Spread
The span the Emperor had promised still had a long way left to run.
And yet there were already people pressing him.
"Er, Sir Allan? It isn't really my place to say this to someone who's come as an envoy, but thousands of people have their livelihoods hanging on the Great Forest. Indirectly, it may be hundreds of thousands. Raw timber alone, coming out of the forest's outskirts, used to run past eight million loads a month."
So the mayor of the border city of Antrim had told him. The people who had depended on the immense resources flowing out of the Great Forest, he said, were beginning to complain.
Of course they're in a bind.
But I felt no urgency. Even at this very moment, the heroin would be spreading, diligent as ever.
If the couriers tried to keep it to themselves, the pace might slow. There was no way, though, to stop the spread itself. However static a creature an elf might be, no one could watch the person beside them puffing away in rapture and feel nothing at all. Once they came into contact with it, by whatever route, getting free again was nearly impossible. They would sink into it of their own accord.
If they happened to know the side effects, they might hold back—but recognizing the harm heroin did was anything but easy.
Strange as it seemed in hindsight, heroin had in fact been made as one of the drugs meant to replace morphine, with all its vicious side effects. After it reached the market it was regarded, for a very long time, as a medicine safer than morphine and more effective besides, and it sold like madness. Nearly thirty years passed before its use was finally banned.
The first narcotics laws in anything like their modern form had also come into being because of heroin. Before that, of course, it had driven theft, robbery, prostitution, bankruptcy, and the breaking of families in staggering numbers. In some respects it had cut deeper than the crack crisis of the eighties.
And these people have only had it for a few days.
Far too short a time to grasp what heroin did.
There was, admittedly, exactly one way to notice early: to endure the craving and stop taking it on purpose. Once the drug wore off, withdrawal would begin to creep in after five or six hours. It varied from person to person, but from the twenty-four-hour mark the pain was more than ordinary willpower could bear. By then one might sense how dangerous heroin was. The odds of it happening were slim.
There's no reason the elves would bother enduring it.
No knowledge of the side effects, a craving for heroin surging by the hour, and the very heroin that could quiet that craving already in their hands? Holding out against that was, in practice, impossible. A tiny handful of elves might manage to endure it somehow, but it would make no difference. There couldn't be many with willpower that exceptional. If anything, it would only sow discord between the elves who craved it and the elves who refused—and considering why I had come here, that was no bad outcome either. The elves would be crippled past the point of waging war all the same.
Marcella woke, blinked her raw and swollen eyes, and drew up a smile.
That's right. I can beat this.
Set beside the days before she had started on the heroin, she was still a wreck. Even now she could probably annihilate a detachment of the imperial army in a single stroke, but measured against her best she was half of that at most. Still, she was a little better than she had been when the "phenomenon" was at its peak.
The desire for heroin had not left her. Enduring it was enough. There was no secret to it. She simply endured. The sense, with a single draw, that her soul was being purified; the warmth that wrapped her as gently as the embrace of the World Tree Mother; the pleasure of a spring of inspiration welling without end inside her head—she was forcing all of it out of her thoughts.
Think about it, and I want to smoke again.
But wouldn't this desire vanish too, someday?
Marcella wiped the cold sweat from her brow and slowly pushed herself upright. It was time to return to Medellin, the domain of the World Tree. She meant to report the peace negotiations to the elders and destroy the heroin. She would also look after her subordinates, whose condition—unlike her own—was far worse. They had snarled at her, but they were still a precious resource. She would have to let it pass.
"Come on. Time to move again!"
She called out to the subordinates who ought to have been sprawled somewhere nearby. For some reason, no answer came back.
"Lurde? Marina?"
Still quiet. And now that she thought of it, she couldn't feel their presence either. However dulled she had become, what kind of disgrace was this?
Marcella sighed and began to look around, certain they were close by, moaning heroin, heroin under their breath. But what was this? Her subordinates were nowhere to be seen.
"Huh...?"
And it was not only her subordinates who had vanished. The porcelain bottle that had been clenched in her hand until she fell asleep—the bottle that held thirty grams of heroin—was gone as well. Whenever the craving rose she had made herself stare at it to steady her resolve, and now where had it gone? She swept the ground around the place she had slept and found nothing.
Marcella's face went slowly pale.
"Don't tell me."
She said it, but only one possibility rose in her mind. Theft. They had waited for the moment their commander, spent past the edge of exhaustion, fell asleep, and they had taken it. She did not want to imagine it. There was nothing else.
Suspecting her own kind was a bad habit, and yet the faces of her subordinates—mad on heroin, noses running—kept flickering in front of her eyes. One of them had even spat at her, jabbed a finger, and shouted that she meant to hog the whole damn thing herself.
I have to find them before it's too late.
Marcella set her jaw and went looking. There were ten of them, and ten pipes; by now they would be having the time of their lives. They might even be grinning at one another, blowing smoke into each other's faces.
"Idiots."
A little heroin, and they had gone all the way to insubordination. She was willing to overlook curses and familiar speech. This could not go unpunished. It was not a matter of her own feelings. It was an act that tore order down. Above all, it was an act that would ruin the lives of the people doing it. Two doses alone had brought this much suffering. Smoke it a third time, a fourth, and would it not only grow harder afterward? The things the body did when one stopped might grow worse still. That wretched future, at least, she had to prevent.
I have to find them before they're ruined. I have to.
Marcella began to comb every place her subordinates might have holed up: the strongpoints they had used while holding out against the imperial army, the dwellings of the elves who lived on the outskirts of the Great Forest as its wardens, and the rest. For a full day she scoured the country around her like a madwoman, and she found them nowhere. The more she failed, the more her impatience doubled. It meant they were hidden somewhere so secret that even she could not find them, sunk in heroin.
"Lurde! Marina! Yomira! Heroin is forbidden...!"
She tore through the forest, crying the names again and again. However desperately she called, no answer came. Instead, an interruption cut in.
"Lady Marcella. You must return to Medellin. The elders have suddenly become strange."
A report, received through communication magic, from the subordinate she had left behind in Medellin. The elders were probably pressing her to report the outcome of her contact with the Empire's envoy. Was a report the problem now?
She felt hollow, but she decided simply to comply—not out of respect for the elders, but because she had begun to think she could not find her subordinates alone.
Better to tell the elders about the heroin and have them send out a search party. This isn't something I can manage by myself anyway.
For now, go back. Marcella looked with stifled irritation at the forest—pointlessly green, pointlessly lush—and started walking. Her body had improved sharply. Her heart was more unsettled than it had ever been. Perhaps more than when she had fought the army of the Britannia Empire at its fiercest. An army did not frighten her. Heroin did.
Medellin, city of the World Tree.
The moment Marcella arrived through the teleportation circle, she ran straight for the building that housed the Grand Elder's office—a building raised on a branch of the World Tree, the most magnificent branch of all. Ordinarily she had thought it more than that lazy Grand Elder deserved. Not now. What mattered was telling them, as soon as she could, that her subordinates had vanished, and securing their help.
"I will see the Grand Elder."
She announced it to the elf standing guard.
"Yes. Everyone is gathered at the moment, but—"
"The other elders as well? Are they in council?"
"W-well. Whether one ought to call it a council..."
"Why are you hesitating—never mind. Step aside."
She pushed past the guard and entered in a rush. It was rude. This was no time to stand on empty courtesy. At a run she reached the door of the Grand Elder's office.
Didn't they say the elders were gathered?
She could clearly sense presences—a great many of them—and yet the office was comparatively quiet. Marcella, on the point of throwing the door open, faltered for an instant. Because she was ashamed to show a face heroin had made shabby? Because it was humiliating that she had managed her people so poorly they were now missing? Not for any such idle reason. Only an ominous suspicion flickered through her mind: that their disappearance and this gathering of elders might be connected, and that something might already be happening inside. Just then a vacant burst of laughter leaked through the crack of the door and swelled her worry.
No. It can't be.
She told herself so, with effort, and went in, reproaching herself for entertaining an impious thought that had no basis.
But inside the office a scene beyond anything she had imagined was unfolding.
"The pipe's empty. Fill it just one more tiiime."
"Elder Silien, you smoked a moment ago, didn't you? ...It's my turn now."
"Anyone under five hundred gets in the cart and... drinks it. The tea."
The elders lay slack and sprawled, pipes clenched in their mouths. Beside them, swaying as they indulged in the smoke, were Marcella's own subordinates—the ones she had thought vanished. The Grand Elder was even licking, with every appearance of regret, the heroin powder spilled across the table in the middle of measuring it out.
A scene that had no reality in it, even as she watched it with her own eyes.
"Ah?"
Marcella's face went blank as she took in the heroin party of her own kin. There was nothing else she could do.