Emperor's Blade: the Corrino dagger that shadowed Muad'Dib

The Emperor's Blade was a long dagger with a jewel encrusted hilt, an heirloom of House Corrino that passed from Emperor to Emperor through the generations of the Corrino Empire. Few objects moved so closely along the fault line between the Imperial House and House Atreides. Shaddam Corrino IV gave it to the young Duke Leto Atreides I as a token of friendship, received it back from him as a token of fealty, offered it to Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen for the death duel that decided the throne, and finally sent it to Count Hasimir Fenring, who drove it into the body of Paul Atreides himself. The blood that dried upon its edge that day outlived the Empire that forged it. Five thousand years later, preserved in a nullentropy field within a Caladan shrine, those cells were harvested to grow a clone of Muad'Dib, and the old dagger was drawn one final time at the climax of Kralizec.

An heirloom between two Houses#

The blade was a family artifact of the Imperial House, handed down from Emperor to Emperor across the long centuries of Corrino rule. Its recorded history began to intertwine with House Atreides when the young Duke Leto Atreides I stood accused at his Trial by Forfeiture. Crown Prince Shaddam appeared before the tribunal and testified on Leto's behalf, arguing among other things that debris could have destroyed both of the Tleilaxu starships at the heart of the charges, and he closed his fervent defense with a gesture no one in the hall could mistake. He presented the elongated dagger, the heirloom of his own House, to the accused Duke as a sign of their deep friendship, and demanded that the trial end in Leto's acquittal.

Nineteen years later the gift came home. Shaddam, now Padishah Emperor, had suffered his great humiliation at the end of the Great Spice War, and at a special convocation of the Landsraad the royal Crown itself faced possible censure. Shaddam's own defense of his conduct over the previous two years was half hearted and close to hypocritical, and it was Duke Leto who stepped in to save him. Leto delivered a spellbinding speech in defense of House Corrino, and as a symbol and token of fealty to the Emperor he gave the blade back to Shaddam. The dagger had now traveled the full circuit between the two Houses, first as friendship, then as loyalty. Its later journeys would be darker.

The duel at Arrakeen#

When the Ascension of House Atreides broke over Arrakis at the close of the Desert War, the blade was present at the hour the Corrino Empire died. In the final duels fought just before Paul Atreides took the Imperial Chair, Shaddam handed the dagger to the Na-Baron Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen for his life or death duel with the Atreides heir. Feyd-Rautha fell to Paul's knife, and the Emperor's Blade failed its first attempt on Atreides blood.

Shaddam did not accept the verdict of that duel at once. He tried to press the blade upon Count Hasimir Fenring, his closest friend, and urged him to fight the young Atreides in turn. Fenring refused. With no champion left to carry it, Shaddam took the dagger with him into exile on Salusa Secundus, a deposed Emperor holding the last portable emblem of his line.

Fenring and the wounding of Muad'Dib#

In 10193 AG the exiled Emperor found a new use for the heirloom. He sent the dagger with his Sardaukar commander, Bashar Zum Garon, to Tleilax, where it was delivered to Count Fenring as a gift. Shaddam hoped the gesture would entice Fenring to join him on Salusa Secundus and support his vain schemes to overthrow Emperor Paul Atreides. Fenring again refused the invitation, remaining in the city of Thalidei on the Tleilaxu world for another year while he and Lady Margot Fenring quietly assembled an assassination plan of their own.

The trap was sprung some months later, when Hasimir, Margot, and their daughter Marie Fenring joined the Imperial family for a celebratory banquet on Arrakis. Marie struck first, using a needle whip that had been fastened to a leg of the banquet table as her weapon against Paul, but Alia Atreides, the Emperor's sister, stabbed the girl deeply before she could finish and killed her. As both Fenrings mourned over their daughter's body, Margot cried out to the Emperor that Marie had been Feyd-Rautha's daughter. The revelation caused Paul to drop his guard for a single moment, and in that moment Hasimir drove the Emperor's Blade into him.

The wound was mortal by any ordinary measure, and it brought Muad'Dib to the edge of death. Drawing on his Bene Gesserit trained powers, Paul healed himself from within and survived. The blade that had been offered against him at Arrakeen had finally tasted his blood, and that blood would prove to be its most consequential burden. Korba took the dagger from the scene and placed it in religious safekeeping, and in time it came to rest in a temple shrine on Caladan dedicated to Paul.

The relic of Caladan#

For roughly five thousand years the Emperor's Blade lay enshrined on the far side of the Atreides water world, by then known as Dan, in an ancient temple raised to Emperor Muad'Dib. The dagger was kept within a sealed package containing a nullentropy field, and inside that field the blood left by Fenring's assassination attempt remained intact, its cells uncorrupted by the millennia. Guardianship of the shrine passed to the Fish Speakers, whose local cell had folded aspects of the Cult of Sheeana into its beliefs, and in the days before Kralizec the temple was presided over by a priestess named Ardeth.

The relic's secret drew predators. The Enhanced Face Dancer Khrone learned of the blade through the Face Dancer Myriad, and he brought his servant, the Lost Tleilaxu Scribe Uxtal, to Dan to examine the artifact and confirm the integrity of the cellular material on the knife. The examination proved that the blade still carried living cells of Paul Atreides. Khrone and Uxtal killed Ardeth, had the temple destroyed, and carried the blade back to Bandalong on Tleilax. There the Tleilaxu placed the preserved material in one of their axlotl tanks and grew a clone of Atreides, whom they named Paolo.

The last duel#

Eleven years later, on the Day of Kralizec, the old dagger was drawn for the final recorded time. The thinking machine ruler Omnius and the independent robot Erasmus had captured the no-ship Ithaca, and believing the search for the Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach complete, they brought both the matured Paolo and the ghola of Paul Atreides from the Ithaca to the Cathedral in the capital of the machine world Synchrony.

There, before the assembled leaders of the Ithaca and of the Machine Empire, Erasmus presented Paolo with the Emperor's Blade for his duel to the death against Paul. In the course of the fight Paul lost his crysknife to a magma fountain that bubbled up within the Cathedral, and Paolo stabbed him deeply with the ancient dagger. The young ghola was carried to the verge of death, and once again the wound did not hold him. As his original had done at the banquet on Arrakis millennia before, Paul healed himself from within and lived.

What became of the Emperor's Blade after that duel was never recorded. When the ghola of Duncan Idaho was revealed to be the Ultimate superbeing, the dagger that had passed through the hands of Emperors, Dukes, and assassins passed at last out of history.