Tomb Raider Emeritus: An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure (I Fear No Evil Book 6)

by Martha Carr

  “I know, and it’s good to have family who cares.”

  The word “family” lingered in Shay’s mind for a few seconds.

  Family? Is that what this is? Is that why I’m bothering to show this girl I have no relation to all this when I didn’t care about my blood family? Why I worry about her at school? Why I killed men to protect her?

  James taught me I could love, but with Alison, it’s a different sort of thing. Caring about someone else and wanting to improve them, rather than them being a partner or lover.

  Shay blew out a breath. She hated epiphanies. They were so annoying.

  Alison blinked. “Something wrong, Aunt Shay?”

  “Not really…just thinking. We already covered how you’re not gonna be a tomb raider. Maybe. Have you thought much about your plans for after school?”

  “Not sure, to be honest. I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about what I might do when I was an adult. I always thought being blind meant I couldn’t have a normal job.”

  Shay scoffed. “Screw normal jobs. You’re a half-Drow princess who can see souls. Get a cool job, not a normal job.”

  Alison laughed. “Like what, bounty hunting or tomb raiding?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sure you’ll figure something out, kid.”

  “And if I asked you to start training me as a tomb raider?”

  Shay snickered. “I’m sure your dad would have a few choice words for me, and a boot he’d stick up my ass.”

  “Then what about something just a little less dangerous? What about parkour?”

  “I don’t know, Alison.” The tomb raider rubbed the back of her neck. “That’s a lot of movement and a long way to fall.”

  Alison shrugged. “But I can do the pulse.”

  “Maybe we can talk about it in the future when we’ve got the vision artifact.” Shay laughed. “Then I can be the woman who taught the blind girl parkour.”

  “Is that better or worse than training a teen to be a tomb raider?”

  Shay shrugged, but her smile slowly faded.

  So teaching Alison is silly, but training Lily isn’t? Shit, I’ve brought her on tomb raids with me already. She can see, but maybe Alison would have been able to see those invisible ghosts in England with her powers.

  Damn it. I’m worried about Alison and making sure she’s safe, but I’m letting Lily live underground by her own choice. Wonder what she’s up these days? It’s been a while.

  She sighed.

  What a complicated damned world.

  A few hours later, Shay climbed a rolling ladder toward one of her stacks in Warehouse Four. She had a little additional background research she needed to do for a lecture at the university tomorrow. Her hand glided along until she found the title in question, and she pulled it from the stack and moved down the ladder.

  She turned to leave but stopped and glanced back over her shoulder with a frown, her thoughts from earlier in the day about Lily bubbling up again.

  Alison lost her parents but ended up with a rich if rough guardian and a beautiful and badass aunt. Lily only has those other kids.

  Maybe it’s not my business to give a shit about the girl, but I do, and the least I can do is help a little with her education.

  Shay walked over to a different section of the library. Time to grab a few books for Lily. Maybe she could stop by the tunnels and chat with her.

  2

  Shay smiled at the gathered students in the UCLA lecture hall. It was time to drop some more truth and open some minds. Maybe giving lectures wasn’t as exciting as slicing up a bunyip or taking on ghosts, but it was far less likely to end with her head bitten off or soul siphoned away. Always needed to look at the advantages and disadvantages.

  A lot of students here today, and even a professor or two. Not bad. My academic rep must be growing on campus. Badass killer. Badass tomb raider. Badass professor.

  A wide grin replaced her smile. Triple threat.

  The gathered students were all older than Lily and Alison. More than a few were older than Shay, but she found she had no less desire to pass on her hard-earned wisdom to them.

  The university was a place that was about your achievements, not your age. In a sense, it was similar to tomb raiding.

  “Religion, myth, history, legend,” Shay intoned. “We like to tell ourselves these things are different, how the categories vary in truth and meaning. That’s how scholars were taught to think for decades, but we know now that viewpoint was myopic to the say the least—and downright stupid in many cases.”

  Several students nodded their agreement. A few others frowned or laughed. Being provocative was always a good way to start a lecture. She’d started doing it more and more. What was the worst thing that could happen? Someone was offended? Big deal.

  Shay cut through the air with her hand. “But if Oriceran has taught us anything, it’s that we have no business blithely declaring what’s true and what’s a mere story, not anymore. We need to make sure we don’t ever again fall into the arrogant pattern of thinking we know with absolute certainty what the truth is and that we’ve uncovered all the relevant evidence. We can get close, but there might be some other piece of information out there we don’t know about. That should always be at the back of our minds, taunting us. In a world where magic is real, the possibilities are endless.”

  The eager students in the front row leaned forward, their eyes locked on her. Even though the lectures weren’t for credit, it seemed like more students attended each new session. Shay couldn’t help but be pleased with that. It was always pleasant to be reminded she was good at something other than kicking ass and snatching old artifacts out of moldy dungeons.

  Maybe if I’d known about this when I was a teen, I wouldn’t have spent ten years killing people and thinking that was the only thing I was good at.

  “We know now that a number of the ancient myths we associate with the religions and folk beliefs of cultures worldwide are based on rock-solid historical truth, like most of what we called history until a few decades ago.” Shay pressed a button on the remote in her hand. The PowerPoint slide with her lecture title An Indian Atlantis: A Revised History Examination of Old Dwarka was replaced by a map of southern Asia and the Middle East. An island was marked just off the western coast of India.

  Shay nodded toward the screen. “India is one of the oldest centers of civilization on Earth. Setting aside our previous archaeologist examinations of the ruins of ancient cultures there, we also have various Hindu scriptures and epics providing evidence.

  “Before Oriceran, most non-Hindu scholars interpreted these sources as mere metaphors or reinterpretations of non-supernatural events, but we now know that at least some of these events did occur, and were magical in nature. Although there remains significant controversy about the exact meaning and truth of specific incidents in ancient legend and religion, we can’t, no matter our personal beliefs, so easily set aside traditional explanations of events without risking missing out on the fundamental truth of ancient events.”

  She advanced a slide, revealing an elaborate image of the blue-skinned Lord Krishna sitting on a throne with a flute, a satisfied smile on his face.

  A few images here and there were the spice of a lecture, but like a meal, too much spice could make things hard to swallow. She preferred to rely on her words.

  Shay nodded toward the slide. “An ancient myth speaks of a mighty city, Dwarka, off India’s Saurashtra coast. A modern city bears that name, but this was an older city, that I’ll refer to as Old Dwarka. The city was on an island that was alleged to have earned the wrath of Lord Krishna around four thousand years ago. As a result of his displeasure, he let the entire island sink into the Arabian Sea as a lesson to all who would make a mockery of their dharma, which I’ll horribly simplify here and reduce to the right way of living according to the cosmic order. So, this was, in a sense, a city being punished for being sinful if you want to think of it that way.”

  The ever-eager Mary
, who was sitting in the front row, shot her hand up.

  “Yes, Mary?”

  The girl furrowed her brow. “And there’s no overlap between this and the legend of Atlantis? It’s not just the other legend being reworked to fit in with local culture? The parallels are amazing.”

  Shay shook her head. “Some scholars in the past argued that it was the result of some sort of cultural diffusion via Macedonian transmission of existing Greek legends of Atlantis, but the details are different, and now we know for certain that these refer to discrete events which just happened to be similar. The timing of the appearance of the legends and the events they reference is different.

  “If you think about it, there’s a lot of water on the Earth, and the oceans are pretty deep. Even if you ignore cities being teleported wholesale using magic and that kind of thing, there’s just a lot of land that the oceans have swallowed, and we’re now just finding out about it. Atlantis and Dwarka aren’t the only cities lost to the hungry maw of the sea.”

  Shay advanced a slide. A radar satellite image highlighted a submerged island just off the coast of India.

  “Thanks to modern technology, we now know there’s definitely a lost city in the sea near the present-day Dwarka. Originally, archaeologists thought the cities were part of the same settlement, but more recent data indicate that the sea ruins have numerous architectural and other material differences that reveal they are somewhat independent sites. There was a clear and cataclysmic break in the material and social nature of local civilization, which is consistent with the sudden sinking of an island containing a city-state as detailed in the legend.

  “Ancient cities had a lot more than just buildings, people, and livestock, especially powerful and advanced ancient cities, though, so I’m going to talk about what I think you are really interested in.” Shay advanced a slide to a picture of piles of jewels, idols, and gold.

  The students murmured and let out a few appreciative laughs. One frat boy in the back clapped.

  “Now for the fun part.” Shay grinned. “As I hinted, the island and city didn’t just go down with a few boring buildings and some sheep. The legends state they went down with a pile of Lord Krishna’s treasure. This was alleged to have been purposeful to reflect his concern over the shortsightedness of the inhabitants.” She shrugged. “That said, very little of said treasure has been recovered in the decades since the discovery of the older city.”

  A student raised his hand in the back. Shay pointed at him.

  “How do we even know there is any treasure?” the student asked. “I mean, anyone can claim there’s treasure somewhere, but that doesn’t mean there is.”

  “Good question, and good point. They have found just enough to make them think there is more, especially in terms of precious metals and jewels. Given the nature of magic and people’s different understandings concerning magical artifacts at different points in history, we can’t be certain that magical items weren’t looted from the site previously. Some magical surveys have suggested residual pockets of magic energy that might be associated with artifacts, which naturally leads us to ask about what else can we glean from ancient sources about this mysterious lost city?”

  Shay walked over to her lectern and picked up a vacuum-sealed bag containing an old and yellowed tome with an elaborately decorated cover depicting several Hindu gods and demons in battle, with a few vimanas in the sky raining down lightning. Gold and silver-inscribed Sanskrit writing decorated the front.

  I can’t believe I got this for only fifty pounds. Almost feel bad for the poor sucker who sold it to me. Talk about a steal.

  She held up the book. “This is four hundred years old. Our country isn’t even that old.”

  A collective gasp swept the audience.

  “But even after thinking about how old it is, it’s important to realize this is just a hand-copied version of a far more ancient text. This book was discovered in a tiny little bookstore in London. The owners thought it was a copy of the Rigveda and never bothered to get it translated, which was unfortunate for them. It was recovered by a…freelance collector who had it translated. She discovered that it provides previously unrevealed details of the events leading to the sinking of old Dwarka.”

  Yeah, don’t want to let these students know I have a massive hidden library of ancient books. That might raise a few too many questions about how a newly minted professor could afford something like that.

  “The book suggests that the sinking of Old Dwarka was less a direct punishment of Lord Krishna, but rather the result of the people and non-divine beings involved ignoring his warnings about following dharma. Thus, their actions led to the same outcome.

  “Interestingly, the tale related in this book is one that I think any modern person, magical or otherwise, would find familiar. There were multiple factions in the ancient society, with increasing tensions between two of the main ones in the decades preceding the sinking. That is to say, there was no sudden cataclysm, but more a slow-motion disaster that people could have seen and avoided.”

  Shay set the book down, rested an elbow on the lectern, and nodded up at a new slide revealing a rather stylized battle involving everything from chariots to a saucer-shaped vimanas performing a strafing run with blue and orange lightning bolts.

  “The book doesn’t detail the exact nature of the tensions, only that they concerned the disposition of a rare resource. Some scholars suggested it might be something like adamantine. Others have suggested unusually powerful magical artifacts and who should be using them. In any event, even if we don’t know what they were fighting about, we do know that in the end, they formed two opposing armies and waged a final massive battle using powerful magic, probably some of the strongest in the world at that time.”

  The next PowerPoint slide was simple and straightforward: a mushroom cloud. Maybe it wasn’t all that accurate depiction of the aftermath of the battle, but it got the point across.

  Silence choked the lecture hall. The audience was hanging on her every word.

  Yeah, I’m good.

  “Powerful elemental magic was used by both sides, but according to the book, which recounts the stories of a few survivor-refugees, the spells on both sides were more effective than expected because of synergistic interactions. Massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions helped sink the island, and also raised the level of the sea to swallow what was left. So, the story ends like so many on this planet end, with short-sighted greed destroying everyone involved. No winners. No losers. Only a handful of survivors.”

  Shay nodded to the book. “We’re just beginning to untangle the truth of those long-ago events, but there’s still a lot to learn.” She took a deep breath. “Now, do you have any questions?”

  Mary raised her hand. “You just talked about elemental magic, but now that we have wizards, witches, and Oricerans, can’t they help reveal the exact nature of the magic? Not that I want them to use the same spells, but if they could tell us more about the magic used, then we’d get closer to the truth of how the city and island were destroyed.”

  Shay shook her head. “Most magical people aren’t all that interested in the site, and even then, it’s not that easy for a wizard to figure out the kind of magic used in a battle thousands of years ago. Initial investigations have confirmed that powerful magic was used on the old city and the island, but that’s all we know.”

  A huge male student Shay didn’t recognize raised his hand in the back.

  “Yes?”

  “So, like, you mentioned the treasure earlier. Are you saying that there could be piles of gold or super-powerful magical artifacts there, and no one has found them yet?”

  Shay nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. The thing is, even with magic to help, archaeology, let alone underwater archaeology, can be hard. Damned difficult, even. There hasn’t been much interest in exploring the site, even though some are worried about curses or other dark magic that might have been left over from the destruction of the isla
nd.”

  He frowned. “But curses are BS, right?”

  The tomb raider shook her head. “Some are, but a lot aren’t. Many archaeologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries got lucky that the low level of magic on Earth limited the power of the curses associated with some of the sites they investigated. For example, if Tut’s tomb had been found in the modern magical environment, every last person associated with that dig would most likely have been dead within days.”

  Most of the class gasped at that.

  Mary shook her head. “It’s just strange to think about how much more there is still to learn about this world.”

  Shay nodded. “That’s exactly what I want you all to take away from these lectures. Remember, you should be happy that we found out about Oriceran. Happy that there’s a whole new frontier of knowledge to challenge your mind. Also remember that although many myths and legends have turned out to be true, there’s no guarantee that they all are.”

  Several more hands shot up, and Shay grinned.

  Damn. I love this.

  Shay chuckled as she walked toward the parking lot. The modest sedan she had driven to the university was a far cry from her Fiat. She was half-tempted to just start driving the sports car and feed everyone the same line she’d once given her friends—that a rich boyfriend had given it to her—but she decided driving another car to the university would be a better bet.

  If there was one lesson Shay had internalized in her life, including her decade as a brutal killer, it was that the more ornate a lie, the easier it was to see through it. People craved the easy to understand, the banal. Anything that stepped outside those boundaries upset their carefully balanced world and made them start wanting to look deeper.