I enter to see him.
—Opening of the Mouth Ceremony
Lord Rhys Kilpatrick slipped quietly through the stately silver portal to the luxurious temple within Khepesh Palace and made his way through the hushed darkness toward the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, where the Opening of the Mouth and Eyes ceremony was taking place.
He was late.
“Oh, Seth-Aziz, hear us!” a trio of dulcet female voices chanted. Their sweet tones echoed softly off the gleaming silver pillars and walls of the inner sanctum.
Damn. The ritual was almost over. Seth’s inner mummy case had already been raised to stand upright before the priestess Nephtys. The precious metal and lapis lazuli adorning the elaborately carved obsidian sarcophagus from which it had been lifted winked and shone from the light of a hundred fragrant altar candles, reflecting the glittering starlight of ten thousand diamonds that radiated down from the midnight-blue curved ceiling overhead. The ritual never ceased to impress Rhys, nor did the splendid setting. Whatever else, Seth-Aziz had exquisite taste. His five-thousand-year-old tomb—now expanded into the sumptuous underground palace called Khepesh where they all lived—was amazing in every aspect.
“Your purification is the purification of the great god Set-Sutekh,” the priestess Nephtys murmured, swinging a censer, walking around the mummy case four times, smudging it with smoking ambergris and myrrh.
Luckily, Rhys’s attendance was not critical. Or even needed, really. The monthly ceremony to awaken the demigod from his full-moon slumber depended only upon the priestess and her two shemats, or acolytes. Nephtys was the one who possessed the power to raise the dead, not Rhys.
“May the god open the mouth and eyes of his loyal follower, Seth-Aziz, so he may walk and speak with his body before the great nine gods in the magnificent Palace of Khepesh, and drink the blood of his humble servants,” they chanted.
Nevertheless, Rhys made it a habit to be there when Seth awoke each month upon the second setting of the sun after the full moon, on the chance his services were required. One never knew what his friend would be in need of upon awakening. A special food. A particular book. A beautiful woman. A willing sacrifice for his bloodlust...which thankfully happened but once a year anymore.
Rhys halted a respectful distance from the altar that overflowed with lotus flowers surrounding a goblet of wine. Nephtys sent him a smile, then held up a snakelike implement topped by a ram’s head, and with the tip touched first the mouth, then the eyes of Seth’s man-shaped coffin.
“I have opened your mouth and your eyes with this blade of iron that came from Set-Sutekh, with which the mouths and eyes of all the demigods are made to taste and see. May your ka arise, my brother, and reawaken to life!”
The priestess and her shemats leaned in, raising their arms in supplication. This was Rhys’s favorite part. The real magic.
From beneath the lid of the mummy case, a misty shape began to materialize, taking on form and solidity as it stepped free of the trappings of death. The shape slowly resolved into a tall, handsome, black-haired man, regal of bearing and stern of aspect. Rhys’s lord and master, and best friend for the past hundred and twenty-five years.
The vampire demigod, the High Priest Seth-Aziz, come back to life.
Or at least his ka. In Egypt, a man had three souls—the ka, the ba, and the akh, each with a different function. Few believed the whole of the man-god’s being still lived, but rather that it was only his solid soul, his ka body double, that was called back from the land of the dead to feed upon the blood of the living. Seth-Aziz was like no other who dwelled in Khepesh. Just two of his kind remained in the whole of Egypt. The last of a dying breed...
It was all a mystery to Rhys, but the spell had worked every month now for nearly five thousand years. Nevertheless, all in attendance let out a sigh of relief mingled with awe when Seth’s eyes fluttered open and focused softly on the priestess.
“Sister,” Seth greeted her, his voice strong and sure. “Ever the loveliest of sights to chase off dreams of the underworld.”
Nephtys leaned forward and gave Seth an affectionate kiss on his smooth, perfect cheek. “Dreams or nightmares, hadu?”
The Guardian of Darkness shrugged noncommittally. “It is what it is.” He turned to Rhys, stepping forward to put his hand on his shoulder, his flesh now as firm as Rhys’s own. “And my loyal Englishman, here to welcome me back as always.”
“I am your humble servant, my lord.”
Seth chuckled. “You are neither servant nor particularly humble, Lord Kilpatrick, yet it pleases me to hear you say so.” He returned Nephtys’s kiss on the cheek, then turned to usher Rhys away between the rows of silver, papyrus-shaped pillars. “How are things up in the mortal world, my friend? Anything urgent to deal with?”
Rhys bowed his head in parting to Nephtys and winked at the two pretty shemats, then matched his stride to Seth’s, heading out through the courtyards of the temple compound and into the grand hall beyond the temple portal.
“Things are quiet, but simmering,” he reported.
“So you think the war with Haru-Re is heating up again,” Seth observed with neither excitement nor anger.
“Yes. I suppose we’re overdue,” Rhys said philosophically. “Ray likes to rattle his chains every century or two.”
The animosity between Seth-Aziz and his perpetual enemy, Haru-Re—or Ray, as he liked to call himself these days in what he thought was a clever pun—had been going strong for five millennia, an extension of the original war for supremacy between their leaders, the powerful rival gods Set-Sutehk and Re-Horakhti, begun at the dawn of Egyptian civilization. After the fall of the ancient gods, their immortal followers—or shemsu netru as they were called—remained on earth, still locked in the ebb and flow of battle. Although “immortal” was a bit of a misnomer. Under certain circumstances, it was possible for even a demigod to succumb to death permanently. In fact, through battle and magic, and the one secret, fatal weakness of vampires, nearly all the demigods who had once flourished had been destroyed. And as the leaders had died, so had their shemsu. Today, only two cults, or per netjer as they preferred to be called, still remained— Khepesh and Petru, those led by Seth and Haru-Re.
“There is a rumor Ray may be lurking somewhere nearby,” Rhys said. “Shahin’s spies are due back tonight with a report.”
Sheikh Shahin Aswadi was captain of Seth’s cadre of guards, and a good friend to both Rhys and Seth.
Seth’s face went stony. “Have him shore up our defenses. Nephtys must be protected at all costs.”
Originally one of Haru-Re’s captive slaves, a princess from a far northern island, Nephtys had been rescued from the enemy and adopted by Seth’s father in the days when they were still young and mortal. From her lowly beginnings, she had risen to become a powerful priestess. Today, she was the only one alive with the knowledge to transform mortal to immortal.
Haru-Re was obsessively determined to get her back.
“We must prepare ourselves for the battle. And increase our number,” Seth ordered as the two of them strode into the Great Council Chamber.
Rhys reluctantly agreed. It was a well-traveled, if dangerous, road. After the untimely death of Haru-Re’s priestess, he now had no means of converting either shemsu or the menials his own human servants called shabti, and had taken to stealing Seth’s. Thank goodness the enemy had not yet resorted to capturing the shapeshifters of Khepesh. But it was a concern, making it necessary for them to step up recruitment of initiates.
If it were up to Rhys, there would be no shabti at all in Khepesh. They were the unlucky ones, robbed of all mind and will. It was a cruel and unnecessary fate to impose on anyone. But unlike Rhys, not every mortal wished to serve the Lord of the Night Sky, nor willingly paid the price of immortality...
“Our number may be increasing sooner than you think,” Rhys said, reminded of the situation that was currently causing him worry. “A mortal is getting dangerously close to discovering the eastern portal of Khepesh, in your old tomb.”
Seth halted in front of the enormous ebony council table, now empty. “Just what we need. Who is this mortal? Grave robber or archaeologist?”
“Neither. I am told it is an historian seeking to document a more recent grave.”
“A grave? Whose?”
“My own.”
Seth’s brows shot up. “Yours? By Osiris’s member, why would they be looking for that?”
Rhys sighed. He’d been fearing this very thing since he’d made his original fateful decision in 1885. “Apparently, the Kilpatrick family wishes to put an end to certain persistent rumors regarding my desertion from the British army.”
Seth’s lip curled. “Your unsavory past catches up with you at last, my friend. Well, then. This meddlesome mortal must disappear, mustn’t he? Who is this man destined to be my newest initiate?”
“He,” Rhys answered with a calculating smile, “is no man. It is a woman.”