55. Withdrawal
She'd taken it again.
This time, she smoked it from a pipe.
The moment she drew a deep lungful, bliss flooded in. Tears streamed down her face, and it didn't even occur to her to wipe them away. It was simply too good.
Heroin really is the best.
Marcella gazed at the pipe, thoroughly pleased with herself.
She and her subordinates had laid hands on the heroin a mere five hours after leaving the human city. Had someone suggested they skim a little for themselves? No. They had only happened to meet one another's eyes while they walked. Lourdes—the aide Marcella treasured most, and her friend—had grinned with her mouth hanging open and winked, and the rest of her people, reading the room, had nodded along.
Any reason not to?
None.
We're smoking it, then?
We are.
A conversation conducted entirely in glances.
Right after, they cracked the gift box open with a satisfying rip, spooned heroin into the pipe with an adorably small measuring spoon, and lit it with magic. They were already ecstatic before the first pull, and the actual taste was more tremendous than anything they had imagined. The tea had been sublime—and this could be better still?
Sprawled anyhow across the undergrowth, puffing and coughing, she couldn't have cared less. If anything, she felt as though she had become one with the forest, and the pleasure doubled. Elves were a people who lived in the woods. Of course it felt right.
Love the forest. Love the heroin, too.
Lourdes called to her as she lay there, languidly melted into the leaves.
"Boss... so."
Boss? Marcella nearly corrected her, then let it go. The comfort the heroin had granted her was to thank.
"What is it?"
"You know. This."
"The heroin?"
"Yes. What if we didn't give it to the elders, and just smoked it ourselves...? We're the ones who fought the hardest, and we're the ones who got the gift. It's spoils, when you think about it. If we keep it to ourselves, we can smoke it for a lot longer, too."
An exceedingly fair and reasonable proposal.
A smile rose on Marcella's face. Her subordinates, each of them sprawled across brush or bare earth, turned to look at her as one.
She's right. If it's just us, it'll last quite a while.
Eleven of them, and thirty grams. According to what was written in the instructions, that was enough for each person to smoke or eat it more than two hundred times. Two or three months of enjoyment, perhaps? All that time, she could spend nestled in heroin's embrace, lost in bliss.
"You're allowing it, then?"
Marcella nearly agreed on reflex. She got as far as of course—and shut her mouth.
Too late, it struck her that the heroin itself was beyond reproach, but the quantity was painfully finite. Thirty grams was a fair amount. It was not enough.
What do we do when this runs out?
The mere thought of a future without heroin already frightened her. She had not the slightest wish to speak ill of heroin, and yet sometimes a thing too excellent, too beautiful, became a problem in its own right. Hateful as it was to admit, heroin had not been made by elves, but by a human—and the apothecary in question was Allan Madoff, a man hostile to their kind.
There's no way he'll keep giving it to us. He hates us.
Marcella turned the problem over for the better part of half an hour before she finally spoke.
"The heroin won't do. I'll have to think on it, but we can't give it to the elders either."
"Huh...? What kind of nonsense is that."
"Heroin is magnificent, of course. But it's so magnificent that that's the problem. Once what we received this time is gone, we'll be in... serious trouble. This isn't something we can simply obtain because we want it."
"Why are we worrying about that already...! We smoke it first and see."
"We have to worry now. Grow too accustomed to how magnificent heroin is, and the parting will only be harder later. So—it pains me, truly, but."
The faces of the elves watching Marcella began to harden. One of them even stared, eyes wide, as if unable to believe what she was hearing.
It must hurt. If it's this hard for me, how much worse for them.
But hard or not, there was no help for it. Of one thing she was certain: fall in love with heroin, and it would only hurt more later. Twice was already enough to break her heart. Better to decide now.
"All things considered, we'd do better to stop taking the heroin."
Marcella grimaced and capped the porcelain bottle.
At that, one of her subordinates began to sob with the face of someone who had lost the World Tree. Honestly, Marcella felt her own heart collapsing. Even so, she resolved to endure. She had a premonition that if she didn't hold out now, something would go badly wrong.
The day after they stopped.
I was right after all.
Still wandering the outskirts of the Great Forest, Marcella looked at the gooseflesh risen along her forearm. In the woods an elf moved like the wind, but now she dragged her feet, forcing herself onward. It was the phenomenon that had started about half a day after they quit the heroin. She couldn't quite explain it, so she simply called it the phenomenon.
It began with cold sweat. What followed was sneezing, and aches in the muscle. Even inside the muggy Great Forest, chills kept creeping over her. That was the worst of it.
Marcella herself could more or less bear it, thanks to a body sturdy enough to surpass the limits of elven flesh. Her subordinates were in a serious state. She glanced back. Ten undead were creeping after her, slow as sludge.
"Heroin—heroin—heroin—heroin—heroin—heroin—heroin—heroin—heroin—heroin—heroin—"
"Lady Marcella, please, can't we just smoke it...? If we run out, we can ask the humans for more, can't we—aigo, no, that's not it. The humans want to make peace with us, so we just demand it as the price. Humans are all cowards."
"Just because she's a little good in a fight, she means to hog the whole thing. How cheap..."
Watching that spectacle only confirmed Marcella's conviction. Heroin must not be smoked, and it must not be eaten. It gave tremendous joy when you took it, and in exchange it wracked the body. Seen like this, wasn't heroin a slightly imperfect thing...? She would never—absolutely never—deny its virtues, but a perfect medicine wouldn't put a person through this. However good it was, the wise course was not to take it.
Honestly, I still want to smoke it.
Even in the midst of all this, the craving for heroin hadn't left her. It was right there in her hand, and she couldn't smoke it. Was there a more galling situation anywhere? She would rather have thrown it into the forest, and there was only one reason she didn't: if she did, her subordinates looked ready to go completely mad.
Their attitude was growing more insolent by the hour as it was. They were even dropping all respect and cursing her to her face—something that had never happened when they fought the army of the Britannia Empire.
Hold on a little longer. That's all.
She would reach the teleportation circle soon. The moment she arrived in the domain of the World Tree, Marcella meant to tell the old ones only about heroin's shortcomings, and dispose of it somehow. It wouldn't be an easy decision. Still, no matter how hard it was, the thought kept returning that this was the right thing.
"Let's rest a moment, then go on."
"Lady Marcella. While we're resting, please, just one pull. Truly, just one."
"I'm sorry. Endure it."
"Why are you even doing this...!"
Marcella deliberately put distance between herself and her agitated subordinates before she sat. She could have pressed on alone at speed. Unlike her weakened people, she was still relatively sound. Even so, she didn't want to leave her ravaged kin behind. Better to take them with her, even if it delayed them a little.
Marcella clenched the porcelain bottle tight in her hand and did her best to ignore the complaining, trusting that they were only grumbling now and would understand someday. At the same time, sleep rushed in on her all at once. She decided not to fight it, and to doze for a little while. At least while she slept, she could erase the desire for heroin. Yesterday the phenomenon had kept her from so much as a wink; that sleep was coming at all now was a mercy.
I want to smoke it. I want to eat it. I still have to hold.
Marcella crushed down the craving as it surged, and barely managed to close her eyes.
After Marcella fell asleep—
Her elite subordinates began to mutter, their faces steeped in venom.
"She's going to eat it all herself. I'm sure of it."
"Look at her, clutching it even in her sleep so nobody can take it. Wow."
Ten pairs of eyes turned on the sleeping Marcella—or, more precisely, fixed with desperate longing on the porcelain bottle in her hand. What ruled their minds was nothing but the craving for heroin, and the suspicion that, left like this, Marcella would monopolize it alone.
Common sense said it had to be so. If Marcella kept thirty grams of heroin to herself, she could smoke for a year. She would pretend the subordinates who had resisted the Britannia Empire beside her didn't exist, and enjoy all that pleasure alone. It was obvious.
"Did she fight by herself? Cheap."
They knew it, and still they couldn't protest outright—because of Marcella's station, and her strength, as the finest warrior in the Great Forest. Even if they somehow stole it, what came after would be the problem. Still, think long enough and a path appears.
Lourdes, her second-in-command, glared at Marcella as if she meant to kill her, then suddenly made a proposal.
"What if we steal it and offer it up to the elders? Then at least we could smell the smoke from beside them."
"Just us."
"We have to drag the old fossils into it if we want to be safe. That human—Allan Madoff—told us from the start not to touch the heroin, and to deliver it intact to the elders. Get the elders at our backs, and a way to get more heroin later will turn up. I'm certain of it."
"Y-you think so."
The talk went back and forth. The plan grew concrete. It did not take the elves long at all to turn on the one who led them.