Pain
So it had finally begun.
"President Allan. The Imperial Military Hospital has barred outsiders from entering. Before that, I also saw a handful of military policemen go inside."
The thought struck me the moment I heard the report from the Bono brothers. I had set them to taking turns and asking around the hospital without a break, and the labor, it seemed, had not been wasted. I could already guess what sort of scene was unfolding in there by now.
The medicine must have run out.
What I had given away for nothing came to sixty grams. Four thousand doses. A man had to take it four times a day, so it was a quantity bound to be exhausted in no time. I had told them to give it only to patients severe enough to lose sleep, but most of the men in there were critical cases anyway. The hospital for the war-wounded was not a place that would admit you for something as minor as a broken arm.
All told, it amounted to barely two days of use. Not long enough for withdrawal to show itself. Pain patients had diminished opioid receptors in the brain; a little morphine was hardly enough to usher them into that abyss of infinite bliss. Pleasure, at the very least, would not be what drove them to beg for it.
But feeling was another matter.
The patients of the military hospital were men who, for the first time since their wounds, had been freed from pain. No more being left to sob, helpless, under agony that rolled in like a tide. No more soaking in despair while the groans of the men around them were forced into their ears. Above all, a life in which pain no longer dragged them awake dozens of times in a single night. Could they forget that comfort?
To have the deep sleep they had only just won back ripped from them by force was bound to breed a sense of deprivation. And it was only a matter of time before that deprivation spilled over into action.
So that was why they'd called in the military police.
A small number, he had said, so it had probably not yet reached the pitch of a riot. But there was no doubt that unease had spread among the patients. The hospital had likely requested support against the worst. Few sights were more wretched than amputees, fracture cases, and gunshot wounded thrashing in desperation and rising up together.
Even so, there was something I could not understand. There had still been no nibble in my direction. By now the hospital, as an institution, ought to have at least tried to contact Madoff Pharmaceuticals. Were they meaning to hold out somehow? The situation was hardly leisurely enough for that, which left only one possibility.
They hadn't come to me. They'd gone to the people above me.
The suspicion had barely formed before I went straight to Sienna.
Ordinarily she shut herself in her office and worked until it grated, but today, for once, Sienna was walking the garden. Every flower and every pod had fallen from the poppies, and they drooped there like corpses; through that bleak ground she strolled. There was not a blossom left worth looking at, and yet she went along nodding to herself with a strangely contented air. With that abundant silver hair let down, she looked rather like a woman not entirely in her right mind. In truth, there were corners of her that were not entirely sound.
Fortunately, I knew why her face was bright.
"So they approached Your Highness first, after all."
"Approached?"
"The morphine. The First Princess's camp has grown desperate and offered you a deal, hasn't it? They may have put the name of Madoff Pharmaceuticals forward, but there's a good chance they believe the one actually running the business is not me, but Your Highness."
"Allan. Aren't you a little too certain?"
"I am, in fact, certain."
At that, Sienna blinked and stared at me. The answer, however, was yes. We were in it together anyway; there was no point circling the subject and wasting time.
"Nine hundred thalers a gram. That's the price Sister Victoria sent a messenger to offer."
"A respectable price."
"I haven't answered yet. It's your business."
One gram came to roughly sixty-six doses. Sell even that for nine hundred thalers, and Madoff Pharmaceuticals would be sitting on a fortune. The cost of the raw materials sunk into it so far would come to seem laughable. But the reason Sienna was pleased, she said, was not simply the money.
"There's more. They offered that if I told them which apothecary made the morphine, they'd recommend him to the Ministry of War and even give him a medal."
They didn't seem to think I was the maker. I hadn't hidden it. If anything, I had stated it openly. Up to that point, it didn't matter. But why go out of their way to ask for the morphine apothecary's name? They were hardly sounding us out because they truly wanted to pin a decoration on someone.
It didn't take long for the suspicion to find its mark. From the look of her, Sienna seemed to harbor much the same one.
"They want the method of manufacture, it seems. Once they've identified the real maker, they'll try to bring him over by whatever means they can. Then they won't need to rely on us."
"I think the same, Allan."
"And you were smiling because the little scheme was so pathetic?"
"Mm."
She nodded with a look that asked what else I could possibly mean. It was pathetic, in truth. From where Sienna stood, knowing the maker was me, it would be funny.
I did not find it funny.
In the middle of the uproar over morphine, they had still managed to scheme their way around to the thought that the method had to be secured. Whether the notion was Victoria's own or some close aide's, the speed of the reaction was impressive.
"Anyway, Allan. That's everything they offered me. What do you mean to do?"
"Yes. I..."
"Oh, would you mind if I offered one piece of advice? The way I see it, it'd be better to stay silent for three or four days and put the pressure on them. Once the patients start howling, they'll come back with a higher price. You're holding the key anyway, aren't you?"
"......"
A notion worthy of a villainess, as expected. Done that way, the price could be driven up and up. But there was a strong chance of an accident before we ever received the figure we wanted. For patients who had already tasted morphine, every minute and every second was agony. Opium no longer did a thing for them. Someone might well pour whiskey in on top of it until he was half dead, just to kill a little of the pain, and slip into a coma.
Nothing in that for me, either.
Hold the patients hostage just to nudge the price? That was never good for business. Nor was it a method we needed. They were already cornered. We could extract a swift surrender without working them over the course of four days. All we had to do was apply a light pressure.
"Your Highness. There's no need to go that far."
"Then?"
"Simply inform Her Highness Victoria exactly as I tell you. Call a mage. Right now."
Sienna did not hesitate over the request. She summoned a mage in her service, and at once attempted a communication spell to her sister, Victoria. The moment the link opened, she began to recite, one-sided, the lines I had given her.
"Sister. You seem to be under some misunderstanding. Allan Madoff is the one who made the morphine. There is no other apothecary. The business is his, too."
"But the humiliations he's suffered lately seem to have left Allan disillusioned. Honestly... can you blame him? He all but begged his way through dozens of hospitals, and was refused cold. More than once he was driven off without even getting a meeting."
"He'd been enduring it somehow, but the offer you sent a servant to make today seems to have turned his stomach. Talking of medals while you quietly tried to draw the method out of him? Ah... you're saying that wasn't your intention?"
"That's hardly my concern."
Some sound of protest came through at that point, but Sienna chewed on it in silence and said only what she meant to say. I could guess well enough what sort of sisters they ordinarily were.
"And on top of that... haah. He says he wants to shut the business down. He says he didn't start it because he was short of money, and he has no desire to sell medicine while bending his pride. I ordered him to recover my investment at least before closing, and he won't listen. You can try persuading him yourself."
Having delivered that, Sienna ended the communication. Then she spent a moment admiring her own face, reflected in the communication orb. From her expression, she did not seem drunk on her own beauty. She simply seemed to be enjoying the sport of grinding her sister down.
"How long do you think they'll hold out?"
"We've gone so far as to suggest abandoning the business. Her Highness Victoria will have no choice but to step forward herself."
At that, Sienna laughed, bright and clear. I smiled back, by way of keeping her company. It was a familiar enough affair by now.
The Imperial Military Hospital.
In the ward that housed the severely wounded, a small commotion was underway.
"Morphine!! Morphine!! Mor-phine!!"
A patient, shouting without cease, thrashed like a madman.
"Why do I have to hurt? When you rich bastards get sick, you get to meet the Saintess, and I'm supposed to lie here like a slab of meat in this shithole packed with fifty-seven fucking men and walk out a corpse? My guts—huh?—feel like someone's stirring them with a red-hot iron poker...!"
It was not one of the medical staff he had by the collar. It was the blameless patient in the next bed, and he was laying into him alone. The peculiar part was that the man being held kept repeating, with a sorrowful face, that he was sorry. He didn't even seem to know what he was sorry for.
"Do you know morphine? Exactly twenty-two minutes after you drink it, the belly begins, little by little, to grow warm. While that warmth spreads slowly out to every corner and every extremity of the body, only the injured part turns pleasantly cool. That is also the moment when I, who had been dying so wretchedly, finally begin to savor life. I can never return to the miserable existence I led before morphine. Morphine is simply the very best, isn't it?"
There was even a patient praising morphine with a wistful look on his face. The words were genteel enough, but moisture brimmed at the corners of his eyes.
Their methods differed, but they had this in common: they longed for morphine with a desperate hunger, and they showed no interest in anything else.
The faces of the nurses tending such patients were, every one of them, full of anxiety. All this, from missing a single dose. No one had yet broken into outright violence, and there was a general air of relief, but...
It lasted only a moment.
"Aaaaaaagh!!"
A scream torn from a critical patient who had undergone surgery three days before.
It was a single cry, but its reach was considerable. The praise of morphine, the petty quarrels, and the whining all stopped at once. What followed was a cold silence, and a drawn tension.
A woman who had been about to step into the ward took in the mood and quietly slipped away. A blonde beauty, dressed in a military uniform with the epaulettes removed. Victoria—the military hospital's greatest patron, and the Empire's First Princess.
"I didn't know... it would be this bad."
The face of the woman murmuring those words had gone as rigid as the faces of the patients from whom the morphine had been taken.