debts or white debts. And it's known to us that you've a traitor in your midst. Who it is, we cannot say, but we're certain sure of it. Mayhap there's the hand guided that flesh-cutter."
Paul absorbed this in silence: a traitor . Before he could speak, the odd woman whirled away and ran back toward the entry.
He thought to call her back, but there was an air about her that told him she would resent it. She'd told him what she knew and now she was going to do his bidding . The house would be swarming with Hawat's men in a minute.
His mind went to other parts of that strange conversation: weirding room . He looked to his left where she had pointed. We Fremen . So that was a Fremen. He paused for the mnemonic blink that would store the pattern of her face in his memory—prune-wrinkled features darkly browned, blue-on-blue eyes without any white in them. He attached the label: The Shadout Mapes .
Still gripping the shattered seeker, Paul turned back into his room, scooped up his shield belt from the bed with his left hand, swung it around his waist and buckled it as he ran back out and down the hall to the left.
She'd said his mother was someplace down here—stairs . . . a weirding room .


What had the Lady Jessica to sustain her in her time of trial? Think you carefully on this Bene Gesserit proverb and perhaps you will see: "Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain."
—from "Muad'Dib: Family Commentaries" by the Princess Irulan
At the end of the south wing, Jessica found a metal stair spiraling up to an oval door. She glanced back down the hall, again up at the door.
Oval? she wondered. What an odd shape for a door in a house .
Through the windows beneath the spiral stair she could see the great white sun of Arrakis moving on toward evening. Long shadows stabbed down the hall. She returned her attention to the stairs. Harsh sidelighting picked out bits of dried earth on the open metalwork of the steps.
Jessica put a hand on the rail, began to climb. The rail felt cold under her sliding palm. She stopped at the door, saw it had no handle, but there was a faint depression on the surface of it where a handle should have been.
Surely not a palm lock , she told herself. A palm lock must be keyed to one individual's hand shape and palm lines . But it looked like a palm lock. And there were ways to open any palm lock—as she had learned at school.
Jessica glanced back to make certain she was unobserved, placed her palm against the depression in the door. The most gentle of pressures to distort the lines—a turn of the wrist, another turn, a sliding twist of the palm across the surface.
She felt the click.
But there were hurrying footsteps in the hall beneath her. Jessica lifted her hand from the door, turned, saw Mapes come to the foot of the stairs.
"There are men in the great hall say they've been sent by the Duke to get young master Paul," Mapes said. "They've the ducal signet and the guard has identified them." She glanced at the door, back to Jessica.
A cautious one, this Mapes , Jessica thought. That's a good sign .
"He's in the fifth room from this end of the hall, the small bedroom," Jessica said. "If you have trouble waking him, call on Dr. Yueh in the next room. Paul may require a wakeshot."
Again, Mapes cast a piercing stare at the oval door, and Jessica thought she detected loathing in the expression. Before Jessica could ask about the door and what it concealed, Mapes had turned away, hurrying back down the hall.