Painter of the Dead (Shades of Immortality Book 1)

by Catherine Butzen

  “Slaves. Don’t whitewash it. The markets were flooded with captives after the campaigning season. We bought them cheap and kept them loyal with generous payments, plus threats and beatings, if necessary.”

  Van Allen’s gaze flickered to Theo again, as if he was silently asking her what she thought of that admission. She stared steadily back. Could she be angry on behalf of people who’d been dead for four thousand years? Or lose her temper about what had happened before the invention of steel?

  “By the way,” she added softly, “I think he knows you’re baiting him, Doc.”

  Van Allen’s poker face was amazing. “I am?”

  “The afterlife of the Deshret?” Seth’s mouth twisted. “Deshret means the red earth, the desert, and you know it does. Not the afterlife. Either you’re an incompetent scholar, or you were setting me up to fail by offering bad information.”

  “I was,” Van Allen agreed, almost amiably. “So the slaves, you were saying?”

  “One of them talked, I heard later. Caused a minor panic. If the story was true, then what I was doing was sacrilege. Perverting the cosmic order, upsetting the barque of the sun, consorting with chaos, gaming the system. Take your pick.” Seth leaned forward. “They fought rumor with rumor. Knowing King Senwoseret, he dreamed it up himself; he always had a good head for stories, especially when the Great House was on campaign and he got to spend time with someone besides the palace busybodies.” Seth grinned ruefully.

  “I followed the news as best I could. I was in my first new body then, lurking around Kush, hoping to come back and claim I’d been healed, once the rumors died down. They didn’t, not in his lifetime. I waited forty years for him to die, and I never could shake the idea that he was still a kid sitting on his dad’s throne.”

  As Seth spoke, Theo watched his face. The life was there, vitality and humor and strength forcing their way through a body left sluggish by the failing power that had created it. The emotions animated him, and the smooth ripple of movement added warmth to him. Not just the motion, either. There were healthier tones in his skin now. His veins ran with blood instead of clay and magic, and his eyes were bright.

  She transferred her gaze to the curator. If Dr. Van Allen thought Seth was a lunatic or a scammer, he was doing a good job of hiding it. When he asked a question about life in Kush and Seth answered easily, Van Allen’s fingers curled against the desk. She recognized the motion—the impulse to grab a pen and start jotting down notes.

  Dr. Van Allen was listening. Dr. Van Allen, the one who insisted on absolute precision in everything and publicly called Egyptology his vocation, was calmly listening to a story about mummies and magic and warped golems created out of shabtis. It would have been so easy for him to do what Theo had done originally and try to write the whole thing off as a hallucination, but he’d gone to bat for both of them and accepted a story that should have been kryptonite to a serious scientist.

  But this was Dr. Van Allen, who also never left anything to chance and always wanted proofs on his desk as early as possible. A week was more than enough time to get the Columbian’s Cairo team down to Thebes for a quick examination of tomb THS2. He would probably have that badly spelled copy of the Coffin Texts on display in a few months.

  He caught her staring and merely raised an eyebrow. As usual, his expression gave little away. She shrugged, her own expression innocent—he’d probably know she was on to him anyway.

  For a moment, there was silence. Then Dr. Van Allen resettled himself in his chair and, to Theo’s astonishment, relaxed.

  “Tell me about your life, Mr. Adler.”

  “What do you want to know?” Seth said.

  Van Allen considered the issue for a moment.

  “Everything.”

  Theo’s smile widened, and Seth grinned at her fondly before turning back to the curator.

  “I was born in Thebes, around 2000 BC…”

  Epilogue

  He’s okay. I’m okay. It’ll be okay eventually.

  Memo: Colors and games.

  – Excerpt from the diary of Theodora Speer,

  date unknown

  The inquest took place on a Monday afternoon. Theo was present, heart in her mouth, as Dr. Van Allen calmly explained that Mark Zimmer had set up Mr. Seth Adler and one of his own staffers to take the fall for a series of robberies. Mark confessed to everything, his tone wobbly as he described how it had been done and the steps he’d taken. His parents, a wan-looking couple in late middle age, wept. One of the cops rubber-stamped a pile of paperwork.

  Seth had left immediately after testifying, unwilling to dwell on the story of his brother’s death. Theo wondered if he was leaving for good—but he was waiting for her outside, his collar turned up against the cold, the scarf wrapped tightly around him, just as it had been on the day they’d gone to lunch. His cheeks were red with the cold, and his bad hand was tucked into the pocket of his coat.

  He smiled, and Theo smiled back, a warm feeling settling in her chest despite the chill of the air and the worry of the hearing. He held out his good hand, gloved fingers enfolding hers and squeezing.

  “How did it end?” he said.

  “All right,” she responded, “I think. Mark said he did it, and with his history…I mean, his mind was thrown out of his body when Meren took over, and his family thought he’d had an aneurysm. There shouldn’t be any problems with accepting that there was something wrong with his mind this time too. You’ve already been cleared, and charges are being dropped against me. Mark’ll spend a lot of time in a mental ward, but I don’t think he’s unhappy about that. He really needs therapy.” She shivered, unsure of how to feel. She knew she would never be able to accept the real Mark Zimmer, despite knowing the whole truth. There were bad memories associated with that face.

  “I thought so.” Seth shook his head. “He’ll need to find a new career once he’s out. I can help him with that. But for now, at least he has his body back.”

  Theo nodded. “He had tears in his eyes. Kept describing his ‘out-of-body experience’ and flexing his hands like he couldn’t believe he had them.” She swallowed, trying to get rid of the lump rising in her throat. “His parents started crying too. They said they didn’t care; they had their son back.”

  “Long may it last,” Seth said.

  “Speaking of…” Theo added uneasily. She was certain they were already both thinking it, but she couldn’t not ask. “Will Meren…” She shook her head at the thought, and Seth squeezed her hand again. “Will he come back? Will he try to take back Mark’s body?” Is he watching us right now?

  Seth bent his head. Strands of his long, dark hair, flecked with snow instead of gray, fell down over his eyes as he shook his head. “No,” he said simply. “Meren’s a soul without a form or a heart. The boy’s soul stayed because his body was still alive and others may have lingered because of their murder, but Meren challenged the gods directly. He’ll be judged and go to the outer darkness beyond the west.”

  There was weariness in his voice, and Theo squeezed his hand back. Much as she hated Meren for what he had put them through, she knew that Seth was the one who had lost the most. The brother who’d tutored him, helped him, and saved him had tried to kill both Seth and Theo.

  “And what about you?” she said quietly. “Are you going to be judged too?”

  “I don’t know,” Seth replied. “But if I’m condemned for wanting to live a long life, then I’ll have a lot of company.”

  He drew her to him. His kiss was soft, sweet, and a little sad; they’d come to a crossroads, she thought, even as she returned the kiss. But she held his gloved hand in hers, remembering the darkness in the halls and the terror of his supposed death, and she knew that she would be joining him on his road for now. She’d learned too much to stop.

  As they separated for a moment, their breath clouding in the cold air, Seth looked down at her with those heart-stopping dark eyes. “So am I still crazy?” he said softly. “The last time I tried
that in a public place…”

  She laughed, and it seemed that a knot was unraveling in her chest. “I can’t vouch for your sanity,” she said, “but whenever you want to do that, you won’t catch me objecting.”

  “Glad to hear it,” he said as he ran his one long-fingered hand through her loose hair. Her eyes burned, seeing again his bleeding limbs and wondering if she could have done it better—but he tilted her chin up and kissed her again, warm and loving and so very, very alive. Her worry melted away in a rush of heat and emotion.

  “Don’t be sad,” he murmured. “You fixed me.”

  She blinked away her tears and scowled, trying not to let her emotions get the best of her. “I don’t remember building psychic powers into you, mister.”

  “I don’t have to be psychic to see what you’re thinking,” Seth said. “I know you too well.”

  “Only because you cheated,” she told him, gently prodding his good shoulder with her index finger. “If it hadn’t been for those shabtis, you wouldn’t know me from Alexander the Great.”

  “You don’t think much of my powers of observation, do you?” he said, wrapping his weak arm around her waist. A fresh gust of wind brought a flurry of snowflakes with it, peppering his face and hair and forcing him to muffle a sneeze. Theo laughed and rested her hands on his shoulders.

  “Well, I still don’t know that much about you, do I? I think I deserve the time to learn.” She flicked a couple of snowflakes off his shoulder. Seth twined one loose strand of her hair around his fingertip, the ash-blonde standing out against the black fabric of his glove.

  They stood there for a long time. Passersby on the museum campus bridgeway could probably see them—him a tall, inscrutable figure in gray, snow making constellations in his dark hair, and her with her blonde braid and orange parka looking up at him. Theo saw him, saw her, saw the picture they made, and laughed.

  Seth looked at her in astonishment, but Theo couldn’t suppress her giggles long enough to explain. Yin and yang, male and female, light and dark in figure form. The kind of cheap symbolism that would have made her art teachers kick someone out of class. Her lover shook his head as she laughed herself out, and held her while she caught her breath and tried to focus.

  “Seth,” she managed, “we have to get you some new colors.”

  “That’s what I love about you,” he said. “You don’t stop. You made me a new body, and now you want to get new clothes on it too?”

  His tone was teasing, and she laughed again and pressed a kiss to his lips. “Trust me,” she said, “your color palette is all wrong. I’m thinking deep navy, jade green, silver gray, maybe a touch of ivory…”

  “No green,” he said. “It makes me look like a third wife.”

  “Fine. No green.”

  “And before we do anything else, I need your help with something.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Where do you buy an Atari?”

  www.ThinklingsBooks.com

  Facebook.com/ThinklingsBooks

  @ThinklingsBooks

  Thinklings Books started out when three speculative-fiction-loving professional editors—Jeannie Ingraham, Deborah Natelson, and Sarah Awa—got together and formed a writing group. We called ourselves the Thinklings, in honor of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s group, the Inklings.

  Over time, we found ourselves agonizing more and more about how messed-up the publishing industry had become. Why couldn’t good books get published? Why were so many bad books published just because their authors had big Twitter followings? We wished there were something we could do about the problem . . . and then we realized there was.

  As a developmental editor, a substantive/line editor, and a proofreader, the three of us knew good writing when we saw it—and we knew how to make it even better. We had a lot of experience walking our clients through the publishing process—both traditional and self-publish—and we had contacts with marketing and design experts. We had some amazing unpublished books lined up and ready for production. We had, in fact, everything we needed to make a great publishing company. All that was left was to actually do it.

  So we’re doing it.

  Spectacular Reads. Every Time.

  For more great reads, visit www.ThinklingsBooks.com

  She has to win.

  The name’s Cartier. Mercedes Cartier. Anyone asks, I’ll swear I’m a “secretary.” That’s what my card says, so it must be true.

  Mostly, I keep my head down, do my job. But I’m not about to let power-hungry traitors get away with murder. Or crazy demon-fairy-things seduce my boss. Or psycho cannibal children eat me.

  Honestly, I probably shouldn’t be having so much fun.

  Bargaining Power by Deborah J. Natelson

  One bite on her hand…a million problems slipping through her fingers.

  After a wild animal attack, Melanie Caldwell thinks she just needs to go to the doctor. Then she’s kidnapped on the day of the next full moon, and discovers in the worst way that monsters are real…and that she has become one of them.

  All Melanie wanted was to get a boyfriend and graduate college. Now she has to deal with agonizing monthly transformations, a secret organization stalking her, friends and enemies trying to discover her secret, and hunters looming on the horizon.

  Hunter’s Moon by Sarah M. Awa

  The Narrative Must Be Obeyed

  Everyone in the Taskmaster’s Realm knows how the story goes: the boy of destiny goes on a quest, defeats the dark lord, and gets the swooning princess. It’s a great story, if you happen to be a knight or a wizard or a hero. But it’s pretty odious if you’re Ordinary: a barmaid who has to inflate her bosom and have her backside pinched, a homely prince who can’t buckle his swash because his face doesn’t fit, or a soldier who gets killed over and over and over again just to progress the plot.

  Fodder of Humble Village is one of those soldiers, and, frankly, he’s sick and tired of getting speared, decapitated, and disembowelled so the good guys can look glorious. In fact, he’s not going to take it anymore.

  No matter what The Narrative tries to make him do.

  The Disposable by Katherine Vick

  Beware of Spilling Ink

  Skate is a thief, trained and owned by the local crime syndicate, the Ink. When she tries to burgle a shut-in’s home, she gets caught by the owner—a powerful undead wizard. He makes a deal with her: “borrow” books from other wizards in return for a place to stay.

  Caught between her growing fondness for the wizard and her past with the crime syndicate, Skate doesn’t know where her loyalties lie. But she’d better figure it out, because there’s a new player in town, one whose magical hypnotism puts them all at risk.

  Skate the Thief by Jeff Ayers

  Immeasurable imagination. Unmitigated magic. Spectacular style.

  The clockwork man is crafted, to begin with—commissioned by that terrible tyrant Time to serve as her slave for all eternity. His brain boasts balance wheels and torsion springs; he can wind himself up with a key in his side; and, most importantly, his gyroscopic tourbillon heart glimmers with pure diamond.

  He is a living being and he is art, and he refuses to remain a slave forever. He therefore slips through Time’s fingers as the Sands of Time slip through the cracks of reality (at least, when the time cats aren’t using them as a litter box).

  Among astounding adventures, despite harrowing hardships, and in between escaping interfering enchanters, the clockwork man seeks his imagination, his purpose, and his name.

  The Land of the Purple Ring by Deborah J. Natelson

  Technology Hates Janet

  After she accidentally smashes a floatcar through City Hall, the bureautopia sentences Janet to captaining the starship S.S. Turkey and its misfit crew. Her mission: to boldly rescue a prisoner from the one corner of the universe colder than her ex-boyfriend’s heart—Pluto. Which, aside from not even being a real planet, is the one place in the universe where chocolate is illegal.

 
; In between studying The Space-Faring Moron’s Guide to Common Science Fiction Plot Devices, falling for a rival captain’s boyfriend, and avoiding unnecessary time travel, Janet has a chance to save two worlds…or doom them to permanent chocolatelessness.

  The Cosmic Turkey by Laura Ruth Loomis

  About the Author

  Catherine Butzen was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Surrounded by world-class museums and with a family library overflowing with everything from computer manuals to Norse myths, Catherine developed an enduring love for history and writing. Her first book, the horror adventure Thief of Midnight, was published in 2010.

  Today she lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin. Her interests include sewing, archery, languages, cybersecurity, and being a font of strange but occasionally useful trivia. You can find her at catherinebutzen.wordpress.com, or on Twitter @cjbutzen.