Some moron had illegally built a garden shed directly over the sewer access grate. He'd allowed his driver to feed off the homeowner, extracting from the woman the location of the shed's key. Dragging aside rows of hydroponic vegetables, they'd uncovered the rusted grate and levered it out with a crowbar. While the driver had waited inside the house for the rest of the family to come home, he'd climbed down into the sewers. The first thing he'd done after entering the wretched place was to relieve himself of the dozen coffees he'd downed that afternoon. Then it was merely a matter of finding the entrance to the qanat, something that had resulted in a painful encounter with a rat. No matter. The creature could do him no harm and the wound on his hand had already healed. It just irritated him in principle.
As the offspring of a succubus, his genetic memories were more lucid than those bom to incubi, like the driver of the truck. Nevertheless, his `memory' of the entrance was two hundred and fifty years old, from the time when his mother, one step ahead of a peasant mob, had returned this way to the Sanctum to give birth to him and sleep off fifty years of feeding.
The fetid smell of the sewer at last behind him, the crumbling walls of the qanat now also gave way to living limestone. Beads of calcium-bearing water clung to the ends of hanging clusters of stalactites. The formations, broken in several places by the passage of Lilith's creations, had developed about an inch of growth on their fractured tips, signaling that he was indeed the first to come this way since 1758 AD.
He was in no great hurry. Neither the police nor the military would find the Sanctum tonight, or likely ever, no matter how far into the cave system they searched. Access was keyed only to those who bore the bloodline of Lilith. While many among the general populace unwittingly carried that bloodline, it had yet to be activated.
Nonetheless, the entire situation was a gigantic annoyance, because it meant that the Awakening of the last chamber would be fraught with a different kind of danger. After sleeping for two and a half centuries, the potent hunger of succubi and incubi made them damned near impossible to control. Awakening to a cavern full of fresh meat-the homeless and easily bribed youth of Ulm and Munich that he and the other cambion had rounded up and trucked to the caves these last few weeks-had taken the edge off the appetites of those in the first two chambers long enough for them to regain their sensibilities. But this last chamber…
Damn it. He squeezed his belly, the result of an easy life these last sixty years since that stupid bloody war, between two tall columns and smashed a collection of delicate helic- tites with a thoughtless brandishing of his flashlight. It wasn't unheard of for the succubi and incubi, driven by an insatiable, blinding hunger, to turn on their own children, the halfblood cambion, and feed until nothing but withered husks remained.
He turned off his flashlight and waited for his eyes to adjust. As with all the sleeping chambers, the anteroom was suffused with a soft amber glow. The light was powered by an unseen force that Lilith herself had bequeathed them five thousand years earlier, when she had led her surviving creations here after the great Deluge.
Taking a moment to scrape the crusted grime from his boots, he then removed his ski jacket, worn in anticipation of an evening snowfall. "Stupid, shortsighted humans, abusing the planet," he muttered. Outside, the seasons were a mess, but the temperature inside, like in all caves, was a constant nine degrees Celsius. He was now perspiring freely.
After two further passages through the ornate formations, he at last emerged into the antechamber, lined with a filamentous membrane, soft and yielding to the touch. He ran his hands along the taut, sinewy flesh that held the membranes in place and smiled in fond memory of his childhood here, basking in the mental companionship of his older half sisters, the cambion who had cared for him from birth. The warmth faded when he recalled how many of them had been burned as witches in the year 1782-except, of course, for beautiful Anna Goeldi, whom the Swiss had hung instead ten years later. He and the other cambion had wanted to save her, the oldest cambion of them all, but Anna had insisted that her martyrdom would assure the protection of the others until the time of the final Awakening.
And so it had, for no more of their number had since been butchered-except when they'd encountered the bastard heretics and their misbegotten creations.
A few steps beyond lay the last of the vaulted sleeping chambers. His smile widened and he glanced up at the hexagonal patchwork of webbing stretched across the roof, his eyes drawn to the third cell from the left, where Desiderata lay sleeping. For seven years after his birth he had been held in the cooling embrace of her membranes, sharing her memories of a time when Lilith had walked among them, learning of his rightful place in the universe and their sacred duty to the Annunaki-what the ones who had stolen the Gate called Ancients or Alterans.
To an extent he could understand why those cambion fathered by incubi failed to comprehend their birthright. Born to human mothers, they were raised as human. It was only in adolescence that, compelled by a fitful longing, many sought out their true heritage. And yet, just as many denied their blood ties and the calling that sang from within their veins. They lived and died as mortal humans without ever knowing the richness and power of what it was to feed.
What he truly couldn't fathom, though, was the choice made by some to follow the heretics. The traitorous bitch Hanan and her cohort had deliberately helped the humans discover the Gate back in 1928, for pity's sake! Still, he conceded, it had eventually resulted in the humans drawing the attention of the On, and since that had been prophesied, he supposed he should concede the point that Lilith did, indeed, work in mysterious ways.
Even those who remained oblivious to their birthright had inadvertently fulfilled their obligation to Lilith by passing their blood heritage on to sons and daughters. Although thousands of their number had succumbed to the Inquisition, the seeds had been well planted across the planet among the burgeoning human population. Once this final Awakening was complete, the heretics and the abominations they had bred would be defeated, the unsullied bloodline that tied the offspring together could be Awakened, and the last Great Battle would commence.
The mind of the Watcher who remained in the Sanctum touched his, and he bowed down before her as she swept into the chamber. All is well, he declared wordlessly. They have safely arrived in their new home.
His assurance was unnecessary, for the Watcher maintained a powerful mind link to the first groups to have Awakened, but because he had come into the Sanctum without food he'd felt compelled to offer some form of platitude.
Where is the sustenance? she demanded.
Explaining to her the spelunkers' discovery of the human husks, he added that he anticipated the arrival of more police sometime during the night and the military at dawn. At his obvious irritation, she smiled and smoothed away his anger and his fears. It is another sign — a good sign.
The truth suddenly dawned on him. Since 2001 and the appearance of the Gate, `hidden in plain sight' as predicted, the cambion and other Watchers had taken great care in searching out the bloodlines of the abominations and eliminating them. It came as no surprise that many who carried both pure and corrupted bloodlines had instinctually been drawn to the Stargate program. Two of the corrupted carriers living in Colorado Springs had been pregnant with fully realized abominations who, if allowed to live, might have passed their bastardized retrovirus on to countless others. Aside from the absolute necessity of killing them and their mothers before that could be allowed to happen, the Watchers had been careful to eliminate only lower-ranked members of the military and those peripherally related to the Stargate program-too many high-ranking carriers of this misbegotten bloodline existed to safely eradicate them all at this stage. The cambion had carefully covered their tracks by burning the remains.