The Beginning
There are moments when words arrive so absurd that thought simply stops.
For First Princess Victoria, this was one of those moments.
"Sister, you're an idiot, aren't you?"
A madwoman had burst into her office and flung the insult in her face. Unprecedented, of course. Victoria might wear the dark green coat and tricorn of her military rank, but her true standing was hardly that of some mere major. Save the Emperor himself, there was no one in the Empire more exalted, and no one dared treat Victoria lightly.
Did I mishear?
The pretty-faced intruder cursed her again, as if to confirm that she had not.
"I'm asking you. Are you an idiot or not?"
"Anais!"
Victoria had no choice but to admit that her own sister had just sworn at her. The bewilderment, however, had not passed. Had it been Sienna, she would only have turned the bitterness over in her mouth—so that thing has finally gone rotten—but the one coming at her now was not Sienna. It was Anais, the youngest.
A girl who had been gentle and innocent from childhood, and of whom Victoria had been rather fond. A month ago, or thereabouts, she had even counseled her on a matter of the heart. There had been a senior at the Academy, had there not, who weighed on her a little? Victoria could still see her clearly, fidgeting, face alight with excitement, and now she was driving curses into her. What rose was less anger than pity.
The eyes alone are enough. She is not in her right mind.
The pupils once likened to obsidian had already clouded, and the face that had always held a smile carried nothing now but venom.
"Tell me why I am an idiot. Is this about Earl Soan?"
"...That man has been working rather hard lately to get into your mother's good graces, yes."
"I know it must sting, watching the nobles who backed you fall away one after another, but I did not recruit him. You know I have little interest in building a faction. My uncles merely assist me in the business of government."
"That doesn't matter. This is about the morphine."
"That trifling thing is all that offended you?"
The medicine called morphine, which she had allowed into the military hospital only yesterday, by way of a favor. Allan Madoff. She had agreed solely because the loyalty that man put on display had been so commendably earnest, and there had been something pleasant, too, in the way he shielded Sienna, his liege, after his own fashion.
So she is sour because it benefits Sienna in the end. There is friction between those two, after all.
Victoria sighed, deciding she would have to soothe her. The abuse was unpleasant, but she could overlook it once. She could hardly brawl with a half-sister seven years her junior.
"Anais. It is no great thing. It is only opium."
"And if it isn't only opium?"
"It is opium. Dosing began yesterday. I inquired, and I was told the effect is merely decent."
"Decent...? The hospital hedged, afraid you'd be displeased if they praised something brought in by one of Sienna's people. The way I see it, it's probably—no. Not probably. I'm almost certain...! It isn't on the level of ordinary opium. It can't be."
Victoria did not answer.
"I browbeat nearly every hospital into blocking it, and you ruined that. There's no undoing it now."
Having convinced herself as she pleased, Anais closed her eyes as if all were already lost. Victoria found it strange, watching her sister sink into such despair. She had tried to stop morphine from being introduced? No one would have accepted it in any case. Was it not odd to go so far as to apply pressure merely to interfere?
"You are being oversensitive."
"Oversensitive...? You're the complacent one! ...Look at the psilocybin alone. Even I thought at first that it was only some peculiar mushroom. I sent herbalists out to find a similar variety, and in the end they found nothing. People died in the trials. Several of them. That was all."
"Wait. People died?"
"That isn't the point right now!"
What do I do, what do I do—Anais had begun to gnaw at her own nails. Only then did Victoria feel that something was amiss.
Thinking on it, had Sienna not treated Empress Yeonhwa, shut away in her chambers, and made her lively (to an excessive degree)? These days, it was said, she and His Majesty were utterly devoted to one another. Sienna could hardly have mastered pharmacology all at once, so there had to be some other secret.
But even so.
"Even if you are right, Anais, this is not a thing to rage over."
"What...?"
"Proper treatment of the wounded is the most important factor in holding morale. If a medicine works, one pays a fair price for it and takes it."
"No, right now you—! Ugh. Forget it."
Victoria only watched, pained, as her sister laughed without a trace of mirth. Her view had not shifted. It was still, to her mind, an oversensitive reaction.
Morphine is God.
So Sergeant Malik of the army had been repeating to himself, a man laid up in the military hospital for a month now. For all he knew, he had said it aloud. It hardly mattered. The Church was not about to come calling because he had offered morphine a little praise.
He belonged to the Imperial Third Artillery Regiment. With nowhere in particular to find work, he had enlisted, and army life had gone on well enough to satisfy him until the accident a month ago. An accidental detonation during gunnery drill. Two soldiers died. Malik alone barely came away with his life.
Not that he had come through whole. Shrapnel had lodged in his side, and his arm was so badly ruined it had to come off. The one comfort was that a knight, come running at an officer's request, had taken it in a single stroke, and so the amputation had at least been quick.
A month of hospital life had followed. What tormented Malik most was the pain at the wounds. Sometimes it hurt badly enough that he wanted to black out. He barely slept. What had pulled him up out of that suffering was morphine.
It ought to be about time by now.
Dosing was at noon. He had already checked the hour several times in his agitation, and the agitation showed on his face. When he had last looked, it had been eleven-forty. Surely noon had come by now.
No. If it were noon, they would already have started. Eleven-fifty, then? He had waited so long; it could not be a mere fifty. Fifty-five, at the least. Five more minutes, and he would manage. But what if it was not fifty-five? What if it was fifty-four, or fifty-three?
Enough of this. Just ask.
A nurse happened to be passing.
"Nurse, excuse me, the time—"
"Forty-five."
"There's still fifteen minutes...?"
Disappointment settled over Malik's face. Fifteen minutes. Should he read something in the meantime? He did have one volume of erotica he kept around to kill the hours, but even that only came into focus after the morphine. Before then it was nothing but a crude spill of type.
Then what am I supposed to do to get through this?
Malik was swallowing, and swallowing again, glancing about in restless agitation, when the man in the next bed clicked his tongue and looked his way. A fellow whose knee a horse had kicked to splinters.
"Can't even wait fifteen lousy minutes?"
"...Why are you picking a fight all of a sudden?"
"I'm not picking a fight. I'm telling you to remember what it was like before the morphine. Don't you recall how you lived then—no, how we lived? Compared to that, this is something a man can bear."
"Ah."
Put that way, he had a point. Malik and the other patients in his ward had met morphine only two days ago. Before that they had lived on opium alone, gulping down a decoction of the boiled drug several times a day. On the bad days, two grams of opium at a swallow. On the worse days, three. At the most they had packed away twenty grams of opium in a single day, and it had done little to master the pain. Perhaps that was why the dose had crept upward, until at some point his stomach burned past all enduring.
Morphine belonged to another order entirely.
Fifteen milligrams at a time, they said. Madness. It really was.
Practically a dusting of powder. Dissolve that paltry amount in strangely salty water and swallow it, and the pain vanished as if it had been a lie. The ache in the side where the shrapnel had lodged, the pain at the stump of his left arm, even the stiffness beginning to settle into his spine from life in a bed—all of it gone. It even carried off the despair that came with the pain.
"Malik. Was that a life we were living, back then?"
"Not even close."
"Morning and noon, people screaming that they hurt; all night, groaning that they were dying. Lying awake through that was just how the days went, wasn't it. ...We were all cripples anyway, and watching them curse and claw at each other over who was dying and who wasn't, I wanted to die myself, I tell you."
"That's true enough."
"Next to that, this is heaven. Bear it."
He was right. Malik had endured a month that felt like a nightmare. What were fifteen miserable minutes? The talk had carried the time off, and now it was truly upon him. Soon the nurses would come with the morphine and kindly portion it out among the patients.
Malik kept his mouth shut and waited only for noon.
Nine minutes left.
His breath tore out of him, once, and again.
Six.
"Coming...! Ah—no. Not yet."
Three. Now his throat was truly closing.
And then, at last.
"It is time for your dose."
The nurse's dreamlike voice rang at his ear. With it, from every bed around him, came sighs of relief bursting free, the clap of hands, and the sound of men laughing under their breath, unable to help it. Malik was no different. A bright and blameless smile rose to his face. Had both arms still been attached, he would have applauded.
So the wait was worth it.
He could no longer even imagine a life without morphine. Nor did he need to. If the military hospital possessed any sense at all, there was no reason it would stop using a medicine this good. People loved it this much. Surely they would not cut it off.
A devout feeling came over him as he waited for his turn. He even straightened his posture, inconvenient body and all. The mere thought that he might receive Lord Morphine set his heart pounding.
And into the ear of Malik, fluttering with anticipation, came a strange sound.
"The samples we were given have all run out. What do we do?"
"Be quiet, you idiot...! The patients can hear."
A troubling exchange between the nurses. Little by little, Malik's face went grave. He hoped he had misheard, but when he looked around, the other patients wore much the same expression. The way the nurses had visibly hunched in on themselves only fed the suspicion.
"The medicine has run out...?"
It did not take very long at all for the unrest to spread through the ward.