Tomb Raider: The Ten Thousand Immortals Read Free Page B

Sam believes it too. Sam believes that something happened between her and Himiko on Yamatai. She believes that Himiko infected her somehow and changed her life.”
    Lara was not a doctor; there was nothing she could provide medically or scientifically to heal Sam.
    Lara was a historian, an archaeologist. She understood myth and legend. She understood history and ritual and mysticism. She understood magic and wonder and belief. She knew about fear and faith.
    Maybe, just maybe, there was more than one way to help Sam. An unconventional way. Something unorthodox. If there was, Lara was determined to find it.
    The Book.
    Lara would begin her research with the Book.
    She put down her plate with its half-eaten sandwich and walked along the wall of bookshelves that ran the entire length of the large room. The Book wasn’t there. She walked back a step. The books moved loosely on the shelf. It hadn’t been put back in the wrong place; it simply wasn’t there.
    Lara thought back to when she had last looked at the Book. She couldn’t remember. Was it yesterday? She glanced at the long, low coffee table in front of the couch. Her laptop was there, but not the Book. Bemused, Lara checked her bedroom. She seldom worked in there, preferring to compartmentalise, to keep relaxation and study separate. The only books beside her bed were a couple of lightweight novels.
    “Where the bloody hell are you?” she asked, striding back into the living room. She sank onto the couch and dropped her head, trying to think. She smiled. It was right there on the floor. It was right where she had dropped it when the car backfiring had shocked her into the panic attack.
    Lara picked up the Book, tucked her feet up on the couch, and made herself comfortable. She knew it was going to take some time.
    The Book was often Lara’s first port of call. It was a collection of bits and pieces of information: notes, drawings, clippings, and references collected and added to over a long period of time. It drew together different sources, making connections, asking questions, and posing hypotheses. It had passed through any number of hands, had been annotated over and over again, and was a rich and wonderful resource.
    Sometimes the Book posed more questions than it offered answers. Nevertheless, it was Lara’s go-to research tool of choice. It was invaluable.
    Lara looked first at the section on spiritual transference. There were a number of myths and legends about an entity passing from one body to another through history. The chapter was cross-referenced with immortality. Beings and entities obsessed with life everlasting often took possession of a series of bodies in which to live. The spirit progressed through a succession of corporeal forms. Lara added some brief notes about Himiko, the Sun Queen of Yamatai.
    She skipped through the references to vampires and werewolves, but then came across a note on a person called Ares and a society called the Ten Thousand Immortals. She stopped for a moment. Ares was the Greek god of war. The Ten Thousand Immortals were an ancient Persian elite fighting force. Other than the name, there seemed to be no connection to the subject. A recent addition in the margin in red ink suggested the name was now used by some sort of secret society.
    Lara pulled her laptop off the coffee table and flipped it open. She typed “Ten Thousand Immortals” into the search field, and a page of results came up. She bookmarked the wiki page, and clicked on the link below it. It took her to a home page with a company or society banner. She bookmarked that page too, and moved on.
    The Book was full of anomalies: snippets misfiled among the pages, nonsensical cross-references that should be put right. There wasn’t time now, but she tried to devote some of her study to unscrambling the Book.
    Lara read about the Irish god Airmed, who could resurrect the dead. She read about Hé Qióng, the female deity of the Chinese eight immortals. She had