Page 20 of Dark Shaman: Eternal Hope
"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 thesuspicious 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 toproduce 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?
9
CAROL
