Reluctantly, Nosferatu let go of Nekhbet. He followed Donnchadh out into the corridor, where her partner had already opened the door to the next cell.
“And who are you?” Nosferatu asked him.
The warrior glanced at him. “My name means nothing to you. Gwalcmai I was called long ago. I have had other names and will have others in the future.” Nosferatu and Nekhbet followed Donnchadh into the cell while her partner remained outside. The twins Vampyr and Lilith were held here. Male and female, they had been brought into the darkness nearly seventy years before, as best Nosferatu had been able to determine. Nosferatu watched as the woman opened their tubes, noting which of the hexagonals she pressed. He shushed the twins’ questions, working swiftly to free them from their chains, and they moved to the third cell and released Mosegi and Chatha, the youngest of the six, another male-female pair, chained up and entombed for only about twenty years. There were six half-breeds in total, one for each of the six Gods who desired the pleasure of drinking their blood.
As soon as the last were free of their tubes, the strange woman, Donnchadh, turned toward the exit to the last cell. “I will leave you to do what you must.”
Nosferatu put a hand out, stopping her. “Tell me more of the Gods. Why do they need to do this?” He lightly touched the shunt in his neck.
“As I have said. They do it for pleasure. It is an elixir for them. They prefer it over pure human blood.”
“That is all?” Nosferatu had always held on to the belief that at least he served the purpose of keeping the Gods alive.
“Do you not relish the feeding you receive?” Donnchadh asked.
Nosferatu nodded.
“And was not her”—Donnchadh pointed at Nekhbet—“blood so much more?” “Yes.”
“Then you should understand.”
“We exist only for their pleasure?” Vampyr was holding his twin’s arm, keeping Lilith upright while she learned to use her legs once more. “Yes.” It was obvious Donnchadh was not interested in talking.
“It is said the Gods are immortal,” Nosferatu pressed.
Gwalcmai was restless in the corridor. “We must hurry.”
“In a sense,” Donnchadh said, “they are.”
“Then am I immortal?” Nosferatu had shied away from that possibility, knowing it would mean an eternity chained to the wall.
Donnchadh shook her head. “No. But if you continue to drink human blood to feed the alien part of your blood — and don’t get drained of any more of the blood you have — you can live a very, very long time. You can also go into the tube and use the deep sleep to let time pass without aging.” Her eyes grew distant. “I have seen it before. Where I came from. They did the same to my people.”
“Where are you from?” Nosferatu asked.
Donnchadh shook her head. “You would not understand.” She pointed to the end of the short corridor. “You can go to the right and get out a secret door near the Nile. The ceremony will start shortly in the Sphinx pit. Wait until the Gods who will oversee the ceremony appear, then follow them down the main Road of Rostau.”
“But—” Nosferatu wanted to know more but Donnchadh was moving away, then was gone to the left, her companion with her.
The other five looked at him, waiting.
“Follow me.”
Prostrated before the massive paws of the Black Sphinx were fifty priests, chanting in an alien tongue the same prayers their ancestors on Atlantis had sung: “We serve for the promise of eternal life from the Grail. We serve for the promise of the great truth. We serve as our fathers have served, our father’s fathers, and through the ages from the first days of the rule of the God who brought us up out of the darkness. We serve because in serving there is the greater good for all.”
The chanting echoed and looped, reverberating off smooth stone walls surrounding the Black Sphinx. The Sphinx was over two hundred feet below the surface of the plateau, reachable only by a set of stairs cut in the stone wall. Just below the chest of the beast, a dark opening was cut into the rock beneath the paws, forming one of the entranceways to the sacred Roads, where only the select high priests were allowed to go.
Hidden in the shadows along the edge of the depression, amid a pile of discarded building stone, watching the chanting priests, were a half dozen figures — Nosferatu and the other five half-breeds. They clutched the sharp daggers the strange human woman had given them in sweaty hands. It was the Ceremony of the Summer Solstice, and the priests were thanking the Gods for a bountiful crop produced by the rich soil along the banks of the Nile and for keeping away the floods that occasionally ravaged the land.
It had occurred to Nosferatu during his long time underground that humans had never thought to question the power of the Gods when the floods did come. They would blame themselves, believing they had transgressed against the Gods in some manner, and pray even harder. The entire concept of worship and religion was something he found strange and most convenient for the Airlia. Behind it all was the tantalizing promise the Airlia had made so long ago on Atlantis — that the true believers would one day be granted immortality via the Grail. It had not happened yet, but again, the high priests told the people that was because they had not believed hard enough and been faithful enough.
Now the six waited, hunched over among the stones, for the ceremony to be finished. They were patient because their goal was the ultimate prize, that which generations of priests such as these had prayed for but which the six of them had decided to seize this night: eternal life. They had escaped from the Roads via an entrance on the bank of the Nile and made their way back here under the cover of darkness. For Nosferatu every breath of the fresh night air was a revelation, the canopy of stars overhead a wonderment to his eyes. The gifts of his Airlia genes combined with years of living in the pitch-black of his tube allowed him to see in the starlight as if it were daylight. He wondered what else he had gained from the Airlia that made him different from humans. “Will the Gods be here?” Nosferatu asked.
“Isis and Osiris have come to give the final blessing every year as long as any can remember,” Vampyr whispered in reply. “I saw them myself at this ceremony before I was taken below with my sister.”
Isis and Osiris were the two principal Gods. There were four other Airlia — Horus, Amun, Khons, and Seb — but they appeared even more rarely. It had been many years since all six had been seen together on the surface. For many years Nosferatu had only been visited by one of the Gods. When others showed up, perhaps coming out of the deep sleep that Donnchadh had mentioned, the others like him were made and imprisoned.
Nosferatu’s mother had told him that his father was Horus and Nosferatu believed it to be true because that was the only one of the five that did not take blood from him during the feedings. In the same manner, Nekhbet’s father had never taken from her.
The chanting paused as two figures appeared in the dark entryway. They were tall, thin, and unnaturally proportioned. From the forms it was obvious they were male and female but as they pulled back their hoods it was also obvious they were not human. Catlike red eyes peered down at the priests. White alabaster skin glistened in the glow of the torches. Elongated ears drooped on either side of their narrow heads. And when the male of the pair raised his right hand in acknowledgment of the priests’ prayers, six long fingers, festooned with jewels, waved their blessings.
Nosferatu recognized them from the thousands of times they had come to his cell and fed from Nekhbet and him. They were Isis and Osiris, the Goddess and the High Protector of Egypt, who had ruled from beneath the ground for over two thousand years. Egypt had prospered under their reign, the borders expanding down the green belt of the Nile and west and east to the edges of the desert. It was the cradle of civilization, the place where the majority of the survivors of the fall of Atlantis had been brought by the Gods. Beyond the borders of the Gods’ reign, there were humans, but they lived like animals according to what the high priests said.