The God Collector

by Catherine Butzen

  “A very odd burial,” Theo quoted, remembering the conversation at the donors’ night, “and a very sick mummy.”

  “I didn’t do anything!” he burst out. “I paid my dues, I was faithful to my wife, I honored my gods and my family! There was no reason for the gods to do that to me!” His fingers flexed, clenching instinctively as if he were trying to find some way to fight the memory. “I thought they wanted me dead. One sacrilege was hardly an overreaction. I wanted the long life that had been stolen from me.

  “Good men don’t earn much. Accolades when they live, but cheap stelae when they die. If I didn’t make a plan, I was going to die like a slave. No more war, no more seeing my family grow, no more chances to earn glory for my name or bring victories for my king.” He turned again, angry, but not at her. “So I went to my brother. Shabtis were said to become whatever we wanted in the next world—so why not shabtis that could return me to this one in a new body? Meren called it sacrilege, but we did it anyway. Why should a cursed man care if he offends the gods?”

  Theo shook her head. “What a mess,” she said. There didn’t seem to be anything else she could say. Seth let out a short laugh.

  “Definitely not normal, eh?”

  “No. Not normal.” She tried not to think about the light in his eyes. His breath was coming faster, anger seeming to fire something in him. He moved closer, and Theo’s heart thumped as he put his hand on her forearm. For a dead man, he didn’t feel very cold.

  Speaking of not normal…

  “What was your name?” she asked.

  This time, Seth didn’t hesitate. His gaze was fixed on hers. “Anhurmose.”

  She turned the word over on her tongue. A name for the mummy. A name for the man in front of her.

  “Anhurmose,” she repeated. “Anhurmose.”

  “I like Seth better,” he said. She shivered a little as his warm breath touched her face.

  “I like them both,” she told him. She did, despite the insanity of it all. Poor mute, sad-smiling THS203—all he’d wanted to do was live forever, and in some ways, he’d managed it.

  Seth was something else. She still had reasons not to trust him, especially over the robbery. But he was also something that she had literally never encountered before, and that night in the loft had torn her customary realism to shreds and given her motion on canvas like never before. She wanted to see, do and know more. She wasn’t forgiving him for everything that happened, but understanding blunted the edges of her anger.

  “Really,” he said softly, “you don’t have to lie, Miss Speer. I haven’t exactly made your life easy.”

  “Theo,” she said. “And easy…no. Interesting?” She moistened her lips again. “Yes.”

  “Is interesting a good thing?”

  “It’s a change,” she murmured. “Change is good.”

  “Theo.” The shadows made deep pools of darkness under his eyes and in the hollows of his throat. He was a bas-relief, a sculpture from a time when the world was both more and less civilized. Her brain screamed that she was about to do something incredibly dangerous, that there was no point in moving further when she knew she was going to get in over her head. Her body threw other images at her: the warmth and tantalizing roughness of his lips, the taste of motion that cascaded across the canvas after she had known real fear. Christ, one incident and she’d turned into a thrill junkie.

  She wanted that back again. Even if it ended in tears, wasn’t that what artists did? Chased heartbreak for their work?

  “Seth,” she said, “interesting is a very good thing.”

  It was barely a kiss, just a brush of her lips across his as she stood on tiptoe, a touch that lasted only a frozen moment. But something struck, a match flared, and Theo’s heart shuddered a little. She could feel Seth’s pulse pounding hard in the skin beneath her hand.

  It seemed to release something in him. His hands went to her jaw, stroking over the skin there as he pulled her closer and deepened the kiss. His need was raw, palpable, a little desperate as he held her. Theo’s lips parted without thinking, responding to the need there, letting him past one more barrier. His tongue touched hers, sending another spark of heat skittering through her, and she curled her hands into the fabric of his shirt.

  He murmured her name again as they separated. His color was high, redness in his cheeks and lips kiss bruised, and his eyes were bright. Their gazes stayed locked, his skin warm against hers.

  There it was again. The shifting of the world, the sense of movement, still figures somehow alive in spite of being only paint and pigment. It wasn’t intoxicating, it was enervating, like the moment just before the big drop on the rollercoaster. Her still-life world was jolting into motion. It would be so easy for it all to go wrong, but for once, there was something there to go wrong.

  “That wasn’t smart,” Theo said after a long moment.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Seth admitted, his voice rough.

  She moistened her lips again and stepped back a pace or two, trying to pull everything into focus. The motion began to still as sanity reasserted itself. “Four meetings, two kisses,” she said. “And you’ve got me doing it too.”

  “I’m a bad influence,” he admitted with a touch of humor. “Forgive me?”

  “Maybe. If you’re willing to trade.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Trade what?”

  “Call it compensation,” she said. “You wrecked my exhibition, and now you’ve handed me this idea of someone who’s been alive for four thousand years. The ultimate primary source.” She smiled. “I know professors who would pay millions just to pick your brain for half an hour.”

  “It’s not that simple, Theo.” He frowned. “Four thousand years is just too much to recall. If I didn’t write things down sometimes, I’d never remember where I’d been. My memories of Egypt are stored in the clay, but everything beyond that just fades.”

  “Then tell me about that,” she urged. “Tell me about Egypt. Tell me about anything. Sounds. Images. Colors.”

  “I can’t, Theo. Not—not yet.” Some of the remaining warmth faded from his eyes. “It’s hard to explain.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “I’m not going to tell anyone, Seth. But I have to know. One thing. Please. One thing that I can take to prove that you lived four thousand years ago.”

  There was a long moment of silence, and Seth’s gaze was leaden and unreadable. Finally, he dropped his head a little, refusing to meet her eyes anymore.

  “My tomb,” he said. “I’ve looked at the excavation records. You’ve got most of it. But there’s another chamber—on the northwest side, sunk into the slope. It’s hidden behind the mural of Apep. Inside, there are ten more emergency shabtis, grave vessels with models of food and drink, two jars of beer, five loaves of bread, a jar of honey, a chisel one of the workmen dropped and a badly misspelled copy of the Book of the Osiris-Name. It’s what those professors would call the Coffin Texts.” The corner of his mouth twisted a little. “My scribe was loyal, but his spelling was shit. I didn’t even realize that until 1938, did you know? I read an analysis of my own tomb inscriptions. They said I must not have been very well liked, to have such an amateur writing on my walls.”

  His eyes darted to her. “Is that enough?”

  “It is.” The words left her in a soft whisper, but they carried weight. It was. It was something the museum’s people in Egypt could confirm. And it was also something that people would question if she revealed it and it turned out to be true—or even untrue. Lots of angles here, directions she wasn’t used to thinking about. Still… “I think it is.”

  Chapter Ten

  You have wandered for too long. Think of your corpse and come home.

  ~From the “Tale of Sinuhe”, circa 1960 BC

  It was impossible to tell what time it was. There were no windows or clocks in the bedroom, lending the place th
e air of a comfortable tomb. Theo sighed a little as she rolled over, stretching out the aches in her muscles. Her rumpled shirt had left crease marks in her skin, and at some point in her sleep she’d kicked the blankets all the way off the bed.

  Memories came creeping back, slow and awkward, and her face reddened a little in the gloom. She’d been kissing a man. Kissing Seth Adler, the source of all her current trouble and the inspiration for her weirdest work yet.

  Her bag lay where she’d dropped it by the edge of the bed. Reluctantly, she reached out and flopped over to it, fumbling through the contents for her cell phone. The little glowing display told her it was almost six o’clock in the morning. It would be time to get up soon, and she would…

  She would have to call Zimmer, wouldn’t she?

  Groaning, Theo let her head drop into her hands. Zimmer would be waiting for her report. If he thought something had happened to her he might tell the police, and who knew what would happen next.

  It was plain that she would have to lie and the thought made her stomach twist. Just twenty-four hours earlier she’d been solidly on Zimmer’s side, ready to help him expose some kind of psychotic, drug-fueled art thief. Now she didn’t know where she stood, and even if she tried to explain it to the Security chief, she doubted he’d listen. Mummies? Blood turning into clay? History straight from the horse’s mouth? Not the best way to guarantee her job security, especially not when she didn’t even have her full clearance back yet. She would have to come up with a damn good lie.

  The thought made her horribly uncomfortable. Sitting there in the gloom of the bedroom, she felt like a gullible tool.

  At least I didn’t sleep with him, she told herself, even while resurging disbelief fought against the memories of clay droplets and disintegrating bodies. That, at least, was a sentiment that could apply to either side. Whether he was an accomplished liar or a…thing…she shouldn’t even have gone as far as she did. Let alone talking late into the night and then sleeping over. There was common sense at stake here, although that felt like the one thing that had been in short supply lately.

  Sighing, Theo swung her legs over the edge of the bed and straightened up, trying to move quietly. Early or not, she wasn’t going to be able to doze any longer in Seth Adler’s bed. She listened at the door, wondering if he was awake, but heard nothing besides the low humming of the central air system. Safe. Tugging her shirttail down, she opened the door and stepped out into the hall.

  Seth was where she had left him, laid out on an enormous tan couch and fast asleep. His arms were neatly by his sides, his legs pulled together, a blanket tucked around his still-dressed form. Moving as silently as she could, Theo stepped a little closer and peered at him. His eyes were shut tightly and his breathing was shallow.

  He lay so still it took her a moment to even spot the evidence that he was alive. There was a pallid tinge to his skin and the veins and tendons stood out sharply, as if moisture had been sucked out of the flesh. Shuddering a little, she quickly turned away. Watching him certainly wasn’t going to do anything for her peace of mind.

  Unsure of what else to do, Theo returned to the broad gallery. It looked very different now. With the great ceiling lights dimmed, only a few bluish strips lent faint illumination to the assembled collection.

  One of the banners was crooked. Her portfolio case had been shoved haphazardly onto a recessed shelf, hiding both it and the lethal painting. The painting’s skid across the floor had peeled several layers of pigment off the canvas, scoring it deeply and destroying part of both figures. Even with part of the painting gone, though, Seth hated having to see it. She tweaked the banner back into place, hiding it completely.

  It was almost funny in its strange way. The person who collected these things had experienced chaos like she could never imagine, but he was afraid of a simple picture. Four thousand years of danger and death were nothing compared to three hours with oils.

  Feet padding noiselessly on the sleek wood, she moved to the nearest case and peered in. There was the old faded piece of greenish cloth with the undyed X showing on the top. In the near darkness, the green was washed out and darkened, leaving the remnant gray-black with a nearly white symbol on top. With a start, Theo realized what it must have been originally—deeply saturated moss-green dye used instead of black, now faded over the years. Hundreds of years, if her reading of the symbol and color scheme was correct. Which meant it wasn’t an X.

  “Hospitaller,” she murmured, sketching the shape of the cross with her fingertip against the glass. “Of course.” No surprise that the sickly mummy had gravitated towards the great doctors of the Crusades. They’d ultimately become pirates too, which had probably appealed to the military part of him. Had this been his, then? Or did he just collect flotsam and jetsam?

  The case was set close to the wall, next to a recessed fireplace that clearly hadn’t burned anything in years. A few more items were displayed on the mantel: a medieval German helmet, a moth-eaten glove, a curved knife on a wooden stand. The knife had a hard-leather hilt stamped with a set of initials, but the whole thing was covered in dust.

  There was a creak behind her and she stiffened. The quality of the silence had changed. Someone was awake.

  Breathing out a little, she ran a finger over the hilt of the knife and wiped away some of the dust. She’d seen weapons like it before.

  “What is it?” she said anyway, brushing away more of the dust. The colors began to come through: the dark gray of worn steel, the initials R.A. It was an old weapon, but it had been well-used. “Who was R.A.?”

  “Rachid al-Adhur,” came the voice of Seth from behind her. “He had quite the interesting life before he founded the Trust. That’s a Khyber knife.”

  “From your time in India?”

  “The most recent one, yes.” Seth leaned against the doorframe, watching her. In the low, cold light of the trophy room, any remaining warmth in his colors faded away. He might have been a tinted marble statue.

  “And the knife?” she asked. She wiped away another spot of dust, exposing an old crack in the leather of the hilt.

  “The knife was a gift while he was playing the part of a Hassanzai of Tor Ghar. Rachid found it necessary to adopt a new persona for a while.”

  “I’ll bet he did.” The knife looked worn. It had been used, a lot, and then cleaned one final time and put away in a trophy room to gather dust. He found it necessary, he founded the Trust. Despite surrounding himself with pieces of history, Seth seemed to have closed himself off so easily from his former lives.

  Or perhaps not easily. She didn’t know much about the Hassanzai, but late nineteenth-century India hadn’t been a good place for people with divided loyalties. War and rebellion raged across the continent. Now, though, it was all gone. Dust gathering on an old Khyber knife, its aged leather set as hard as wood, the people it might have killed names in textbooks. Everything passed, and the heat of politics and religion and colonial warfare became moot in a hundred years’ time. Even something that could force Rachid al-Adhur to adopt a fake identity—an imposture within an imposture, carried out by a man who couldn’t die—would eventually vanish.

  If this was all true, then everything was impermanent to him. Everything she took for granted, like the country she lived in and the rules and morals her world ran on, would pass. And he’d live to see it, and learn the new rules in turn. Sic transit gloria mundi.

  She couldn’t imagine what that was like. But the motion, the blurriness that it must lend to the world itself, made her thoughts spark.

  “I’ll bet he did,” she repeated and turned away from the mantel to lean against the case containing the Hospitaller tunic. She rested her arms on the top of the case as she leaned down, examining the strange garment. The tails of the shirt she wore fluttered a little in the soft breeze of the air system, and she knew Seth’s gaze was on her. “You know, we had an exhibit on the court
s of the maharajahs not so long ago. Opulent doesn’t even begin to describe it. How did Rachid like that?”

  “He didn’t care.” Seth moved around to the other side of the case, mirroring her posture with his own and meeting her eyes as he leaned over the Hospitaller tunic. “He didn’t have the kind of life that put him in the palaces of the rajahs and ranis—not when there were so few left after the Mutiny.”

  “You mean the Indian Rebellion?”

  He shrugged. “Six of one. People died.”

  “As they typically do in mutinies and rebellions.” Theo stepped away from the tunic and moved left, towards the next case. This one contained all things golden: more gold coins, an aged gold torque in the old Celtic style and a gold-plated cigarette case with a date and inscription that were worn down to almost illegibility. She thought she caught the number 1901 on it, but it was hard to tell through what looked like acid damage. “That was when the empire really started coming apart. You must’ve seen that coming. You’re an old hand at this, after all.”

  Seth circled around her, padding almost noiselessly on the smooth boards, before stopping opposite her again. He rested just his fingertips against the glass this time, poised above the sleek curve of the torque. “Nobody can see the future,” he said softly, his eyes once again locked on hers. “And it’s hard to see an empire dying if you’re just one man on the edge of it. No matter how many times it’s happened before.”

  Theo swallowed, but kept her voice calm and level. “Is that what you’ve learned from four thousand years? That you don’t know anything?”

  “Not quite,” he said. “But it’s a good start.” He reached across the case and, softly, slid his hand down her forearm and over her wrist. Her fingers curled around his without quite meaning to, and he ran the very edge of a thumbnail over the pad of her palm, watching as she shivered a little at the sensation. “The problem with people, Theo, is that we’re never as wise or as strong as we think we are. That was the first thing I had to learn. I don’t know if I’ve learned anything since.”