The al-Busiri family had owned these long stretches of land for generations. Their ancestors were warriors who patrolled the land and its bounty of harvest like a deterrent to foreigners.
It took an entire dynasty of falling to bribes and failings of character to steal their titles, a war to steal their land, and a bastard grandchild, through an omegan lineal line no less, to bring wrath upon them.
Their story was sad but none answered her recruitment missive.
The home's above-ground flooring was for greeting businessmen, selling their commodities, and welcoming their friends with food. Tables and well-crafted gaming with small pieces for money. Behind the home was their garden, flush with green fertile land that grew every fruit and vegetable the people in the inner city desired.
And so among this greeting room, where their walls let cooling air breeze through, Mshairi Orakpo settled in. He yelled at his son to bring the drinks and his young but foolish spouse to bring the food as he said, "Diuru, my son and his husband will be bringing you--"
"No need," the scarred man cut in. His body pushed the chair back so that he could stare the older man down. With a few wrinkles and his white hair, his voice wizened with age. But the man no longer needed a boastful voice. Everyone knew what he was capable of. He gestured to Nabel. "I know that the relieving servants will be entering dock soon but there is limited space--"
"Ah, my brother has beaten me to the chase!"
Nabel felt his knees shake as his eyes jumped between Mshairi Orakpo and Ta'ui Malahi, the Patriarch of the Malahi clan and not one to show his face often. His eyes dropped to the ground. He was dead. He knew it. His life would end as soon as his feet left the room. The words said at court that day were peddled to him from various factions, so maybe he was a bit greedy in trying to appeal to them all at once. But who said hard work didn't also deserve rewards, hm? What was said in the scriptures? Greed makes you dumb, gluttony makes you enemies, but laziness always leads you astray.
It wasn't his fault!
His clumsy son and inept husband tripped into the room then and he had to turn away. All of his bloodline would die tonight. He knew it!
Until he heard the familiar gentle footsteps of his son Elijah.
His crown jewel!
They may not have had money but his omega son's calla lily skin shown, like the glowing midnight sky and his beaded hair made music as his graceful movements went from one end to the next end of the room. He felt tears well up in his eyes. They were saved!
"Who is this little gem?" Diuru Orakpo said with a shark grin. "I imagine he must be your son but from you?"
"Yes, yes," Nabel crowed, while wringing his hands before waving his son towards him. The omega crept into the room with a wary expression, but he yanked the older boy to his side. "Much of my wealth has been spent in educating him in the ways of the land, the greatness of our Empire, and the greatness of the bloodlines who have won such a prize."
"You mean to suggest this boy is on equal par to our families," Ta'ui said pointedly.
And Nabel felt his soul crack.
Diuru Orakpo laughed. He said, "The man thinks his children are capable of great things. I'm sure it is something all fathers console themselves with. Dreams are easy to make up."
The crack spread.
"Perhaps we should retire, there's a new king in town!"
The men laughed, and Nabel felt his soul shatter as his ghost flew out of his body.
Elijah tugged at his robe and said, "We have a client who wishes to scope out the rooms for a shipment."
Nabel sighed. "Make sure they have money first and take your brother with you."
Both his sons and his son's spouse skittered off like bugs, and he knew that the men were right. He pulled out a chair for Ta'ui and bowed his head as the two began to speak like old friends instead of enemies who had worked a majority of the last few decades to end the other's prosperity.
"I hear your son's twins were able to get added to the books. Congratulations!"
"For a child of my bloodline to lack the protection of the gods? It was a terrible thing for me but worse for my son, yet, as we all know, the Empress knows best. It was not the time then."
"Indeed! Indeed not."
"A congratulations are in order for you as well, I hear. Babatu's omega son marries into the royal family and adds to your bloodline."
"It does indeed! The gods have blessed us greatly."
Nabel leaned against the wall and cricked his neck.
It was going to be a long day.
"If you could follow me," the omega said to Jata Niara as he led her through the exterior corridor of the small house opened up to a decline with spiralling stone stairs winding down into an unseen nothingness. "There will be light halfway down. It only looks as though it can't be seen."
The alpha was not one to be frightened of the dark, but the omega clicked their tongue and then began dragging her by her waistclothes into the nothingness below. She felt her feet patter down the steps one by one as the nothingness consumed him and then her but just as she was warned the lack of sight was brief.
Incensed wax lanterns posted along the corridors with corridors leading in various directions like a maze. The only thing that made the walls and doors recognizable was the painted stones in the walls glittering in the light.
Their current path was full of blue.
"You must also be an al-Busiri then?" She said, breaking the quiet of only their footsteps.
The omega sighed and then tossed a look over his shoulders, his beads clinking and echoing in the corridor like light bells. "My name is Elijah of the al-Busiri clan. Our family has owned this land for many generations and I was raised within these halls."
She was not one to miss context or be unaware of what the al-Busiri did. There was no need to ask where his omega father or mother was.
Just the idea of it alone sounds frightening for any child to experience, it reminded her of her own trials in the Orakpo family. No need to upset him and possibly ruin her investigation.
"Do you not have any alpha brothers?"
"I have two," Elijah laughed. "But one of my brothers has married out of my family and my father is disgraced by it. He has no ill will against the family but believes my brother has lost his dignity as a man and shamed our ancestors by leaving our clan behind. My other brother is useless. I feel bad for my brother-in-law who is married to someone who has a brain but forgets that it has a purpose."
She noted that he a lot to say about his brothers. Words that he may not have normally been able to speak except within earshot of a stranger.
"And he wouldn't help you, lead a client through these halls," she said carefully, not wanting to make the omega uncomfortable. Still, she couldn't imagine leaving any of her omega siblings to wander into an underground building alone with an alpha stranger. Not even Khaemwaset. "Does this happen often?"
"I tend to hand over alphas who leer at me greedily to my brother," Elijah said as they reached a corner where the walls went from blue to green. "You haven't looked anywhere but my eyes and my beads."
The beads were personally crafted with bright colors that reminded him of the feathers in multicolored birds and the fangs of a tiger. Drawings of creatures were displayed as if to tell a story.
"They're well-crafted."
"My omega father made them," Elijah said. "It was--the only thing he left me."
"Condolences."
"I don't remember him. There's nothing to console."
Jata Niara shuffled behind the omega quietly until Elijah said, "Here we are."
The area opened up to the same stones in the previous corridors but paved, smoothed down giving it a glistening look. She looked up as the gurgling water she had heard earlier hissed, and a distended portion of stone carried the sound. It had the makings of an aqueduct repurposed by a Sonhrai builder. The distended stone lowered into five sections where water could pour from overhead and fall down into holed stone that connected to water basins lining the other sides of the wall.
It was a clever system of ingenuity.
The omega continued to walk past the bathing area and the exterior fur bedding that she didn't have to guess its use until reaching a thick door with well-smithed bolts. This door alone was more expensive than a season of a laborer's pay and as it squealed open, it was much thicker than she presumed.
Nabel al-Busiri had vastly understated their wealth--or, as she remembered and should always be reminded, the riches of her family likely came from here.
A sick feeling sat at the bottom of her stomach.
"Let us know if any of them pull your interest," Elijah said pointedly as he closed the door behind her.
The fur bedding in the exterior was lined along the walls here with buckets against the wall. It should've smelled worse than what it was but instead it smelled of sweat and bodies.
A few of them stayed asleep while the few others whose eyes fell upon her looked up at her shivering in fear before their gaze dropped.
There was only foreigners trapped in these walls but such a feeling did not relieve her of the guilt. Her eyes kept skimming over the faces as if one of them would be recognizable in some way. As she turned around, her memory flashed.
The young omega wore a thin purple covering, his hair had been shorn, dirt crusted on his face, and nothing covered his lower body but the fur of his bedding. His big eyes and pouty lips were unbearably sad. She reached to thumb off the dirt from his face and heard Elijah speak, "If you want to pay for that one, he's fifteen gold coins. He's past his age ceremony by four years."
Somehow, he was even older than her by one year.
A ridiculous price but that was likely why they stripped him nearly naked. With the dirt smudged off, she could see a defined face under those round cheeks and thick lashes.
"I'll buy everyone here, and if you have any alphas, them too."
Elijah yanked the door open at those words, he said, angrily, "If you're playing around--!"
"I'm going to need their names, if they have associated clans, and their skillset," she repeated. This was also an easy source of recruits. No one needs to be ratted out and she could solve this issue quietly without anyone using this against her omega father. And the slaves may not feel indebted once they learn her identity, but they might not hate her either. "I'll return tomorrow. Make sure they're all cleaned and prepared to leave by then. I'll bring them clothing, presuming you already know the counts now."
"We do," Elijah slowly nodded. "This is going to be well over two hundred gold coins."
Cheaper than she expected.
Her Princess's salary was five hundred a year, not including the funds her omega father's maiden clan had, which was several times that. This wasn't even a dent.
Besides, it was their money after all.
"What is his name?"
"Srinivas, uh," Elijah gestured her to leave the room before he said more as the chattering within the room increased. The ones who could understand their language translated to the others. When the door shut, he continued on, his hands shakily locking the door, "Saavedra."
She sharply exhaled. "Commander Saavedra's relative?"
"He was thought to be killed in the accident that killed the commander with only Ari Saavedra as the survivor but--"
"That's why he's worth so much."
"Now that Commander Berman is set to be arrested," Elijah leaned forward and said lowly. "You're a gravedigger digging into a hooked trap if you take him."
Jata Niara smiled and then patted the omega's shoulders. He appeared earnestly worried. She did have one other question that needed to be asked, "Who built all of these basins? The stone flooring with holes? Ingenius."
"My brother built them," Elijah said with reddened cheeks. "But--they--I drew up the plans for them. We always had them here, but they were starting to fall apart, and they would get sick if they stayed here long enough. One of us has to learn how these things work to update them with what we have here."
Her eyes scrolled over the omega and then said, "May I see them?"
With a bit of hesitation, he looked over his shoulder and waffled between them before slowly nodding. "I have a few sheets that I could show you." and grabbed one of the wax lanterns to carry along with.
He led her through the corridors again but this time it was truly a maze. From blue to green, then red to yellow, and green again, until they reached a homely, open area with cut-off rooms and a much simpler bathing system in between.
Shaking a door furthest to right open, Elijah hooked the lantern in the exterior where there was a table with used cotton and scribbles written over them. The extensive mapping drawn on the slips of cotton were well-measured, thick, and easily understood lines.
Although much of this was rough and not entirely doable within the context of the scribbles, the imagination and ideas were strong.
An idea of her own started to come together.
"How long would it take to build a system like this underground housing?"
Elijah scoffed. "This took generations for it to function as well as it does. And half of it was done by me. It would take years just to start the foundations."
Her hands tapped against the table, and then she said, "What if we take our time and build it section by section, like blocks, easily carved off. We'll need thick columns and breathing holes that won't obstruct the stability above."
She balanced the gold pouch hitched inside of her waistclothes to weigh it mentally. It was about three hundred gold give or take twenty and tossed it onto his thick fur bedding with a plomp.
The omega was flabbergasted. "Why? I don't understand."
"I prefer working in the darkness," she confessed and then she flipped through more slips of the designs. There were other ideas outside of the underground housing like better aqueducts, smaller fountains, and even filtration. She stumbled around the idea of allowing the outer reaches of the Empire more access to clean water but much of their research was taken "under review" by the Carolingian Empire when their plague struck. Elijah's writings might be the only references to those works in the entire empire. "I think that we could work well together. Very very well together."
"I'm sorry," Elijah smiled weakly. "I don't even know your name."
"You should pack your things and be prepared to leave, tomorrow," She neatly stacked his slips on his table. "Hide these from your father and your brother. Let me know by tomorrow evening if you're not interested."
"And--" the omega paused and then began wringing his hands. "--if I am interested? Possibly?"
"You won't be seeing your family for a long while," she said. "Or leave the darkness."
"I don't mind the darkness."
"Good. It's not as though you'll be alone."
The last thing she remembered was his shy nod.