I feel like we need to take inspiration from Bene Gesserit punishments for the architects of the failed insurrection.
"Banquet?" Duncan was puzzled.
Tamalane swung completely around in her swivel seat and looked directly into his eyes. Her steely teeth glittered in the bright lights. "History has seldom been good to those who must be punished," she said.
Duncan flinched at the word "history." It was one of Tamalane's signals. She was going to teach a lesson, another boring lesson.
"Bene Gesserit punishments cannot be forgotten."
Duncan focused on Tamalane's old mouth, sensing abruptly that she spoke out of painful personal experience. He was going to learn something interesting!
"Our punishments carry an inescapable lesson," Tamalane said. "It is much more than the pain."
Duncan sat on the floor at her feet. From this angle, Tamalane was a black-shrouded and ominous figure.
"We do not punish with the ultimate agony," she said. "That is reserved for a Reverend Mother's passage through the spice."
Duncan nodded. Library records referred to "spice agony," a mysterious trial that created a Reverend Mother.
"Major punishments are painful, nonetheless," she said. "They are also emotionally painful. Emotion evoked by punishment is always that emotion we judge to be the penitent's greatest weakness and thus we strengthen the punished."
Her words filled Duncan with unfocused dread. What were they doing to his guards? He could not speak but there was no need. Tamalane was not finished.
"The punishment always ends with a dessert," she said and she clapped her hands against her knees.
Duncan frowned. Dessert? That was part of a banquet. How could a banquet be punishment?
"It is not really a banquet but the idea of a banquet," Tamalane said. One clawlike hand described a circle in the air. "The dessert comes something totally unexpected. The penitent thinks: Ahhh, I have been forgiven at last! You understand?"
Duncan shook his head from side to side. No, he did not understand.
"It is the sweetness of the moment," she said. "You have been through every course of a painful banquet and come out at the end to something you can savor. But! As you savor it, then comes the most painful moment of all, the recognition, the understanding that this is not pleasure-at-the-end. No, indeed. This is the ultimate pain of the major punishment. It locks in the Bene Gesserit lesson."
