87 pages • 2-hour read
Chapterhouse: Dune
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Chapters 38-46Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 38 Summary
Content Warning: This section contains discussions of death.
Odrade readies herself to go to Junction to meet the Honored Matres. Bellonda and Odrade argue about the utility of Honored Matres abilities to the Bene Gesserit. Odrade thinks that, while appealing, their abilities leave them vulnerable.
At the landing pad, while she waits for her lighter craft, Odrade reflects on how the changing climate of Chapterhouse will closely mirror Dune, with high-speed Coriolis storms. This means they will have to operate with increased caution in the future.
The lighter arrives, and Odrade boards. She hands command of Chapterhouse to Bellonda, Sheeana, and Murbella. Tam, Dortujla, and an acolyte join her aboard the ship. Odrade mentally composes her last will and testament. She considers Murbella as a replacement should she die. They embark on a 19-hour journey through fold space.
As they approach Junction, the scanners on their ship detect the Honored Matre’s defenses around the planet. The way the barriers are spaced means that they are vulnerable to Miles Teg’s plan of englobement. A defensive ship contacts them and agrees to take their ship to the ground. The pilot of Odrade’s ship is revealed to be Clairby, now cyborged.
They land, and Odrade disembarks. Her surroundings on Junction are of Spacer Guild design. There are many Ixians on Junction, too. They arrive at their accommodations and await further contact from the Honored Matres.
Chapter 39 Summary
Miles Teg approaches Gammu, Streggi beside him. He gives the command to send in the decoys and commence the attack. Miles Teg uses his ability to see no-ships to direct his forces but continues to hide this from observers.
As they land to drop troops, the no-ships become briefly visible and vulnerable. He sends out decoy uniforms with shields to fool the enemy into shooting them with lasguns, which causes chain reaction explosions.
A commander on the planet contacts Miles Teg to inform him that the Rabbi is asking for asylum.
Murbella gives the order to take him to the flagship. Miles Teg pushes back against this but eventually relents. Miles Teg goes to meet the Rabbi in person. Rebecca is with him and reveals herself as a Reverend Mother.
Chapter 40 Summary
Odrade waits for her Honored Matres escort. She bothers the Ixian cleaning robots and loudly criticizes their surroundings, a show for the com eyes. They are led to their quarters, which are comfortable but unattractive. Odrade goes alone to meet her escort to Dama.
The Spider Queen meets her and allows Odrade to call her Dama. They go outside to talk. Odrade says that she has little value as a hostage, as she left behind three replacements. She also reveals that she knows that the Honored Matres are fleeing someone. Dama brings her to her quarters. There, she tells Odrade that her pilot has detonated himself and his ship rather than allow an inspection. Dama also knows that Odrade is transmitting a signal to let her allies know if she is alive or dead.
When Odrade implies that the Honored Matres may be offshoots of the Bene Gesserit, Dama becomes enraged, saying that this is a dangerous assumption. Odrade realizes that Dama will never agree to an alliance, so she was correct to unleash Miles Teg.
Logno brings them two glasses of wine. Dama wants to poison Odrade; however, Odrade quickly realizes that Logno actually poisoned Dama in a bid for power. When Dama dies, Logno tells Odrade to call her Great Honored Matre. She then tells Odrade that she is not going to destroy a useful weapon at the moment of greatest need.
Chapter 41 Summary
Murbella watches the assault on Junction. The engagement is focused on The Citadel, the guild building where the Honored Matres have established their main base. Elsewhere, many Reverend Mothers are sharing memories in preparation for the Scattering.
Miles Teg’s forces advance through large botanical gardens toward the Honored Matres’s main base. Miles Teg’s personal aide informs him that the last pockets of the Honored Matres are bottled up. However, Miles Teg’s command pod and its backups have been lost, and he must rely on private coms. They have yet to contact Odrade.
Odrade can see him from the tower, where she is being kept prisoner by Logno. She is moved to a workroom. She hears a commotion outside that indicates that Miles Teg is winning.
Logno says that Odrade has won the battle, and the Honored Matres are now their prisoners. Odrade asks about her companions, and Logno says they’re dead.
Miles Teg arrives and assesses his victory. Logno is surprised at his appearance and realizes that he is a ghola. Miles Teg is surprised at how totally the Honored Matres defenses collapsed. He asks if Logno gave the command for defense to stop. Odrade senses that something is wrong. Miles Teg feels the same. He says that the Honored Matres have a weapon he has not yet discovered.
Chapter 42 Summary
Sheeana can smell worms in the distance. They are still very small because Chapterhouse is comparatively damp when contrasted with Dune. She reflects on the religion founded in her name, and Other Memory converses with her about it. It is powerful but can be unstable.
She knows that she will soon have to lead a great migration.
Chapter 43 Summary
Murbella witnesses an attack on Odrade and Miles Teg through the com eyes. On her way to them, she encounters a group of Honored Matres and convinces them she’s still on their side. She leads them to the Honored Matres command, where Miles Teg and Odrade have been captured by Logno after an ambush using a secret weapon, which they have now exhausted. Murbella challenges the Logno to a duel; using her mix of Bene Gesserit training and Honored Matres reflexes, Murbella kills her.
During the fight, one of the Honored Matres kills Odrade, who tried to intervene. Murbella mourns her. The Honored Matres find this curious but are too intimidated by her to do anything.
Murbella is now Mother Superior and Great Honored Matre. Murbella selects an entourage of Honored Matres and returns to Chapterhouse. On her first morning back, Murbella wears an Honored Matres red robe and summons Bellonda, who brings in her council of Honored Matres. She informs them of her new title and announces her plans to merge the orders. She reckons with the weight of the task before her and reflects with other memory. Bellonda tells her that Sheeana has discovered a way to teach all Bene Gesserit her ability to speak to sandworms. Scytale is still on the ship, but they can’t find exactly where he is.
She talks to Bellonda about incorporating the Honored Matres into the Bene Gesserit, something that will have challenges. Neither side compromises easily, and Murbella predicts that the joining will involve the deaths of many Bene Gesserit as the Honored Matres learn their ways. She then realizes that Duncan is planning to leave.
Chapter 44 Summary
Duncan is on the no-ship with Sheeana. Many Honored Matres are landing on Chapterhouse. They aren’t hostile, but that will only last if Murbella is alive, and the Honored Matres have a tradition of assassinating their leaders. He is deeply conflicted about this as he plans with Sheeana to leave with the no-ship. They neutralize the onboard guards and remove the fail-safes designed to stop the ship from leaving. Duncan considers staying behind, but he knows that due to her ascension, Murbella no longer has a bond with him. He decides to leave.
The ship takes off. As it enters fold space, he has a vision of the two elderly face dancers again. He wipes all the data storage to ensure that the ship can never be identified, keeping most of it in his Mentat-trained mind.
Chapter 45 Summary
Murbella knows that Duncan has gone. Bellonda informs her that the ship has left. She curses them, but they still have axolotl tanks and Duncan’s cells as resources for the Sisterhood. With the aid of Odrade’s remnants in her other memory, Murbella realizes that Sheeana is going to embark on the Missionaria Protectiva scheme that puts her at the head of a religion.
Chapter 46 Summary
Daniel and Marty are the two older face dancers from Duncan’s visions. They are aware that he could see them, and they regret not being able to steer him to a planet they had picked. However, they take some consolation in how the Bene Gesserit will not be able to catch them. They speak cryptically of a master, referring to a Bene Tleilax.
Chapters 38-46 Analysis
The various plotlines of the story converge during the attack on Junction. In the beginning of the section, Odrade reflects on how they have changed the climate of Chapterhouse to closely mirror Dune and its Coriolis storms. The danger in how they have altered the planet symbolizes how they are at risk of repeating the past mistakes made on Dune. Nonetheless, she must finally face their primary threat head-on. She creates her final will and names a successor: Murbella. This choice reflects how Odrade was always driven by her understanding of The Importance of Change and Adaptation to Survival. She recognizes how the stagnation of the Sisterhood could lead to peril and embraces the one person who represents unity between the seemingly polar opposite factions. Yet Odrade’s choice is not purely strategic—it is also deeply resigned. She does not fully trust in the preservation of the old ways; rather, she sees Murbella as the necessary evolution, even if it means ceding control to forces she cannot entirely predict or approve of. Odrade’s leadership becomes an act of letting go of tradition, certainty, and herself.
This can ensure the Bene Gesserit survive while also learning the new abilities they sought and preparing themselves for an unforeseeable future. Once again, however, this decision is not presented as indisputably good; in the end, Murbella feels “haunted by words she had heard but not accepted until this moment. ‘The things we will do for Bene Gesserit survival have no limits’” (543). After actions of violence, domination, and manipulation by Odrade and the Sisterhood throughout the novel, Murbella feels burdened by Odrade’s legacy of change. The weight of this legacy becomes more than political—it is existential. Murbella inherits not only power but the moral contradictions that allowed the Sisterhood to survive. Her success comes at the cost of certainty, love, and even humanity.
Ending the story as the central character, Murbella also spurns the regard shown for prescience—an attitude of both reverence and suspicion held by many. When considering the actions of the Honored Matres, she thinks about both factions’ purpose:
There lay the threat of Honored Matres victory. Aimed by blind violence!
Blind in a hostile universe.
And there was why the Tyrant had preserved the Sisterhood.
He knew he only gave us the path without direction. A paper chase laid down by a jokester and left empty at the end (527-28).
Her disdain is sharp, arising from a disillusionment with the religiosity of those around her. She ultimately isn’t surprised by the Matres’s actions due to the brutality of the universe, as she sees it, but she also refuses to buy into the attitudes shown toward the prophecies of Leto II. This closes the discussion of Free Will and Prescience, at least as far as Murbella’s personal arc, by rebuking the idea of fate and taking control of her own actions. She sees no higher purpose in following orders, and this ability to prioritize her own opinion of how they should act displays the type of changes she will bring to the Bene Gesserit as the new Mother Superior and Great Honored Matre. Her foil, in this circumstance, is Sheeana. Murbella’s rejection of the “paper chase” left by the Leto II is a pivotal moment: It reframes leadership not as the fulfillment of prophecy, but as the navigation of chaos without a promised end.
Sheeana has been revered for her ability to speak to sandworms and interpret the will of the tyrant Leto II, which is why she is predicted to be a religious leader in the future. Sheeana thus poses the only claim to power that opposes Murbella, and her decision to flee with Duncan, Miles Teg, and Murbella’s children in the end shows how Murbella’s rise to power has also personally cost her. This is represented by how Sheeana steals the Van Gogh painting Odrade left behind. The painting represented Odrade’s connection to humanity and sentiment, so Murbella being robbed of it implies she may lose touch with her ability to emote, particularly as Sheeana has also absconded with her lover and children. The acceptance of her inner child and her love for her family that Odrade exhibited is now gone from Murbella, and the future this spells out for the Sisterhood is ominous. The battle between Murbella’s free will and Sheeana’s fate is left a mystery, as Sheeana escapes into the far reaches of distant space, enacting her own Scattering. Sheeana’s departure represents an alternate vision of adaptation—one rooted in memory, intuition, and chosen exile. Where Murbella stays and reforms power, Sheeana absconds with the most sacred relics of the past, from Duncan to the painting to the worms. Their divergence leaves the Sisterhood at a crossroads of whether its future will be forged by institutional strength or personal conviction.
This final section underscores the novel’s core tensions: survival versus identity, prophecy versus will, and unity versus divergence. Odrade’s death cements her belief in transformative leadership, but it is Murbella and Sheeana who carry the consequences. Their parallel arcs suggest that no single path secures a stable future. Instead, the Sisterhood’s evolution depends on its ability to hold space for contradiction—to govern with force and feeling, to lead with memory and innovation, and to change without erasing what came before. Meanwhile, Duncan Idaho and Miles Teg, once symbols of loyalty and service, choose exile alongside Sheeana, suggesting a rejection of the Bene Gesserit’s increasingly utilitarian ethos. Their departure signals that survival may lie not in control, but in escape, improvisation, and the preservation of individual freedom. The presence of Scytale—and Duncan’s visions of the ancient face dancers—hint that this escape is not without its own dangers or manipulations. The story ends not with clarity, but with divergence, echoing the uncertainty of any Scattering.
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