The Target
I nearly gambled with my soldiers' lives.
Victoria felt the cold settle into her face and drew a steadying breath. It was not only her cheeks that stung. Something sat lodged in her chest and heaved there, and her hands fidgeted on her knees with no regard for her will. Allan was still talking, saying he had a counterproposal, but none of it reached her.
"Sir Knight, I'll just take three pills. Couldn't you throw in one Dreamy, though?"
The cowed voice came from beyond the door, right on cue. It belonged to the sword-faculty prodigy Allan had driven out of the office. Whether he thought greed had wrecked the deal, he kept apologizing and whittling his terms down, which meant he could no longer manage even ordinary judgment. Allan, apparently past disbelief, broke off his explanation and only sighed.
"Leon. I am in the middle of an important conversation with Her Highness the First Princess. Leave, or there will be no medicine."
Only then did the presence pacing outside the door vanish.
What followed was silence. A deeply uncomfortable one. Allan dragged a hand down his face, bewilderment written into the gesture, and Victoria, unable to meet his eyes, fixed her gaze on the papers atop the desk. Of all things, it was a report on the state of the naval penal unit.
I meant to show him this and talk Sir Allan around.
She had planned to dose fifty sailors of the penal unit with ephedrine on a trial basis and confirm its effects and its side effects. Looking back now, though, she knew she had never truly meant to verify those side effects. She had only needed grounds solid enough to set Allan at ease, so he could supply stimulants to the imperial army without reservation.
And if events had gone the way her greed wanted? She would very likely have mass-produced veterans who had given up on life and would hunt the drug until they died. Their existence would have been a heavy burden on the Empire. Once they broke the way Leon had, they would do anything to obtain it, and considering that every one of them had come out of the military, the damage might have been worse still. The thought of a catastrophe that might well have come to pass left her vision swimming.
Even through that, a question surfaced.
"Sir Allan. You said you had something to tell me? Before that, there is one thing I wish to ask. ...If you permit it, of course."
"Yes. Please ask, Your Highness."
"Why, of all people, did you give the drug to Leon Lauderdale? I heard he was addicted to the syrup, of course, but there was no need to feed him something even more harmful, was there? I am not doubting your goodwill, so I hope you will not misunderstand."
She knew she was in no position to ask, and still the doubt clung to her. Had there really been any need to steep in drugs a talent so overwhelming that even the Empire's masters marveled at it? Better to have left him to the syrup. He would not have fallen apart to this degree.
At the question, Allan offered a bleak, forlorn smile.
"It's simple. Only then could I keep him alive at all."
"What...?"
"That Leon wasn't merely gorging himself on syrup. I'm told he smoked opium all day long, skipping meals to do it. I judged it marginally better to dose him with something stronger and drag him out of the opium smoke."
"Then, once he came into contact with your drug, he lost his interest in opium and the syrup?"
"Exactly that. He says neither opium nor the syrup is any fun anymore. He even sneered that the friends wallowing in the opium smoke looked like pathetic wrecks."
"Why would he even sneer at— no. Enough. He isn't in his right mind anymore."
Only then could Victoria grasp what Allan had intended. He must have meant to tame the boy with a stronger drug he could not obtain at will, and thereby keep him alive. Allan, after all, could regulate the dose so it would not kill him. As a knight, he simply could not stand to watch a brilliantly gifted junior throw his life away for nothing. She understood the feeling.
And without knowing any of that, I twisted Sir Allan's intentions.
Far from thanking the man who was straining to stop her from a disastrous choice, she had doubted him. Self-reproach welled up again. At this point, even sitting face to face with Allan was painful. In the end Victoria let her gaze fall, all the strength gone out of it.
"Sir Allan. As you already know, the introduction of stimulants is withdrawn. I'm sorry for the trouble."
"I'm relieved."
"You said you had something to tell me. What is it?"
"It concerns the border with the Great Forest. There is a way to lighten the security burden."
"I see. But, Sir Allan...? It might be better to propose it directly to the Minister of Military Affairs rather than to me. Princess I may be, but by rank I am only a major attached to the Special Staff. If you wish, I can arrange a meeting."
Honestly, quibbling over rank at this point was absurd. As a major she had already decided to introduce morphine and unilaterally notified the minister and the vice minister, and that had been mere formality. Her influence could not be measured by rank. But what good was power, however great, when she lacked the judgment to use it?
I nearly caused another disaster. For a while, I ought to keep my head down.
Even managing her expression was starting to fail her. Victoria made a show of rifling through the papers for no reason at all, hoping the benefactor who had stopped her mistake would leave the office quickly.
Allan, unkindly, would not let her go.
"Your Highness the First Princess. If you permit it, I would rather speak to you."
"Well. You're free to speak, but as I said, I—"
"I can guess why you're avoiding the conversation. ...But, Your Highness. Admitting a mistake takes courage. And you withdrew the plan at the conception stage, before any mistake was committed. No one was harmed."
"Sir Allan."
She lifted her head to tell him there was no need to humor her, but Allan shook his head with a faint smile.
"I am not doing this to win Your Highness's favor. I am being stubborn only because the First Princess is the only one who can make my goal real. This is not a matter a minister or a vice minister can shoulder by a bureaucrat's authority."
At those words, the sense of defeat that had been gnawing at her began, little by little, to fade. It did not vanish, but it receded to something she could endure.
Right. My feelings don't matter.
Victoria looked straight at Allan Madoff: an unusual knight who had studied pharmacology to wash away his lord's disgrace, and now a loyal subject of the Britannia Empire who had even prepared a means of lowering the tension along the Great Forest border. A resource so capable, and so conscientious, that it seemed a waste to leave him under Sienna.
"Very well, Sir Allan. Speak."
Hearing him out mattered more than something as petty as face.
I had no choice but to put my acting to work. I couldn't afford to miss the opening while Victoria was vulnerable.
Honestly, from where I stood, feeling guilty over a thing of this scale was strange in itself. It wasn't as if Victoria had pickled the imperial army in stimulants and driven them on a sleepless forced march. She had only withdrawn the idea at the planning stage. It was a moment that confirmed, all over again, what kind of person she was.
From my position, there's nothing to lose.
Soothing a princess whose pride had been wounded was enough, by itself, to buy her trust. I had done it as insurance against the day Sienna caused some disaster, and fortunately it seemed to have taken. Victoria, who a moment ago had been openly and awkwardly fiddling with scraps of paper, was now looking me straight in the eye. I came to the point with her, briefly.
Victoria flinched, then nodded at once. Anything that came out of my mouth, she must have decided, was worth hearing first. Which let me spin the pitch without restraint.
"As you've seen, the product I make incapacitates a person, and worse, makes them put the drug ahead of their own life. Morphine given to patients in severe pain does relatively little harm, but feed it to a healthy person and they become a wreck in an instant."
"If we exploit that property, we can neutralize the elves, can we not? There is no need to sacrifice precious troops fighting inside their territory. If it goes well, we can bring the elves to heel without a war."
"Even if it fails, a great many elven warriors will drop out of their fighting strength. At the very least, it's better than feeding it to our own soldiers, isn't it?"
I didn't bother explaining what drug I would make, in what quantity, or how I would put it into circulation. Once permission came down, I intended to handle the rest myself. Victoria had seen the state of that bastard Leon, so she would have a rough sense of what would unfold.
I could push this forward even without Victoria's permission.
But it was true that the First Princess's backing would make it far easier. It would give me the justification that I was working for the imperial army—more precisely, for the Empire's interests. It amounted to distributing narcotics in the open with the state at my back, and if a problem arose that I couldn't handle on my own, the burden would be lighter.
Fortunately, Victoria did not drag the deliberation out.
"Very well, Sir Allan. If you need my support, say whatever you like. But I have one thing to ask of you. Can you guess what it is?"
"That I take care the drug does not flow into the imperial army?"
The moment I turned the question back on her, Victoria nodded, and added in a small, timid voice:
"That will do."
She still hadn't shaken off the shocking sight Leon had shown her. Even so, she didn't seem to care in the slightest if the elves were ruined. Natural enough. This was a woman who had been ready to feed stimulants to her soldiers because of the elves.
"Understood. Then I'll proceed from here."
I left Victoria's office at once.
I had secured the cooperation of a real power in the military, but there was still plenty else to do. The Great Forest. The land of the elves, treated in practice as a nation unto itself. Dyeing that vast territory in narcotics was no ordinary undertaking. Had I not been in a position to work not only the staff of Madoff Pharmaceuticals but even the palace attendants under Sienna like common laborers, I would never have dared consider it.
First, I would have to secure enough volume. I headed for the manufacturing room to make the drug. I wasn't planning to produce more morphine. For the elves, I meant to make something deadlier than that.