The Naming
So they found me out after all.
"I lasted a good long while, all the same."
Anais let out a thin little laugh when the report reached her—people were snooping around the syrup factory. She had acquired the place, out on the edge of the Imperial Capital, immediately after leaving school. It was one of the works that had sprung up everywhere once even the middle class could taste sugar now and then. The original owner had been a noble who founded the factory certain he would make a fortune, only to have his nerve broken by nothing but losses, and she had taken the title off his hands at a comparatively cheap price.
She had not bought it to make ordinary syrup.
From the moment the purchase was done, Anais halted every process and set the place to preparing a new product. She even stationed a mage, so she could issue her orders from a distance. The work went smoothly. It had never been difficult to begin with—mix something into the syrup, and that was all. A child could have managed it. The only difference was that she was mixing in something other than strawberry juice or chocolate.
"Your Highness. They say several apothecaries have suddenly lost their customers on account of the morphine."
"The men who used to swell their takings by supplying the military hospitals with whatever quantity was needed at the moment are staring blankly into empty air now, I hear. The raw materials we required were easy to come by."
"Ah... during production, one of the workers fainted for a moment from the smell. It seems he put in too much jimsonweed, not realizing that boiling it down concentrates the dose. The finished goods should be ready soon. Would you care to see them yourself?"
Those additives were medicinal ingredients, and she had not used only one kind.
First she put in opium, the old champion of the trade—more precisely, opium powder made by evaporating and concentrating the raw stuff. Until morphine appeared, it had been the medicine they called the army's friend. Morphine would have been best, had she been able to use it, but that was the monopoly of Madoff Pharmaceuticals. Diverting any of it would have been no different from an act of self-harm, so she had no choice but to content herself with this.
Opium alone, of course, was not enough. And so she added jimsonweed.
It was an ingredient that held ugly memories for Anais. Jimsonweed was the very reason she had fallen into Sienna's trap. Even so, she was the one who had boldly ordered it in, for the sake of a greater aim. Toxic it might be, but its effects—pain relief, anesthesia, sedation—were said to be certain.
Even this isn't enough.
So, at the last, she mixed in one thing more.
In the homeland of Empress Yeonhwa, Anais's birth mother, there was an herb that the concubines of great ministers and the courtesans were fond of taking as a slimming medicine. Swallow it, and the heart pounded, the eyes grew clear, and the sweat broke out. It grew wild in the Britannia Empire as well, though it was not yet widely used, and Anais herself knew of it only thanks to a maid who attended her mother—a woman who had abandoned her homeland and emigrated in order to serve Yeonhwa.
What she had, in the end, was a blend of three herbs, with a little soda rendered from seaweed and a splash of liquor stirred in besides. Even Anais could not say what effect would come of it.
How would I know? It's not as if I ever studied pharmacy.
She could only guess that if one mixed ingredients which, even taken one by one, carried a violent efficacy, that efficacy would be amplified in some fashion or other. Her only real worry was the taste, and the smell. The syrup disposed of that problem with ridiculous ease. Sweet and sticky—syrup was something most people liked well enough.
Why didn't I think of this sooner?
Syrup. A method so simple it begged a scoff. She found it almost strange that no one had thought of it until now.
"Truly magnificent! However did you conceive of such a thing?"
One of the few confidants still left at Anais's side rubbed his palms together as he fawned. It did not particularly please her.
"It's a simple matter."
"But there are great ideas that are simple, are there not? I heard it from the underlings myself—the juice of boiled herbs is terribly bitter, they say. And yet people force it down all the same, desperate to cure some illness or other. Your Highness has solved that very trouble...!"
"I got the idea from watching Sienna. There was a medicine she used to present to Mother... I heard that from some point on she started mixing it with orange. That's how I learned that flavor matters."
"Even so, truly magnificent!"
"That's enough."
"Ah. Yes."
All that remained beside Anais now were nobles of this sort. Those with even the means to change camps had long since clung to her elder sisters. There was even a man who had feigned illness and withdrawn into seclusion.
What a wretched figure I cut.
Frustration did not settle on the face of the self-mocking Anais. Rather, a smile rose as she looked at the finished article in her hand, a small bottle of syrup. From here on, she need only make of it the opening for a reversal.
"Come to think of it, I haven't given it a name. Not yet."
Considered properly, the naming mattered a great deal—perhaps even more than hiding the bitterness of opium and jimsonweed beneath syrup. She needed a name that could draw near to people with an easy familiarity, a name that would let them lift it on a teaspoon without any revulsion toward an unfamiliar medicine. She had to succeed commercially first, if she was to provoke Sienna and lure her into a mistake. The strength to fight the girl would come out of that success as well.
What name would do?
What rose in Anais's pondering mind was the face of the old maid who attended her. Dorothy Chandler: a grandmother of ample, kindly looks and a gentle temper. Setting that woman at the center of her thoughts, a rather convincing name came to her.
"Mrs. Chandler's Syrup... no. Healthy Syrup."
Yes. This was the one.
First Sienna, and now even that younger sister of hers meant to set up as a narcotics peddler. I hadn't seen that coming either.
Of course, even if I had grasped it beforehand, there would have been no way to cut it off at the root short of burning the factory down. She was buying a works with her own money and proposing to make a sweet syrup tonic—what was I supposed to do about it? The reality was that the very concept of a narcotic did not exist here.
It wouldn't be strange if the thing appeared in the world as soon as tomorrow.
Start puzzling out a countermeasure now, and there still wouldn't be time enough. And then, disaster piled upon disaster: in the midst of all this, an incident broke out at my own company.
"President Allan. There has been an attempted theft."
The report came from Bono, now in charge of security at Madoff Pharmaceuticals. As if to show he wasn't treating the work lightly, he had caught a thief this time.
"Attempted theft?"
"Yes. You may wish to see for yourself."
I accepted the offer of a visibly troubled Bono and had the thief brought in.
The culprit was one of my own employees—one of the hands recently hired to produce morphine tablets. His task was to measure out a precise dose of the morphine I had made, blend it with starch, and stamp it into pills on a tablet press. Manual, of course. Whether he had lost his mind in the middle of making the medicine, he had pocketed the very product he himself had pressed, and he was caught when his belongings were searched at the end of the shift.
Go into business, and you end up dealing with nonsense like this.
I couldn't simply let it pass. In a trade of this kind, the thing one has to watch most carefully is theft from within. My younger brother, in my previous life, had once complained of the trouble it caused him. A dropper he kept under his hand had skimmed the drugs he was meant to deliver to a customer and then offered some contemptible excuse; in the end my brother caught the trail and took his revenge, but he said the losses had been heavy.
A short while later the thief knelt before me. The other employees, dragged in along with him, stood ranged in a line like a folding screen.
"Why did you do it?"
"I... I truly wasn't trying to steal."
"If you didn't steal them, did the morphine tablets climb into your pocket of their own accord? The truth is already out, so just say it straight."
"......"
"Why did you steal them?"
"The truth is... my little brother has headaches! He kept whimpering that it hurt, and it weighed on me, so I thought—maybe if I gave him just one of these, he'd be all right...!"
The little-brother excuse. Very likely a lie. One does not steal forty morphine tablets for a sibling's sake. Dose someone with that for a mere headache, and you have a perfect candidate for an addict. Even if it were the truth and not a lie, nothing would change.
"Was it really because of your brother?"
"The headaches... he said they were truly bad."
"Unless a man is a patient in genuinely severe pain, the side effects of morphine outweigh the relief it gives. Are these headaches fierce enough that you'd dose him knowing that—and by stealing, no less?"
"......"
"Last chance. Speak honestly."
Cornered, the thief looked to Bono as if begging salvation, and cast pitiful glances at the employees who stood watching. Far from help, there wasn't even anyone willing to meet his eyes. Who would cross me to save a thief? In the end his nerve broke completely.
"It looked as if it would fetch money, and before I knew it greed took me and I... laid hands on it. The sick aren't only in the army, are they?"
"And?"
"I meant to sell it quietly to sick people. I've told you this honestly, so I beg your leniency...! Please...!"
Leniency was out of the question. It was dangerous to leave the impression that a man could pocket morphine and still be forgiven. Set the precedent once, and the other employees would do the same.
"It's too late. And even if you'd owned the crime from the start, I wouldn't have been lenient. The theft itself doesn't vanish."
"But in money, it's only a little over six hundred thalers."
"The sum isn't the problem. The problem is that you stole what is mine."
My mind made up, I rose slowly to my feet. Hand him to the military police as he was, and he would take a flogging and that would be the end of it. A flogging alone would leave him thoroughly broken, true enough, but then I couldn't make an example of him before the staff. Given the reputation I already carried, it would amount to letting him off.
What the moment required was something harsher. The instant my resolve set, I swung my fist—straight at the bastard's mouth.
"President, wai—!"
A dull thud, and with it the sensation of something breaking and pulping under the blow.
"Guhk!"
The thief I had struck collapsed to the floor and flopped about as if he were dying. One punch, at most. Had it ended there, it would have been a mercy for the man himself. The real punishment was something else.
"Her Highness Sienna keeps a fleet."
"Ah!?"
"I'll send you there as a deckhand at the very bottom. You won't, of course, be permitted to quit because you feel like it."
"Over a thing like this...!"
The thief thrashed, blood pouring, as if the sentence were an outrage. He had only meant to scrape together a little pocket money and had fallen into the life of a sailor; he had some cause to feel wronged. Shipboard labor was so brutal that the homeless and the vagrant were what passed for crew.
"Pleeease!!"
However desperately he cried, I couldn't spare him. A brawl in the mud was coming soon enough. This was no hour for mercy.
In the end, it was the right judgment. From the very next day, stalls selling "Healthy Syrup" sprang up all across the Imperial Capital.