Awakening
"A new medicine, you said?"
Allan Madoff asked it again in a lowered voice, his face set hard. Only then did First Princess Victoria realize she had spoken too hastily. Look closer, and he was in no state for a calm conversation: a mask covered his mouth and nose, and beads of sweat stood on his brow. He had been at hard labor until moments ago.
I've been rude.
She was, of course, a princess of the strongest nation on the continent — and a trueborn eldest daughter at that. Even so, she had no wish to lean on that authority and press Allan. He had already done important work for the Empire. He had restored peace to the wounded, men who had broken their bodies in the nation's service and been left to dull the pain with nothing but opium and drink, and he had cured an empress worn thin by long years of decline. That alone was service enough to merit a decoration. He simply had not been put forward, because Allan himself had modestly declined.
So I've gone and piled more work onto a man who has already done his part.
A princess appearing out of nowhere to pressure him, just as he was trying to catch his breath — it would have been stranger if he weren't startled. Even so, she decided against an apology. Judging by Allan's reaction, even an apology was likely to feel like pressure. Better to feign composure and come straight to the point. Living as an imperial princess, one sometimes had to be shameless.
"Yes. A new medicine."
"Your Highness. Forgive me for saying so, but I would ask you to be more specific in the commission. And I hope you will understand this: it is true that I have some knowledge, but I have no gift for instantly making and presenting a medicine with precisely the effects you desire."
"I'll tell you everything. Shall we move somewhere else first?"
"It's all right. Please speak."
His expression suggested he was anything but all right, but she had brought this on herself, and she would have to bear it. Victoria came to the point at once.
"One of the knights who escorts me was a customer of the Health Syrup. Right after Madam Chandler was arrested, the man confessed it himself."
"He wasn't taking the Health Syrup because something ailed him. Strangely enough, he took five spoonfuls without fail every day before training. When I asked why he'd taken it, he said it seemed to improve his efficiency in training."
"It might have been an excuse. But he was a veteran knight with no ordinary taste for gambling or drink. From the other knights' accounts, his concentration during training hours really did seem to have improved. They said he grew bolder in the sparring yard as well."
Perhaps — just perhaps — the Health Syrup had a benefit after all. That was the case Victoria laid out.
Explain it like this to an ordinary apothecary, and they wouldn't have understood a word.
To demand a new drug while praising the virtues of a substance whose manufacture and sale had been banned by imperial decree only recently — say that to anyone else, and she might well have been asked whether she wanted a trip to a monastery herself. But Allan, she thought, would understand on his own. It was not a baseless leap. It was trust earned by everything he had already accomplished.
Thankfully, he did not betray her expectations.
"Yes, Your Highness. I can more or less guess what effects he felt."
"You can?"
"A sense of vigor and confidence, most likely, with the fatigue somewhat reduced. The euphoria that opium and sugar induce can, depending on the person, be taken for something that helps with training. In the long run, of course, it's a way of killing oneself."
Victoria let out a breath of relief, thinking this would not end as a wasted errand. At the same time a new expectation began to fill her: harness these properties properly, and they would be of enormous help to the army — above all to the troops posted along certain borders.
Fatigue and anxiety had always been the army's most chronic enemies. Solve that problem, and subduing the Empire's foes would become that much easier.
Abuse would have to be guarded against, of course. The same as with morphine.
But wasn't it only a matter of giving them a proper dose? Victoria was not selfish enough to look the other way when a means of easing the frontline commanders' burdens sat plainly before her eyes. Even if it meant shouldering a little of the weight herself, she was willing, so long as it was for the army.
"Sir Allan. Then I'll be more specific."
"Your Highness, I—"
"Hear me out first, and then decide. As I see it, the Health Syrup — a particular component of it, rather — appears to possess effects the army would find extremely useful. It would reduce fatigue, raise morale, and help strip away the fear of the enemy."
"..."
"I want a medicine that cuts the side effects as far as possible and keeps only the advantages. A medicine that grants courage, you might call it. ...Can you do it?"
A medicine that grants courage. That was what Victoria demanded, looking Allan straight in the eye. If he accepted, she fully intended to see him well compensated.
Only after the commission turned concrete did his mind settle at all.
When the word medicine had first left Victoria's mouth, the world had gone dark in front of his eyes. For a moment he had wondered whether even she had taken an interest in narcotics. He knew she wasn't that sort of person, but you never could tell with the world.
If even she goes rotten, the Empire is finished.
The younger sisters were already in that state. If Victoria threw herself into the business as well? While she and Sienna competed to push product, the Imperial Capital — no, the whole of the Empire — would most likely be steeped in drugs and collapse. Unlike Anais, Victoria had a formidable foundation behind her. The scale of the damage would have been different from the start.
Fortunately, commerce was not what interested her. That did not mean it was time to relax.
"A medicine that grants courage, you said?"
"The name hardly matters. So long as it can raise combat efficiency."
From where he stood, this request was no less awkward. Who would have thought she would look at Health Syrup and conceive a military use for it? He didn't believe she had arrived at the idea because she was wicked by nature.
If anything, she's being faithful to who she is as a soldier.
Soldiers who forgot fatigue and fear and marched on the enemy. Soldiers who moved sharp and didn't complain. No officer was immune to the appeal of that. Armies that didn't rely on stimulants, to one degree or another, hardly existed — betel nut, coca leaf, chocolate, amphetamine, and the rest. Analgesics and stimulants had always been an army's closest friends.
"Sir Allan. Can you do it?"
Victoria's expression said she was already convinced — convinced that he could manufacture a medicine with the effects she wanted. Feigning ignorance now would not be believed. Better to answer her honestly.
"Yes, Your Highness. I can."
"Truly?"
"I can make a medicine more effective than the Health Syrup. The process is more involved than morphine's, but it is a matter of time, not of impossibility. And... if a small sample will do, I could even show you one within two days."
"Ah...!"
Victoria's face began to brighten, visibly. Perhaps she thought she had found a shortcut to a stronger army. He felt afresh just how deadly serious this woman was about the military.
If he actually set out to make it, there was nothing he couldn't make. Even in the workshop he currently had, he could isolate and extract as far as ephedrine. It would take a great deal of money and labor, but he could simply charge in proportion — the way he had supplied morphine at a thousand thalers a gram.
Ephedrine alone would raise combat efficiency. Dose it together with a large amount of caffeine, and the expected effect climbed higher still, because athletic performance genuinely improved. Dope someone of knightly skill and send them into an operation, and they would perform in high spirits.
But he could not simply grant Victoria what she wished. Not because he was worried for the army, but because he had no desire to add to his workload. Manufacturing morphine, and growing psilocybin on top of it, was already driving him hard enough. He left ordinary chores to the Bono brothers and the rest of the staff, but any work that required security he bore alone. And from ephedrine onward, the danger was real — even without mixing it with anything else.
Once long-term use began, you were gambling with your life. Judged purely by the harm it did to the body, it was worse than steroids. Elite athletes died of it often enough even while a coordinator supervised every dose; how much worse would it be here? The side effects one would have to bear were far too great to justify using ephedrine — or whatever was stronger than that — merely to nudge combat efficiency upward.
"Your Highness. There is something you ought to understand, however."
"Speak."
He began setting the expected harms before Victoria without softening them. A proper dose, taken for a short time, was acceptable, just as she had said. But a proper dose would not deliver the effects the army wanted. Heavy use could bring sudden death, and there was every chance of turning out addicts in bulk.
"Is it that dangerous?"
"Too dangerous a medicine to issue for the sake of a little stimulant effect."
At that answer Victoria's face hardened, as if to say she understood.
I've explained this much. Won't she give it up on her own?
He had seen it with the morphine: Victoria's concern for the army was sincere. A woman who had even put up her private fortune for the critically ill — of course she would not try to feed a dangerous drug to people already exposed to danger.
She wouldn't have.
"Sir Allan. There's sense in what you say. Even morphine, with the dependence it causes, has produced men who make trouble. But."
...But?
"You're an excellent knight, but you don't know the reality of the front. ...Lately the clashes along the border of the Great Forest have been growing more frequent. The elves' offensive is fiercer than it has ever been. We believe a single clan has begun acting on its own."
"Is that why you came?"
"It was an important reason. ...The side effects must be guarded against, of course. I'm not suggesting we dose every soldier with the medicine. But there are certainly soldiers who need a drug that can shake off fear and fatigue. War is reality."
"..."
"I am not Anais. I'll proceed with care, so I would like your cooperation."
With the Imperial Capital already unsettled over the Anais affair, the losses on the elven front were worsening as well, and she seemed to feel the weight of it. She must have thought of him while that compulsion — the need to contribute somehow — was eating at her, and come looking.
So she didn't come after a drug out of nowhere.
Victoria stared at him with her lips pressed shut, resolve written across her face. She was waiting for an answer, but he could not readily give one. Not because he meant to brush her aside. There was another reason.
A hard-line elven clan that had suddenly begun to make trouble; the clashes along the border of the Great Forest, grown frequent because of it; the relations between elf and human, worsening by the day. It was the original story — the one he had lived all this time forgetting.