War of Assassins of 10,187 AG: the ruin of House Moritani

The War of Assassins of 10,187 AG was the second and final conflict between House Ecaz and House Moritani, fought across Caladan, Ecaz and Grumman, and drawing in House Atreides after blood was spilled under an Atreides roof. It followed the Great Spice War and preceded the Desert War. Archduke Armand Ecaz and Duke Leto Atreides I fought it against Viscount Hundro Moritani, who was covertly reinforced by Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and a division under Count Glossu Rabban. By its end House Moritani had collapsed entirely, and its fiefs, wealth and privileges passed to Ecaz.

A dying heir and a closed border#

House Ecaz and House Moritani had been feuding for generations, most recently in the first of their two Wars of Assassins roughly a decade earlier. That earlier conflict had cost Armand Ecaz his eldest daughter Sanya, publicly executed on Grumman alongside his brother, and had left the Archducal Palace bombarded and the ancestral Mahogany Throne burned to ash.

The final round began with a sickness. Wolfram Moritani, born in 10,175 AG, was the only son of Viscount Hundro Moritani and his wife Cilla, and therefore the only heir House Moritani possessed. He contracted a disorder that caused him to physically waste away. The single known remedy was esoit poay, a palliative that grew nowhere but in the flora of Ecaz. Because the feud had run for decades, Armand Ecaz had passed a complete embargo forbidding any of the substance from leaving his world, and Grumman above all was to receive none of it.

Wolfram declined day after day until he could bear waking only under a deep semuta trance, barely coherent. His Suk doctor could do nothing. The boy died in the early part of 10,187 AG. Hundro Moritani, widowed and now childless, turned to a bitter madness and swore revenge on the House that had let his son die.

That same year the Viscount found a partner for it. At the reception following Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV's marriage to Firenza Thorvald, sister of Earl Memnon Thorvald, a clandestine understanding was reached between House Moritani and House Harkonnen. House Atreides was absent from that wedding, being occupied with a marriage of its own.

Blades at Castle Caladan#

Armand Ecaz had offered the hand of his last surviving daughter, Ilesa, to Duke Leto Atreides, a friend and ally who years before had been betrothed to Sanya. Leto travelled to Ecaz with his household, including his bound concubine Jessica, his son Paul, Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho, and at the Archducal Palace the two rulers settled the marriage terms. Armand pressed Leto to conduct no treaty or trade of any kind with Grumman.

The wedding was held at Castle Caladan and drew a wide guest list, among them Earl Rhombur Vernius of Ix with his wife Tessia and their son Bronso. The Ecazi party was escorted by the Swordmasters Whitmore Bludd and Rivvy Dinari, both of whom had gone rhonin after the Moritani raid on Ginaz and taken service as bodyguards of the Archduke's household.

The killing mechanism had been placed by Prad Vidal, Duke of the Ecazi continent of Elacca, a vassal of the Archduke and a secret ally of House Moritani. Vidal had concealed hexagonal blades along the sides of the potted plants that decorated the hall. As the Wedding March began, the discs lifted and began circling the room, hunting their Ecazi targets. Dinari threw his own body across his master and died for it, and even so a disc reached Armand and took his arm. Bludd failed to hold the line around Ilesa. One disc opened her carotid artery and she bled to death at the altar. A holographic message of Hundro Moritani then rang through the hall, claiming the deed and opening the war.

A second attempt followed within hours, against the Archduke as he lay recovering in a tower of Castle Caladan. Duncan Idaho cut those assassins down. Others sent after Paul Atreides and Bronso Vernius were beaten by Rhombur. Idaho and Paul were driven at one point into the dense jungles of Caladan's eastern lands while evading the Grumman killers.

The killing of Prad Vidal#

Armand resolved to return home, muster his forces and finish House Moritani. Leto assembled his own navy and army and escorted the man who would have been his father in law back to Ecaz. The arrival went badly. Ecazi civilians fled in panic, believing an Atreides invasion had begun, and ships scattered from the Archducal Palace hangar towards Elacca. Prad Vidal had already announced that the Archduke, his daughter and much of the Atreides household were dead on Caladan, and that he himself was the successor.

Armand wanted to march on Elacca and kill Vidal in the field. Leto argued him out of it. A full military assault would ignite a civil war on Ecaz and hand Hundro Moritani months in which to build his strength on Grumman. Leto instead proposed what he considered a proper war of assassins, and went in disguised as an Elaccan guard with Gurney Halleck at his side. They reached Vidal's wooden fortress palace, where Leto turned the fogwood of the traitor's own residence against him, constricting it to trap the Duke. He spoke the ritual words of kanly and beheaded him.

The siege of Ritka#

With Elacca subdued, the combined Ecazi and Atreides armies moved against Ritka, the capital of Grumman, where the bulk of the Moritani forces had gathered. Ritka sat on the edge of a salt basin that stretched for hundreds of miles, pitted with holes and furrows left by mineral excavating machines. Grumman had been stripped of its minerals and much of its water, and was reckoned a dying world fit only for the hardiest.

Hundro had bought reinforcement by blackmail. He held information implicating House Harkonnen in the assassination attempts at Castle Caladan, and used it to extract from the Baron an armed force commanded by Glossu Rabban. His own troops fought mounted on the Grumman wild stallions, animals renowned for their size, strength and brutality. In the battle outside Ritka the Viscount ordered a cavalry charge that tore into the besiegers and inflicted real casualties, and it was in that charge that the Atreides commander Burbage took his scar. The besiegers held. The Grumman soldiers were pushed back inside their fortifications.

Rhombur Vernius then arrived from Ix with reinforcements. Rabban's Harkonnen division was cut apart by Gurney Halleck's soldiers, who killed nearly all of them. Rabban himself went over into a raging river and was lost from sight in the rapids.

Atomics beneath the salt basin#

Emperor Shaddam IV came to Grumman expecting a straightforward imposition of peace on the four Houses entangled in the war, Atreides, Ecaz, Vernius and Moritani. What he found was tens of thousands of troops and most of the assembled nobility standing on top of a buried arsenal. Hundro had ordered his family's atomics placed in the caverns and furrows around Ritka, and intended to fire them once the Emperor arrived.

He also revealed why. Hundro Moritani claimed descent as the last of the renegade House Tantor, the family that had once come close to destroying House Corrino with atomics on Salusa Secundus, wrecking that world's ecosystem and driving the Corrinos to Kaitain. Heirless and mad, he judged he had nothing left to lose and gave the order to detonate.

Nothing happened. His personal Swordmaster Hiih Resser, an old friend of Duncan Idaho from the Ginaz school, had laid the weapons in the caverns as instructed but had never fitted the detonators, having decided that a nuclear catastrophe would ruin Grumman forever. Shaddam ordered the Viscount arrested and condemned to the Imperial Prison at Corrinth City on Kaitain. Hundro Moritani never arrived. A depressurization accident in space closed his mouth permanently, a matter the Baron later described with satisfaction to his nephews Rabban and Feyd-Rautha.

What the victory cost#

House Moritani ceased to exist as a power. Its fiefs, wealth and privileges were awarded to House Ecaz, so that Armand's estates afterwards included Grumman itself. The victory was hollow for him. He was the last member of his House, armless, without an heir, and he retired to Ecaz morally broken.

The Atreides returned to Caladan, where Leto swore his devotion to Jessica before Paul and the assembled spaceport workers and promised to entertain no further marriage proposal. The bill came due later. Five thousand years afterwards the last ghola of Duncan Idaho still recalled that the war of 10,187 AG had very nearly emptied the treasuries of both House Atreides and House Ecaz, and the Landsraad had watched a Great House be annihilated over a boy who could not get his medicine.