The God Collector

by Catherine Butzen

  The casualness of her tone didn’t quite fool Seth. “Theo,” he said softly. “I told you. I don’t have any memories for your art.”

  “I’m not asking for memories, Anhurmose.” His eyebrows shot up at that, and she put a hand on his arm. “And I’m not going to ask you for details, so please don’t…don’t look at me like that. This wasn’t some kind of seduction scheme. I just want to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “About the art. The story.” She let out a breath she didn’t even know she’d been holding, and her hand tightened a little. “Tell me about the shabtis, Anhurmose. Please.”

  He looked down at her. His first instinct was to say no—the secret must be protected at all costs, or his too-long life would be ended and the gods would have him. But… “Why?” he said finally.

  “Because it’s what I love.”

  He examined her, his eyes hooded in the dim light. Then, with a whisper of blankets and skin on cloth, he gathered her to him. Their bodies fit neatly together, her head against his shoulder, him staring at nothing.

  He told her.

  Magic had always been a part of his life, because it was part of Egypt. People believed in signs, spells, ritual incantations and the power of names and images. It was said that great priests and kings had known the art of making wax figures of their enemies and then destroying those figures to bring destruction on the enemies themselves. Those who could read, and were high enough to enjoy the privilege, studied in the kingdom’s great libraries, in hopes of obtaining that kind of power. Whenever the sky clouded and rain fell, everyone who could made ritual offerings to help the barque of the sun overcome the serpent who wanted to swallow it.

  But he’d never seen magic happen. People practiced with their wax figures and their incantations, but no matter how long he served in the pharaoh’s innumerable wars, he’d never seen spells destroy an army. No matter how people behaved when the rain began, the sun always came back. He believed, but in a perfunctory sort of way, the way he believed in the existence of dirt. It just…was. For a man who couldn’t read and relied on the priests to handle godly affairs, magic wasn’t something to be concerned about.

  He’d taken it for granted that his life would go the way he wanted, and that when he died, he’d have a good burial and an afterlife worthy of a loyal servant of the pharaoh.

  Then came disease, and Anhurmose had turned to magic when nothing else would help him.

  “Hearts,” he said. “Wax figures are too mutable, that was part of it, but the spirit needed something to—hold on to, I suppose. We put in the hearts of sacrificial animals.”

  “A life for a life,” she said softly. Their hands were entwined, and she ran her thumb over the edge of his.

  “Not quite. They say…” he frowned, looking for the right words, “…they say Khnum made the first people on his potter’s wheel. All of us are clay, at the bottom of it. But the heart is the center of it all, the thing that made us alive. And I think you can’t run blood through a heart that’s not your own. My brother might know, but after I died, I never saw him again.”

  He spun out the story for her. Two brothers wrapped up in a race against time, frantically searching for the grain of truth in centuries of religion and mysticism. Testing and refining, hoping and praying. And finally, they had a formula and a prayer that could do what was needed.

  “Can you tell me?” she said.

  With only a second’s hesitation he whispered the words of the prayer for her, and he watched her drink them in, “Khnum is my father, Neith is my mother… Ha ne sah en Merenptah…”She sighed and nestled into him.

  “I’d like to paint it,” she said.

  He made a hrrm noise, drawing a tired smile from her.

  “Though not if it’s going to cost anyone their soul.”

  “Don’t know if it will,” he murmured. “But being what I am gives me a healthy appreciation for charms and rituals.”

  “There are so many thesis papers begging to be written about this.” He chuckled at that, and she poked him in the shoulder. “Don’t tell me it’s never crossed your mind. Even if you just published your memories as theories, it could help expand people’s ideas of what Egypt—Kemet—was like. Isn’t that important?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But it’s not going to change anything. Not a lot of people actually care what happened four thousand years ago, Theo.”

  At that, her mouth twisted. Seth gently brushed back a tousled curl of her hair, looking into her eyes. “I know you do,” he said. “But no matter what I do, it’s all gone, Theo. A god with one worshiper is barely a god at all, and a nation with one citizen isn’t much better. I’d rather let people think of Kemet as dead and buried.”

  “Not dead, maybe,” she said, running her fingers over his shoulder. “Moved on. If you’re still alive, maybe the afterlife is real too. For them, anyway.”

  “I almost hope it isn’t,” he admitted in a low voice. “Maybe this is some sort of magic, or science, or…something. I don’t like the idea of facing Ammit and Anubis after four thousand years of hiding from them.”

  She pressed a kiss to his mouth, smiling against the skin as he made a little noise deep in his throat.

  He could feel his borrowed heart thumping under her hand, and wondered if she could too.

  “Well,” she said, “at least you can start your negative confession with ‘I have not lied to those who sought knowledge from me’.”

  “No, I haven’t,” he agreed. “It’s a nice change.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  For Set held in his heart great hatred for Osiris, and would not be swayed by words or by deeds. And when the rage was upon him, he slew him, and cut him into pieces to be scattered across the length and breadth of the land.

  ~Excerpt from the Rebirth Papyrus, circa 1390 BCE

  He was asleep, but he might have been dead. A strange pall seemed to lie over his left side, and the skin there was sunken and gray. Theo watched in silence, counting between each shallow breath, wondering if he might have had a stroke at some point.

  No, that couldn’t be it. What kind of clay-bleeding mummy man had a stroke? Carefully she oriented herself. North was that way, so— Ah.

  His sickly side faced west. To Egyptians the west was the realm of the dying sun, where gods of the dead dwelled and souls were brought for judgment. She remembered the creeping, stalking dog shadow and shivered a little. Zoology was not her department, but she’d bet anything that it had been a jackal.

  She knew enough to understand that Anubis wasn’t an evil god. He was a guardian of the dead and a patron of mummification, not some kind of satanic ghoul. But Seth had committed a sin against him and against the cosmic order of ma’at, dodging his influence and the land of the dead entirely. Maybe there was no specific commandment against living forever, but if Anubis was real he would be understandably annoyed about it.

  Yet Seth had trusted her despite the possibility of divine wrath. She remembered his low, soft voice reciting the incantation that had brought him back to life. One of the greatest discoveries in the history of humanity. The museum already had the inscription, the one written on the shabtis, but it was nothing without the prayer that went with it.

  The syllables of the language… Theo didn’t speak it, not really, but the syllables were like music and music was only a step away from color. She pinned each syllable to a color and painted them in the back of her mind, memorizing the matches and clashes and what they meant to her. She wasn’t going to share it, but she had to know. It was that simple.

  Despite everything, a smile crept across her face. If she still had a job when this was all over, Dr. Van Allen would be getting a hell of a mural from her.

  She wondered, almost idly, what the curator was doing. How would he handle another blow to the department? The first robbery had been bad enough, and now it l
ooked like his trust in Theo (if he’d ever had any) had been misplaced. The exhibit was ruined.

  The thought squeezed at her heart. First the mummy, now the shabtis, not to mention the jewelry.

  Jewelry. She frowned. That was the piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit. Mummy and shabtis, yes, united by magic and Seth. Jewelry? There was barely any jewelry listed among Number Three’s grave goods, thanks to what Seth had described as the “secrecy of sacrilege”. It was hard to gather valuables for a tomb when there wasn’t supposed to be a tomb at all. What little had been found was cheap clay and faience amulets, stuff that even as antiquities wouldn’t fetch much of a price and apparently had no connection to magic beyond the usual protective symbols. So why had it been taken? Or had it even been jewels from the burial, and not something else entirely?

  Dr. Van Allen wouldn’t talk to the press if he could avoid it. Letting people know exactly what had been stolen only guaranteed that the thief would take the items apart to prevent their being recognized. Better they be lost to an illegal collection than destroyed entirely. That was how Van Allen would see it, anyway.

  She needed to find out what was going on. Seth had to play the long game because he had no other option. He was going to outlive everyone and could afford to be patient. It had kept him alive, but it also meant he had learned not to think like a vulnerable human.

  Theo couldn’t afford to hide forever. She only had one lifetime, and she didn’t want to spend it as someone else. Falsely accused fugitives on TV always seemed to manage pretty well, but Theo wasn’t the A-Team type. There had to be a way to fix this without going that far.

  Seth hadn’t even blinked at the mention of jewelry. It was just one more part of a situation he had to escape. But it niggled at Theo, a discordant patch of olive drab in the middle of Starry Night. She needed to look into it.

  She pressed a kiss to his cool, sunken cheek and slipped off the couch. He didn’t even stir. If it hadn’t been for the slight rise and fall of his chest, he might have been completely dead. It wasn’t a face she’d anticipated when she hoped to meet someone, but it wasn’t one she regretted.

  His keys were in his jacket, where he’d dropped it. After a moment’s thought, she unlocked the door then used the keys to weigh down a piece of parchment on the spindly writing desk.

  She started to write in English, but stopped and smiled a little. Then, rearranging her grip on the pen, she carefully pieced out a few English words in the hieroglyphic alphabet.

  I’m going to ask some questions. Back soon.

  T.

  Then she made a quick bow to the standing gods and slipped the small tyet amulet off the shelf. It was supposed to be a woman’s symbol, after all, and she could use the luck. Wearing it would feel strange, but there was nothing wrong with carrying it in her pocket.

  Dr. Van Allen was a loner and a night owl. Rumor had it that he lived in a crypt, or possibly a basement laboratory with a body on the slab. Now that she had no access to the staff database, she had no way to find out where he lived. But he was also a curator with a pilfered exhibit, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. Easy bet that he was still at the museum.

  The question was, could she get to him?

  But for once she had a stroke of luck. The industrial park around the airport had been built decades ago, and though it didn’t see a lot of pedestrians, it did a lot of business. Pay phones had been scattered here and there on the long, unlined streets, and with so little foot traffic, few of the phones had been destroyed by casual vandalism. It’d do.

  The block around her was deserted, but she still pulled her collar up and glanced around nervously. She couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her.

  An automated voice, a little wavery through the old phone, greeted her, “You have reached the office of Dr. Wayne Van Allen. Who shall I say is calling?”

  She pitched her voice down a little. “Sophie Winslow, Clausen Insurance.”

  “Hold, please,” it said, and Theo smiled a little. It paid to know whom your boss dreaded.

  There was a click, and a familiar voice answered, “This is Dr. Van Allen. Is there a problem?”

  “Doctor? I’m sorry to disturb you so late, but this a very irregular case.”

  “I understand.” Van Allen’s voice was oddly worn, and Theo felt a twitch of sympathy for the cold curator. He might not be sociable, but he wasn’t a bad person, and she doubted he would enjoy the opportunity to be interrogated about his department’s loss. “What is it?”

  “The files your office sent for confirmation have been corrupted, and we need to double-check our records for the lost properties.” She tried to sound busy and harassed, which wasn’t hard. “Can you please confirm the item list?”

  There was a moment of silence. Papers shuffled. “I’m surprised. I thought you had that on file, Miss Speer.”

  Theo almost dropped the phone, but fought to keep her composure. “I’m sorry?”

  “I know my employees, Miss Speer. Even those accused of theft.” The voice was as cool and flat as ever. “Is there a reason you called?”

  “You’ve got to believe me, sir,” she said. “If I’d stolen them, I wouldn’t be calling you.”

  “If so, why did you run from the police?”

  “I made a mistake.” Was it true? She didn’t know. “I got scared.”

  “And what do you expect me to do?” he said calmly. “I assume you’re calling me—and not the authorities—for a reason.”

  “The jewelry…well…the jewelry doesn’t fit the thief’s pattern. I wanted to know what it was they stole.”

  Papers rustled again. “Some rather impressive examples from the Scythian exhibit.”

  Theo tried not to slap herself in the face. No wonder—Clausen didn’t cover the Scythian stuff. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Actually, it’s the only thing that does.” His calm was slightly eerie. It felt like a conversation they should be having in the cubicles of the loft, not while she was standing in the middle of a deserted industrial block. “The Scythians left us almost no literature, but their jewelry was unparalleled.”

  “I know, it’s gorgeous. I did some of the prep work for the brochure last year.”

  “It would’ve been a wonderful exhibit. But then, I’ve been saying that a lot lately. Who do you think is responsible?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. The Egyptian items were the real goal.”

  “And why do you think that?”

  She laughed a little, but her heart wasn’t in it. “How did I wind up answering your questions instead of asking them?”

  “I’m the one asking questions that need answering.” She could hear the doctor tapping his pen on the edge of the desk. “If you’re telling the truth, Miss Speer, why did he steal the Scythian gold?”

  “Cover. Make it look like a regular old burglary.” Theo tried to think. “Or maybe for the money, but I wouldn’t bet on it. The guy doing most of the robberies right now seems to be that Collector character, and he doesn’t strike me as the type that needs cash on hand. Whoever it is, though, if he knows what I know about Number Three’s grave goods, then he’s after more than just money.”

  “And what is that, exactly?”

  “It’s a mess, is what it is.” She took a breath as she tried to figure out how to phrase it. “It’s…it’s big, Doctor. Stolen artifacts, old religion, history being rewritten. Everything we know about Number Three is being turned upside down.”

  “That sounds suitably mysterious. And unlikely.” The doctor’s tone remained level. Apparently, even being called in the middle of the night by an employee on the run didn’t really faze him. “Granted, Egyptology spent most of the nineteenth century as scientific plundering, but things have moved along a little since then. We learn things through careful research and scholarly analysis,
not corpse robbing and midnight hijinks.”

  “Dr. Van Allen, if I could have learned this stuff in an incredibly boring and normal way, I would be thrilled beyond belief. You know how they say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing?”

  A pause. “Do you have any proof to offer?”

  “Yes.” She silently asked Seth to forgive her. “In Number Three’s tomb, there’s a hidden room behind a panel of Apep. It contains several shabtis and a pretty bad copy of the Coffin Texts. Get the museum’s Cairo team to check it out, and I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

  Another pause, longer this time, and she thought she heard the scratching of pen on paper. “It’ll take at least twenty-four hours to get a team to the site,” he informed her calmly. “Are you going to tell me how you came by this information?”

  “I know a guy.”

  “Miss Speer, you’re not precisely instilling me with confidence.”

  “Sir, I swear if you get our Cairo people on the job, they’ll find it.” She let out a breath, trying to settle her racing pulse. “That’s not the only thing I’ve learned. I need to talk to you—I’ve found some things that could lead us to Number Three.” For something to hurt the mummy so badly, it couldn’t be in responsible custody. And that meant that Dr. Van Allen, who’d rather see an artifact disappear than risk it being destroyed, didn’t know where the mummy was right now.

  “I must admit, hostage negotiation was not part of my preparation for this position,” he said. Theo could hear more papers shuffling in the background. “But THS203 is invaluable. Where would you like to meet?”

  “The museum,” Theo said instantly. “I know for a fact that there aren’t many cameras in the administrative wing. I’ll meet you at the west entrance in one hour.” She swallowed her fear and tried to keep her voice steady. “Please believe me—I don’t want to see Number Three get hurt.”

  “It’s a little late for that,” the doctor responded, his voice steady. “But I believe we share a goal in that respect. One hour.”

  The museum campus was dead and dark after nightfall. Dr. Van Allen might not want to see THS203 hurt any more than she did, but that didn’t mean she could just walk in and ask to see him. Security would be on high alert, and even if there were no cameras in the administrative section, it would be too easy to get caught.