Page 10 of Dark Shaman: Eternal Hope (The Children Of The Gods #100)
ELUHEED
T he large Boston fern was heftier than Eluheed had expected, its fronds brushing against his face as he maneuvered through the harem's corridors.
The pot alone had to weigh thirty pounds, and with the soil and root system, he was carrying at least sixty pounds of an excuse.
But it was a good excuse—one that would get him exactly where he needed to go.
"Lady Areana requested this for her private sitting room," he told the guard stationed at the entrance to the first level's private quarters. The man, one of the regulars who'd seen Eluheed tend the gardens countless times, barely glanced up from his post.
"She's in the library with the others," the guard said, which Eluheed already knew. He'd waited specifically for this time, when the ladies would be occupied with their book restoration project.
"I've just been there and showed her the plant, and she asked me to place it in her bedroom." Eluheed shifted the pot in his arms, pretending it was heavier for him than it was. "Do you need me to go back and get a note from her?"
He wasn't lying. Areana had actually asked him to put the plant in her apartment, but only after he'd suggested it, explaining how crucial greenery was to a sense of well-being.
"No need." The guard waved him on. "Don't take too long."
"Of course not."
The private quarters were through a set of ornate double doors that opened into a beautiful anteroom, which thankfully wasn't decorated in Navuh's preferred palette of black, white, and splashes of deep red. This was Areana's domain, and everything was soft, tasteful, and inviting.
The ceilings were higher than in the rest of the harem, probably four meters tall if not more, with crown molding that appeared to be hand carved. Everything spoke of wealth and soft indulgence.
Eluheed crossed the anteroom into the seating area, his footsteps muffled by thick Persian rugs. He couldn't see cameras, but he was sure they were tracking his movements. Hopefully, there were none in the bedroom.
He had to believe that Navuh drew the line at surveilling his and Areana's bedchamber. He also suspected that was where the entrance to the secret tunnel was located.
The bedroom was massive, dominated by a four-poster bed that could have comfortably accommodated six.
The walls were adorned with pale silk wallpaper featuring a subtle pattern of vines and leaves.
Eluheed set the fern down carefully on the floor, then straightened, rubbing his lower back as if the weight had strained it, just in case there were cameras in the bedroom as well.
This gave him the perfect excuse to walk around the room, stretching and examining the space from different angles. "Where would you like to live?" he murmured to the plant, playing his role even though no one was watching. "Perhaps in that corner where I can put you under a daylight lamp?"
As he circled the room, he paid careful attention to the walls. The silk wallpaper was perfectly applied everywhere.
Except— there .
Along the north wall, near what appeared to be a built-in bookshelf, the pattern didn't quite align.
It was subtle, the kind of thing that could easily be explained by moisture warping from the recent floods.
The seam where two pieces of wallpaper met showed a gap of perhaps two millimeters, and the molding at the base had a similar discontinuity.
Eluheed got closer, pretending to examine whether the corner was a good location for the large plant.
The bookshelf was built into the wall, its shelves filled with leather-bound volumes that looked purely decorative.
The proportions were off. The bookshelf was shallower than it should be, given the wall's thickness.
His fingers itched to press along the seam, to search for whatever mechanism might open what he was increasingly certain was a hidden door.
But the fear of alarms kept him still. Navuh might not have cameras in his bedroom, but that didn't mean there weren't other security measures.
Pressure sensors, infrared beams, and who knew what else?
"I think you'll be happiest over there," he told the fern, carrying it back to its original position. "If Lady Areana doesn't like it, I can move you later."
He spent another few minutes adjusting the plant's position and picking off a few dead fronds. He still needed to bring the daylight lamp, which would give him another excuse to come up here. But the problem of the potential alarm remained, and he didn't know how to solve it.
As he headed out, an idea struck him. Hassan, the engineer overseeing all the restoration work, would have the architectural plans of the harem. He had to have them in order to supervise the restoration work. The question was whether he would be willing to show them to Eluheed.
The excuse came to him fully formed, so perfect he almost smiled. The indoor garden's irrigation system had been damaged in the earthquake, and he needed to understand the drainage patterns to prevent future flooding of the plant beds.
Nodding to the guard on his way out, he even received a grunt of acknowledgment. The man had no idea he'd just allowed someone to scout what might be the only escape route from this underground prison.
Hassan's office was on the sixth level, and it was now the command center for the restoration efforts that were still going on despite the residents moving back in.
Eluheed found the engineer bent over a tablet, comparing something on the screen to a physical blueprint spread before him.
"Hassan," he called from the doorway. "Do you have a moment?"
The engineer looked up, his weathered face showing the fatigue of weeks of non-stop work.
"Elias." Hassan straightened, stretching his back much as Eluheed had pretended to do earlier. "What can I do for you?"
"I'm concerned about the irrigation system in the indoor garden on the second level." Eluheed stepped into the cluttered office. "The earthquake damaged some of the drainage pipes, and while Tony and I repaired what we could, I want to make sure we're not creating future problems."
Hassan nodded. "Water damage is insidious. It can take months or even years to show up. What specifically concerns you?"
"I need to understand how the water flows through the structure." Eluheed moved closer to the blueprint on the table. "If we're overwatering or if there's inadequate drainage, we could cause problems for the levels below."
"Smart thinking." Hassan pulled out a roll of blueprints from a tube beside his desk. "You can find the complete plumbing and drainage systems in these."
"Great." Eluheed lifted the tube and walked over to one of the tables that wasn't overly cluttered. "Do you mind if I take a look over here? I don't want to take your time."
Hassan waved a hand. "Go ahead. Just put them back in the tube when you are done. The moisture level in the structure is still too high, and I don't want the blueprint pages to stick to each other. We only have two sets of those."
So, there was another set. That was good to know.
Eluheed spread the blueprints out and started leafing through them one by one, then going back to look at them again. "I'm trying to understand what I'm looking at," he murmured to excuse his interest in pages that had nothing to do with drainage. Especially the structural plan of the first level.
The area he'd identified in the bedroom was marked as "structural support," but it was far too large for a simple load-bearing column. It was rectangular, about three feet by seven feet—the size of a doorway and a small landing.
"Why are you looking at the plans for the first level?" Hassan asked.
"I want to make sure we're not creating problems for the lord and lady's quarters."
"Water usually doesn't climb." Hassan chuckled. "But I can't really say that after what happened here. The water definitely climbed." He walked over to a pile of tubes and pulled out another blueprint.
"The first level is actually the most protected," Hassan explained, spreading out the new blueprint. "See this reinforcement here? And here? The whole level could withstand significant water pressure without failing."
Eluheed studied the plans intently, no longer needing to feign interest. The "structural support" was clearly marked, and now he could see it connected to something labeled simply as "infrastructure access." The tunnel. It had to be.
"This support column seems massive," he commented, pointing to the area.
Hassan glanced at it and shrugged. "Original construction. Probably over-engineered. The whole structure is built like a bunker. Lord Navuh values his ladies' safety."
"Understandably," Eluheed murmured, continuing to trace the water pipes with his finger while memorizing every detail of that hidden space.
They spent another twenty minutes going over the blueprints, Hassan warming to his subject as he explained flow rates and pressure calculations. Eluheed asked enough intelligent questions to keep him talking, all while building a mental model of the escape tunnel's structure.
"You know, most people don't care enough to understand these systems." Hassan rolled up the blueprints. "They just want things to work." He rubbed his eyes. "Half my problems come from people who don't understand that buildings are living systems. Everything affects everything else."
"Like bodies," Eluheed suggested. "A problem in one area can cause symptoms somewhere else."
"Exactly!" Hassan's face lit up. "You understand. Buildings breathe, they settle, they respond to changes in temperature and humidity. Ignore that, and you get disasters like the flooding we just experienced."
Eluheed kept the chitchat going for a few minutes longer, talking about the repairs and building rapport with the engineer.
He still might need his help.
Hassan was a good man, competent and dedicated. Under different circumstances, they might have been friends.
When Eluheed returned to his room on the second level, he sat down at his desk, pulled out a notepad, and sketched what he'd memorized, translating the mental images to paper before the details could fade.
The first level's layout, the location of the suspicious wall section, and the dimensions of the "structural support" that was too large to be what it claimed to be.
He drew it from multiple angles, adding measurements Hassan had inadvertently provided.
The tunnel entrance was definitely hidden behind that bookshelf in Navuh and Areana's bedroom.
The question now was how to access it without triggering whatever security measures protected it.
The only one who could answer that question for him was Areana, but he couldn't just ask her if the door in her bedroom was rigged with an alarm.
The door to his room opened without warning, and Tony walked in. Didn't the guy ever knock?
Eluheed quickly covered his sketches with a book about medicinal herbs that he kept on his desk.
"Working on the garden plans?" Tony flopped onto the couch.
"Something like that." Eluheed casually closed the herb book to further hide the sketches. "What do you need, Tony?"
"A friend." Tony stared at the ceiling. "Tula barely looked at me during lunch.
Sometimes I wonder if she's pulling away.
She told me right from the start that she had no plans of getting attached to a human, but I thought it would change over time, and that she wouldn't be able to resist falling in love with me. "
"She might be protecting herself from heartache, or she might be still in the mode of pretending you two are not together even though it is no longer necessary in the harem."
Eluheed still caught himself being cautious with displays of affection for Tamira.
They'd been forced to act distant while residing in Navuh's mansion, not because of Navuh, who encouraged their relationship because he wanted them to produce a son he could claim as his own, but because of the servants and the need to maintain the fiction that Navuh was active with all of his concubines, and all the children born to them were fathered by him.
"I don't know." Tony sat up, running his hands through his hair. "But logic doesn't help when you're in love." He turned to look at Eluheed. "You are lucky. Tamira loves you despite you being human. How did you do that?"
Eluheed wasn't human, but Tamira had fallen in love with him before she had known that. Still, it wasn't something he could reveal to Tony. "Each person has a set of rules they live by. Tula might just be more pragmatic than Tamira."
"I suppose." Tony sighed. "I'm not giving up yet. I can't give up. What will happen to me if Tula says she doesn't want me anymore? Unless one of the others takes me on as her lover, I will be demoted to the servants' quarters on the lower levels."
That was an odd thing to be concerned about. If Tamira told Eluheed that she was done with him, his first thought wouldn't have been about his accommodations or about one of the others taking him on as a lover.
Did Tony really love Tula?
Or did he love the comfortable living conditions that came with being her lover?