His voice was rough. “They’re mostly forgotten these days. I keep lists, copying them over and over again, so I don’t forget. And I burn incense to them.”
One by one, Theo picked them out. Sedna, with her children the sea creatures. The African Mami Wata. The hand symbol of the god of Israel and Jacob, and more she couldn’t begin to name. So many gods, so many lands visited and lives lived.
A shiver ran through Theo. He remembered them and gave them honor in thanks for their mercy to him. It sounded ridiculous. Collecting gods like that, old gods, when everyone knew that they were nothing but stories that ancient cultures made up to explain things…
Really? a voice whispered as Theo felt the blood drain from her face. There stood a man who lived because of gods, or powers, unknown to her. What other creatures were out there in the darkened corners of history, hiding the way Seth had? Every story she’d read about them, gods and monsters, crowded her mind and crept in behind her eyes. Why not? Why not?
A strangled cry escaped from her throat as she turned on her heel and made for the door. She didn’t have the key. For a crazed second, panic seized her completely—the dozens of eyes were fixed on her, watching and judging, knowing that if she didn’t give her pound of flesh they’d have no reason to let her live. Gods were evil, petty things with powers that she’d never be able to face—
She flattened her back against the door. Seth’s eyes were wide with alarm, one hand reaching toward her, but for a moment the one thing she could see was that host of staring faces. Her gaze was locked on theirs. Her jacket collar clung to the skin of her neck, and she realized that tears were running freely down her face, mixing with the perspiration brought on by the hot, still air. Her heart pounded; her world shrank to her and those staring, judging gods.
Then darkness fell and the faces vanished. Theo let out a gasp, a half sob, as the eyes winked out of existence. They were still there, she knew, but in the dark she could only feel metal at her back and hear her own harsh breathing echoing in the enclosed space. The gods were gone. She was safe.
Breath touched her ear, and a pair of arms enfolded her. “Theo,” Seth whispered hoarsely. His grasp was almost painfully tight, but she didn’t care. “Theo. Djed. Are you all right?”
She couldn’t reply. If she thought about the eyes, the staring powers beyond her comprehension, she would go insane. She needed the here and now. Desperate, Theo flung her arms around Seth’s neck and pressed her lips to his in a wild and clumsy kiss.
Sensations flooded her. There he was, warm to the touch, skin flexing under her fingertips. His day-old stubble scraped at her cheek, sending millions of tiny shivering feelings—painpleasureainpleasureholdme—flickering through her quick as thought. His lips a smooth curve, an enigmatic smile that was ruined when he came to life, responding to her need—
She could feel his heart pounding wildly under her hand. Hot blood, a tremor in the hands as her legs automatically began to part, the hiss he gave in the back of his throat and the shiver of pleasure as he moved that eager kiss down her neck, nipping at her collarbone… She moaned, clutching those sensations to her, clinging in the darkness to the things that made him human.
“Don’t be afraid,” he whispered against her lips. “You owe them nothing. They can’t touch you.”
As he said it, his breath hot against her skin, she felt the fear begin to drain away. Slowly, so slowly, she began to relax in his arms. She’d stood between him and Aki, between him and the human authorities; he was trying to stand between her and the gods. She breathed again, murmuring something even she didn’t understand as the tension unwound. Her heartbeat began to slow.
“Can you face them?” Seth said quietly.
Theo drew in a breath.
“I think so. Wait!” She didn’t want him to reach for the light switch just yet. “Listen.” Her words felt awkward, and she struggled to grasp them. “I don’t…I don’t want to be watched. Or used. I’m not theirs.”
“They don’t have that kind of power,” Seth said. “Not here, not now. But when I finally do stand in front of the judges, I want to begin my negative confession with ‘I have not refused homage to those who sheltered me.’”
“You’re a good man,” she said.
When the light flicked back on, the eyes of the gods didn’t seem quite so judging.
Fortunately, Seth didn’t give her an opportunity to dwell on it. He knelt down and began hauling several fireproof boxes from under the couch. Each one of them had been triple-locked, with hieroglyphic symbols Theo had never seen before painted onto the lids and sides. Seth worked the locks skillfully, opening each without a single click or scrape.
She stared. The boxes contained everything she could possibly imagine needing for a life on the run: multiple passports and driver’s licenses, more skin and hair dyes, pieces of concealable weaponry that Theo couldn’t name, prosthetics enough to build three or four different faces, bank cards, social security cards, and—holy hell, that was a lot of cash.
“You put a lot of thought into this,” she said, sorting through the documents. “There’s at least three identities here.”
“You never know when one won’t work,” Seth responded. “Some are better than others. I had to use different forgers for each type and name, and few of them are up to the best standards. But I learned a few things from them.” He extracted a smaller box from the largest one and opened it. Inside were several ID badges from federal agencies. None of them had photographs or the final stamps applied.
“I can’t fake working identities on short notice, but a convincing-looking ID from the government is usually as good for anyone unofficial. Give me a few hours, and I can make you something useful.”
Swiss Army Seth? She didn’t doubt he could too.
“Are you going to do it right now?” she said as he sat down at the spindle-legged table, box of materials in hand.
“There’s no time like the present,” he said. “I’m sorry, Theo. Will you be all right for a few hours?”
She nodded. He turned away and got to work. As she watched, he began to cut one of the cards apart, gently raising the outermost laminated layer to get at the chip implanted in it.
Too bad she hadn’t brought that sketchbook. Looking for something to do, Theo let her curiosity get the better of her and picked one of the scrolls off the shelf. Definitely modern paper, probably from a specialty art store, but the writing was in hieratic. The penmanship was casual and broad: lines wandered, characters ran into each other, and Greek or Cyrillic symbols cropped up here and there. It had clearly been written for the scribe’s eyes only, with no concern for whether anyone else could read it.
“What are these?” she asked, not really expecting an answer. At least she knew most of the symbols. Not enough to understand, but enough to see distinctive repetitions and patterns in the text. She squinted at the paper, picking out the hieratic version of the basket hieroglyph—the hard K. Then the mouth R, and the horned-viper F. She murmured it aloud, trying to find where the vowels would fit.
“Cleopatra VII Philopator,” Seth supplied. He glanced at the scroll and pointed the tip of a razor blade at the back of it. Turning it over, Theo found a series of numbers like a library card-catalog ID.
“It’s my diary,” he added. “Well, parts of it. I keep trying to maintain one, but I don’t have the patience to write down everything and parts always get lost. I recopy them every chance I get.”
“In hieratic?”
He grinned wryly. “Well, my version of it. It’s the one language I never forget. I copy the diaries, seal them in a cache, or save what I can. This is the one way I can remember where I was or what I did.”
Theo looked down at the scroll in her hands. It was beautiful in its own weird way, a modern re-creation of what one of the ancient papyri might have looked like when it was new. “But isn’t that impractical? I mean, these things don’t last forever. And people can find them.”
He shrugged
his shoulders at that. “Chances are that anyone who finds them won’t know what it is. And I don’t trust digital. It’s too impermanent.”
“Anhurmose, this is your life,” she murmured.
Seth’s eyes softened as she used his name, and for a moment, he set down the razor blade.
“Cleopatra Philopator. That’s the Cleopatra. You knew her?”
“Not exactly. But I was a mercenary at Actium,” Seth said. “I saw her for about three seconds on the royal galley. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”
“She wasn’t beautiful?”
“I couldn’t tell. And nobody’s beautiful when they’re losing.”
Of course not. Theo had read about the Battle of Actium, when Cleopatra and Marc Antony were defeated and Egypt’s future as a Roman province was sealed. It hadn’t been a good time to be an Egyptian queen. “Who did you fight for?” she asked curiously.
“Octavian,” Seth said. “Emperor Augustus, he was later.”
“Smart man,” she murmured. “You picked the winning team.”
As she spoke, she turned the parchment over. Actium was, what, 30 BC? And he had been there? How many times had he recopied this parchment, preserving memories of a sea battle two thousand years past? It made her head spin.
Seth snorted, apparently unaware of the thoughts going through her head. “I picked the one that paid better and didn’t have Antonius.”
“But he was fighting for Egypt,” Theo said. “I would’ve thought you would want him to win. So Egypt could remain independent, I mean.”
For a moment, his gaze went blank, focusing on something she couldn’t see. “It was already dead,” he said. “The Macedonians claimed they were kings by divine right, but the line of descent had been broken so many times… Better no king than a bad one. At least the Romans tried to maintain order and take care of the land.”
Seth was gesturing to the shelf of gods, pointing out the native Egyptian deities. “I spent time in Alexandria, but you’re not going to see Serapis here. He wasn’t one of them. The Ptolemies and their people made him to keep the population under control! If I’d cast my shabtis in Serapis’s name, I’d be as dead as Antonius.”
Theo looked up at the gods and wondered. Someone must have invented them at some point, hadn’t they? And yet Seth, in their names, was still alive. How did you tell which gods were real? Or did they become real when they were worshiped? The staring eyes were beginning to bore into her again, and she turned her back on them.
* * *
Hours passed in near silence. When the scrolls and various boxes had exhausted their entertainment value, Theo tried to find a way to occupy herself, but Seth was bent over his work and she knew what it was like to be deep in a project. He’d switched off again, she thought, irritated in spite of herself.
To distract herself from getting too annoyed over what was doubtlessly important (but did he have to tune out so completely?), Theo took a blank roll of paper from one of the shelves and, using a stick of charcoal from the makeshift brazier, began to sketch. The close heat of the room made her lightheaded, and after a while, she stripped off her outermost shirt and fell asleep.
She awoke to the sound of crinkling plastic. Opening one eye, she realized groggily that she was lying down on that strange pseudo-Egyptian couch, her cheek pressed to one of the cushions. She blinked away the remnants of sleep and raised her head. Her cheek ached, and glancing into a polished bronze mirror on the wall, she could see that the cushion’s embroidery had left the shape of a lotus printed on her cheek.
The sound that had woken her was Seth. He was kneeling next to another box, unwrapping plastic from what looked like freeze-dried disaster rations. He glanced up as she stirred, and a guilty expression flitted across his face.
“I didn’t mean to wake you…” he began.
“I shouldn’t’ve been sleeping any…way,” Theo said, rubbing her eyes. The last word was split in half by a yawn.
Seth rose, holding a couple of the packages under one arm. “You didn’t sleep well last night, though. I could hear you tossing and turning.”
“Still, I shouldn’t be napping when we’ve got work to do,” she said, swinging her legs over the edge of the couch. “What time is it?”
“About four in the afternoon.” Seth turned over the packages, grimacing. “I thought we should eat something, but the only food I can keep here is the kind that won’t go bad. The words ‘shelf-stable’ are never a sign you’re about to enjoy yourself. Which would you prefer: alleged chicken or alleged stew?”
Theo stifled another yawn. “Death.”
“Pick again. It’s not—ah—all it’s cracked up to be.”
She hid a smile at the awkward slang and pointed to the package of faux fowl.
It appeared to be an MRE or Meal, Ready to Eat, the military foodstuff that had the rare privilege of its entire name being a bald-faced lie. Still, Theo couldn’t deny that she was hungry, not when she hadn’t had a real meal since the day before yesterday. Pilfering Aki’s Chex Mix wasn’t quite the same.
“You’ve never died, though,” she pointed out as she extracted what was supposedly a chicken patty from its plastic tomb. “Not really. You said you haven’t…crossed over.”
“No,” Seth admitted, gaze fixed determinedly on his meal. “But I’m in the house when the lights go out, you could say. Does this look like stew to you? I can’t tell.”
Theo recognized a diversionary tactic when she saw one, but she let it go. If Seth wanted to talk about it, he would do so in his own time, and prodding would make them both angry.
“I don’t want to say what it looks like,” she said, tearing her rubbery patty in half. “Mom always told me not to use that kind of language. Try this instead; yours could probably eat you.”
After some persuading, she managed to make Seth accept a few pieces of her meal. He didn’t seem to need more than a mouthful or two, which made a strange sort of sense to her. If she were designing a brand-new body for a soldier two thousand years before the birth of Jesus, she would want him to require as little food and water as possible. He would have to sleep less, be stronger and faster, heal better. And of course, hah, be taller. Six foot two was nothing much to modern eyes, but in the days of Amenemhat I, it would’ve made him a giant among men.
Looking over the rim of her bottle of water, she found herself remembering the tubercular body of the mummy. Seth, Anhurmose then, must have been in horrible pain. The vessel he had built for his soul had been an escape from that as well. And it was good for a man who was planning to live a long, long existence as a general in wartime conditions, though maybe there was vanity in it too.
As she watched, Seth tore a few scraps of chicken from his half of the ration. He tossed them into the bowl, poured lighter fluid over them, and fumbled for matches. Theo automatically looked up at the smoke detector in the ceiling, but she saw that its batteries had been removed. Having firemen break in on your burnt offering was definitely not part of the ritual canon.
The fire blazed up and died away almost immediately, burnt out after a minute or so. As it receded into ash, Seth murmured a prayer.
“You can say that again,” Theo said. “So what now? What are we going to do?”
“We have to find Zimmer,” Seth declared, waving away a wisp of smoke from the bowl. The meat had been completely consumed, leaving behind nothing but a thin crust of black ash. “He’s our best lead right now, whether he was involved or not. Do you know anyone who could help us get back into the museum?”
“Not Aki,” Theo said. “He’s supposed to be working from home. But Sandy Navarro is pretty smart, and she might be willing to listen. Or Dr. Van Allen. I’ve known him for years, and he was head of the Classical Antiquities Department when I was interning as a scenery painter.”
At that, Seth looked surprised. “Dr. Van Allen? I remember him. Short man, strange, unsociable?”
“Pot, kettle.”
“I’m serious.” Seth’s expressi
on turned grim, the brown eyes sharp and snapping. “He sent a request about six months ago. He wanted the Neith Trust to be extended to cover administrative and departmental costs. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Museums always bleed money.”
“Come on, Seth. You’re not thinking he had something to do with this?” Theo almost dropped her cup in surprise. “He’s the curator of the Egyptology Department!”
“He has the clearance,” Seth pointed out, setting down his own cup of water. “He can read hieratic and priest’s script. He would have known which shabtis were LoJacked. And he was extremely eager to have a large amount of capital funneled into a place where he could make use of it.”
Theo formed a mental picture of Dr. Wayne Van Allen. She didn’t hate working under him: despite his standoffishness, Dr. Van Allen had helped keep multiple departments producing. And funded, of course, though the Trust had been a big part of that. A little man, quiet enough, but relentless in his work. Leaning across, she tossed a cracker into the embers.
“It’s possible,” she conceded reluctantly. “But I can’t see it, Seth. Curators always want money—it’s like a fish wanting water. But he’d never do anything to hurt the museum. It’s his life.”
“Then let’s see if anyone else fits the bill.” Seth’s dark eyes focused on her. “You know the museum, Theo. Can you think of anyone besides Zimmer who might have had a motive to help or hinder us?”
Theo closed her eyes and thought. All those weeks and months, working and visiting from department to department, she’d been pretty secure in her position. She hadn’t been considering which of her fellow employees might be a thief or a would-be murderer. There were a few unpleasant types, especially in the Animatronics and Building Departments, but nobody struck her as the sort of person who’d frame someone for antiquities theft.
Though there was something else.
“It has to be someone who was in the loft or with the cops,” she said. No question of which night. “Someone who heard my story about you. They did it while I was at your house, and I doubt that’s a coincidence. It made us look like we were in on it together, and to swing that, they had to know that I named you as a suspect in the first place.”
Painter of the Dead (Shades of Immortality Book 1) Page 19
