An Example
I had made an example of Anais, and I had given them the rest of the notice as well: ignore my warning, and I would delete what little fortune they had left.
With that, my business was finished.
"Escort Her Highness Anais to the palace. …The rest of you, disperse."
Anais went quietly. The others lingered. A man complained of a headache, as if he had helped himself to several spoonfuls of the healthy syrup. A woman sniffled with the face of someone who had lost the world. And an old man, lacking the courage to step forward himself, kept nudging the person beside him.
"You're really going to leave it like this?"
Only when I raised the morningstar again did the investors move.
Twenty-three of them left. The remaining three, for whatever they were thinking, stayed where they were and watched me.
"Something to say?"
One of them edged closer and spoke. I could already guess his errand, but I decided to hear him out.
"Ah, President Allan. There isn't… any word of compensation for our losses, is there?"
The question belonged to a noble who had grown rich selling counterfeit porcelain in the Eastern style.
Good. This is how it ought to come out.
This was exactly why I had buried Chandler Syrup before it could ever be listed. The scheme was the work of a member of the imperial house—power itself—so of course they expected to be made whole. Had the shares been opened to the public, thousands might have risen together.
"There will be no compensation. You invested knowing the risk."
"Knowing? What did we know? It isn't as if you looked inside me, President Allan…!"
"And why did you decide to invest in the first place? Because Her Highness Siena and I went about shouting ourselves hoarse over the danger of the healthy syrup. You dismissed that as slander and put your money in anyway. Compensation, for a man like that, is an absurd thing to ask."
"I didn't go by rumor! I had my own judgment…!"
"Then you took it yourself, thought highly of the effect, and invested on that basis?"
"…"
"Either way, this is not a moment in which compensation can be discussed. Even if the imperial house were minded to show mercy, Her Highness Siena would stop it with a smile. And if she did not, I would petition in my own name until it was stopped."
At that, the counterfeit-porcelain noble turned a wounded look on me.
"This is really too much."
He trudged off, and that was the end of him.
Demanding restitution merely because one had lost money was absurd enough, but men of his sort were, relatively speaking, the lesser danger.
The truly dangerous one was someone else.
"Sir Allan? The situation you fear will never come to pass."
An old man of ordinary build—Marquis Rikius, the heaviest of the investors—came forward.
Only moments ago he had been murmuring along with the others. Now he had his face admirably in hand, and this despite having lost more than anyone. Over five million thalers, he had said.
He was also the one who had tried to lay my suspicions to rest.
"Yes, I'll grant it. I did think there was a business in it. Had it not been for your warning today, Sir Allan, I might have thrown in with the friends who just left and set the board anew. To be frank, it isn't as though I've lost all interest even now…."
"Meaning you have no intention of entering this trade if it means setting yourself against me?"
"Ho ho. A man can hardly step into a fight whose result is already decided. …I haven't the faintest idea what this ephedrine of yours even is. How could I hope to win? Such a pity."
"A genuine pity."
So he muttered, clicked his tongue, and turned his back.
At a glance he looked like a man who had given it up. There was no chance he truly had. To throw up a smokescreen of I am not enduring this because I am good; I am enduring it because your edge frightens me—the trick itself was entirely too classic.
I was a swindler's son. As if I would miss it.
"Your Lordship. If you mean to set up some convenient puppet and run the business through him, by all means do so. …Only understand this. Should a product resembling the healthy syrup appear later, I will take it that Your Lordship stands behind it."
A second healthy syrup, in other words, would be treated as his handiwork.
Marquis Rikius turned back with a face gone blank in disbelief. I gave him one line more.
"If you wish to avoid suspicion, you have only to conduct yourself carefully from here on."
"Are you threatening me…!"
"I brought down the Third Imperial Princess herself. Why would I suddenly be afraid of a marquis? If Your Lordship will see to it that the other investors attempt nothing foolish, nothing will come of this. I don't consider it a difficult charge."
It did not seem to have sunk in for the marquis, but I meant every word.
Watching each of them myself would take far too much work. He might resent the threat and come after me for it, but a man who sold narcotics had to stomach that much.
"I shall… bear it in mind."
"Thank you."
When the marquis, too, had gone, the exchange was truly empty.
One of them is still here, though.
Professor Bobby of the Faculty of Magic was putting on a spectacle, the soul gone clean out of him.
"My money. My… money!"
He sat collapsed on the floor, fitting torn share certificates together like a puzzle.
When had he even torn them? And why, of all things, was he trying to stick them back together?
He was plainly not in his right mind, so I decided to leave him be. His eyes were brimming, his mouth hung open, and still he went on with that miserable little labor.
I did not forget, when my eyes happened to meet Professor Bobby's, to give him a single nod, as though I pitied him.
Not from pity. It was bait, so that once he had broken completely he would come to me of his own accord. If he actually came, I meant to tame him just enough to be of use. A man at the pinnacle of flame magic would have many uses in the making of narcotics.
With this, everyone tied to the healthy syrup has been brought to heel.
A busy few days, one way and another.
If one insisted on counting, a single person remained.
Mrs. Chandler—the name on the sign of Mrs. Chandler's Healthy Syrup.
In a sense she was the most important figure of all. It was that old woman who was known as the syrup's maker, and that old woman who had carried its success.
Yet her future was already fixed, whether I lifted a hand or not.
Even an imperial princess was being taken apart. It took no imagination at all to guess what would be done with a mere head maid.
At the temporary stall where the healthy syrup was sold, Mrs. Chandler—directing the young maids as they peddled the medicine—had let her face harden for all to see.
It was not an expression one often found on a woman who went about smiling. She had not stiffened over nothing.
"I'm only asking for a hundred bottles…! I said I'd pay the listed price!"
A young customer was making a scene.
He wore an Academy cadet's uniform, and he was a great deal younger even than her youngest son. She could not tell which faculty he belonged to, but he looked like a first-year.
He had dragged his friends in behind him in a pack and was making an outrageous demand.
A hundred bottles.
From the day she opened, Mrs. Chandler had held to one rule: one bottle to a customer.
Selling by the crate to a heavy spender would certainly have been simpler. She might have cleared the stock in a flash. But she bore the inconvenience so the healthy syrup would reach the people who truly needed it.
The healthy syrup belonged to every citizen of the Imperial Capital.
"Now see here, young man."
"Hurry! If I can't make the quota, the seniors are going to beat the hell out of me…!"
"Is this an errand? I'm sorry, but I don't do business that way. You can see the people waiting behind you, can't you? If you students walk off with a hundred bottles, it won't reach the folks who actually need the medicine. I understand how you feel, but do restrain yourselves…."
"Fuck, I'm paying!"
Gentle words won't do for this one.
That he was an Academy student made the matter somewhat delicate, but she still could not treat him differently from the other customers.
"See here, students!"
The rebuke cracked out of her. The rough boys did not listen.
"Ugh. This isn't working."
They resorted to their hands instead.
"Granny, here's the money! That settles it, right?"
They flung the coins onto the floor and seized several crates of fifty bottles each.
"What do you think you're doing…!"
"Give those back!"
Students of the Academy in name, they were remarkably good in a scuffle. A handful of servants helping at the stall had no hope of stopping them. They shoved through the customers in line and bolted—and they were fast on their feet, too.
An outrageous raid by Academy students. The stall, which had always brimmed with cheer, was a wreck before anyone could blink. Being stripped of two hundred bottles of healthy syrup was merely thrown in.
Mrs. Chandler stood dumbstruck, able only to say it over and over.
"Heavens. Heavens."
They had left the money, yes, but it was robbery in all but name.
To think the students of the Academy—the very timbers of the Empire—would do something so violent.
This isn't right. This isn't.
She could not write it off as the foolishness of the young. If such things kept happening, the dignity of the healthy syrup would be cheapened.
Someone might ask what dignity a medicine sold in the street could possibly have, but that no longer held. Before long it would be on the shelves of the Imperial Capital's great emporiums and grocers.
Above all, this was a venture on which an imperial princess's honor rested. She could not treat it lightly.
The Third Imperial Princess—the grateful mistress who had granted so great a chance to a woman forty years a maid. For her sake, it seemed, some extraordinary measure would have to be taken.
For the moment, though, there was still a shop to run.
"Ma'am. Are you all right?"
She could not turn her back on precious customers kind enough to worry for her.
Mrs. Chandler had worries enough already. Of late, more and more customers had come complaining that chest pain, violent dizziness, and sleeplessness had fallen on them all at once.
They're ill because life is hard on them. Poor souls.
What people like that needed was the healthy syrup, of course. Mrs. Chandler found her smile again and went back to selling.
Business flourished, as it always did.
Then, without warning, the military police burst in and began tearing the temporary stall apart.
By imperial command, the sale of the healthy syrup is forbidden!
"What is the meaning of this?"
When Mrs. Chandler protested, the soldiers answered with a twisted arm and rope. She was pinned before she could even scream.
A colonel of the military police then set her offenses before the crowd.
That she did manufacture a harmful medicament, and thereby threaten the physiological functions of the citizens of the Imperial Capital.
"Harmful? What about it is harmful…! Do you know how hard I worked to make this!"
Mrs. Chandler writhed and fought, but the only answer was the rod.
Thud! The soldiers brought their clubs down without mercy on her aged body.
"Aaagh!"
In the end Mrs. Chandler lay sprawled on the ground, a wretched sight.
All she had done was sell a medicine good for the body, at a fair price. Why this had happened, she had no way of knowing.