Negotiation
The negotiation with the Third Princess had been arranged at Sienna's initiative, which meant two drug dealers who had only just begun staking out their markets were about to sit down across from each other.
It was not a meeting to decide who would gorge on the golden market that was the Imperial Capital. I was content enough with military supply. Even if I expanded later, the most it would come to was a limited trickle into civilian hospitals.
My only real aim was to rein Anais in.
I meant to tell her what future awaited her if she kept this business going, and to make it plain that even at this very moment someone was probably dying because of it.
She won't listen just because I put it nicely.
Mrs. Chandler's Healthy Syrup was already selling at a furious clip. Match the supply, and she could install a bottle in the cupboard of nearly every household in the capital. Why would she ever give that up?
So I had prepared a compensation sweet enough to tempt her—something that would let her live comfortably off a modest share of the profits without pouring herself into the syrup trade. In all honesty I didn't want to hand over a thing. But if I meant to stop this mess, I had to leave the Third Princess a way out. I was even willing to guarantee her safety, so that Sienna would not grind her underfoot later.
Give what I must. The best outcome is still getting her to step back on her own.
I drove the thought into my head and set out for Minster Palace, the Third Princess's stronghold. The means of travel was teleportation. Every palace, the main Imperial Palace included, had a teleportation circle laid into it, so the trip was possible. Ordinarily, they said, the circles saw almost no use. Had the sisters been the sort to come and go in one another's houses, none of this would have happened in the first place.
"I shall cast it, Sir Allan."
It was the first time since I had taken this body that I truly felt the weight of magic. There was no room to savor it. The problem in front of me would not allow it.
Opium, jimsonweed, ephedra. Tropane alkaloids, ephedrine, and dozens of others besides. Mrs. Chandler's Healthy Syrup, rolling off the line even now in a factory on the outskirts of the capital. Anais's sense of deprivation, and the revenge she wanted from me.
It would not be easy. Of course it wouldn't.
The moment I arrived at her office, the outlook grew darker still.
"Allan... Madoff?"
The cause was the man who, by the look of things, had paid her a call ahead of me. Early fifties, hair burning red, a face cut for severity. Bobby Duncan—dean of the Magic Department at the Imperial Academy, and a mage of no small standing in the empire. Confine the question to fire magic, and he was acknowledged on all sides as the empire's finest.
He was, however, even more gifted at something else. Namely, incinerating his own fortune.
The moment Professor Bobby caught the scent of an investment that looked promising, he shoved his money in without a glance to either side. Stocks, bonds, real estate, antiques—the lot. Whether because his instincts were spectacularly bad, every venture ended in a wretched rout. In the original story, when Sienna whipped up a speculative frenzy, he was the one who bled the most and bawled the loudest.
And if that same Professor Bobby was here...
"Have you come to inquire about investing in the Healthy Syrup, by any chance?"
At the question he knit his brow and glared at me. From the look of him, it had not been a mere inquiry. His face was grave enough, and yet his hands would not stop fidgeting.
"What investment would I be making?"
"Because you judged that money put in now would return a handsome profit. In the past Her Highness the Third Princess was so thickly surrounded there wasn't a gap to squeeze through, but that is no longer the case, is it? So you seized the opening."
Professor Bobby looked away instead of answering. He could not even bring himself to deny it.
I had no thought of talking him down. Here was a man so taken with a thing that had only just appeared in the world that he had resolved to invest—and already followed through. He was convinced he had backed a promising venture. He would not listen if I tried.
"My apologies, Professor Duncan. I overstepped."
"Think nothing of it. ...But have you also come to see Her Highness Anais, Sir Allan?"
"I have. Unlike you, however, I did not come to invest in the syrup, nor to discuss a collaboration. I would ask you to bear that in mind."
"......"
He gave me a sour look, then departed under a palace attendant's guidance. It occurred to me he might have wanted to ask about morphine, but it would not have changed a thing. Madoff Pharmaceuticals had no need of investors.
"Sir Allan. Her Highness Anais will see you."
At last I stood before the Third Princess. Perhaps because the business was thriving and she had gained a sturdy ally, a smile had risen on the face of Anais Carlyle as she received me.
For a while we faced each other and let an uncomfortable stretch of time go by. The eyes that called obsidian to mind, the pale skin—those were unchanged. Look closer, though, and she seemed a different person altogether. One corner of her mouth lifted. Her hair was pinned up carelessly with a hairpin. She did not so much as offer me a seat, only a gaze that raked me from head to foot.
Still. I have to say my piece.
There was no need to drag the whole sordid history out between us. We were hardly easy company for each other.
"Your Highness. I know you harbor ill feeling toward me over the matter of Her Majesty the Empress. You have had no shortage of troubles since."
"...Troubles. You do dress your words prettily. If you hadn't played your little trick back then—"
"Then Her Majesty would have become an addict. Opium and alcohol both."
"What?"
"What Princess Sienna originally meant to present was opium wine. Not out of malice. She simply knew nothing of pharmacology. ...Had I not intervened, Her Majesty would by now be taking two or three grams of opium and more than a bottle of wine every single day."
Anais's eyes went wide.
"...That bitch."
A curse for Sienna, no doubt. Defending her by insisting she wasn't one felt like a bit much. Even so, I had my doubts that Anais had any right to curse her own sister.
"Your Highness, forgive me, but opium wine is less dangerous than the Healthy Syrup. There are patients who endure for years on ten grams of opium a day, even fifteen. The syrup, by contrast, can kill in a small dose."
"What would you know...!"
"I know precisely what I am saying. Honestly, even you do not believe the syrup is truly good for one's health, do you?"
Her mouth opened as if to snap back, then shut again.
Right. There was no way she didn't know. I could grant that she might be ignorant of the harms of opium and ephedra. She could not fail to know the toxicity of jimsonweed. She had probably mixed it in to catch up to morphine's effect, without once considering what happens when you mix things that way.
"I hear three or four thousand bottles sell in a day. ...Someone has already lost the light without ever knowing why. Half paralyzed, sweat pouring off them, they claw their way back to themselves only to find the world gone dark before their eyes. Blindness, I mean."
"It's fine if you take the proper dose."
"Forgive me, but do you know what the proper dose is? From what I can see, you did not even run a trial before putting it on the market."
"......"
"Left as it is, people will start dying by the dozens before long. Perhaps by the hundreds. Can Your Highness bear the aftermath?"
Anais closed her mouth again, unable to muster a proper answer. That was not all. I caught the faint tremor in her pupils, and the way she kept biting her lip.
Is this actually getting through?
I did not believe people could be mended and put back to use. Aside from Victoria, I had never met a genuinely good person—not in my past life, and not in this one. But Anais was a novice who had only just set foot on this road. She might be incapable of guilt. She did not have the nerve to stomach people dropping dead, or going blind.
I had frightened her enough. Time to open the exit.
Anais had risen on her hunger for revenge against me and against Sienna. She would not want to retreat merely because someone she loathed had asked her to. So I decided to hand her a pretext.
"Your Highness. If you fold the business here, the losses will be considerable."
"Who said I was folding? You do jump to conclusions."
"I am only speaking hypothetically. Should you abandon the syrup, I am prepared to compensate you. I have, in effect, obstructed the enterprise of one so exalted. My talents are meager, but I would like to be of some small help to Your Highness."
"...Compensation? Speak."
"I am the man who makes the morphine. I trust Your Highness can guess what sort of compensation I mean."
I already had it in mind. When I made the next product, I would let her take a cut. I had no intention of turning ephedra into that. What I was considering was a non-narcotic painkiller and fever reducer for household use. Failing that, cultivating psilocybin and passing her a fixed quantity would not be bad either. It was excessive, but nothing less would get through to her.
"That is all I have to say."
I had told her what disaster would follow if she kept this up, and I had promised compensation. Opening my mouth any further would be a waste. All that remained was Anais's choice.
Not entirely hopeless, is it.
Her composure was unexpected—uncanny, even. Because of it, a sliver of hope remained in me as well. The hope that I might sweep the syrup off the streets without a dogfight.
A stretch of silence passed. Then Anais slowly opened her mouth.
"Allan Madoff. I loathe you. ...If that bitch Sienna hadn't been shielding you, you might be dead by now. Or aboard a ship running to Jin."
"I don't mind. I put someone on a ship myself, recently."
"Did you? Feelings aside, I'll grant your expertise. You said the jimsonweed in the syrup could kill people? If that actually happened, even I would have a hard time coming through it clean. ...And the two of you wouldn't leave me alone, either."
"That is also true. I might not move. Princess Sienna certainly would. And with great pleasure."
"I do like the honesty."
Had she given up, then? It felt too easy, but there was nothing wrong with easy. Not for me, and not for Anais herself.
"Your Highness. What will you do?"
At my prompting she looked straight at me. I could not read hostility in her. At a glance she almost seemed won over.
But.
"Fine. I'll cut the jimsonweed down to a trace, or leave it out entirely. I'll just put in more opium instead. I met you because I was curious what nonsense you'd spout, and here you've actually been helpful?"
What came out of her mouth was, in the end, a refusal.
"...Your Highness."
"I'm sincerely grateful, Allan Madoff. But I have no intention of folding the syrup business. Now that I know how closely the two of you are watching me, why would I stop?"
So saying, Anais smiled as if the whole thing amused her. I let out a hollow laugh and looked at that pretty face of hers.
With that, the negotiation was dead.