The Deal
Negotiations with the elven Great Elder.
The woman was already enthralled by the heroin. I could feel it even through the magic orb.
"Human. You know this as well as I, I should think, but peace is not merely the absence of fighting. Peace rests upon consideration for one another, and only a lively commerce of minds can bring the walls of conflict down. If you were truly dispatched as an envoy to reconcile our two sides, you would understand that. Would you not?"
Long-winded — but strip away the varnish, and all she wanted was a little heroin. Business was well enough, but that wrapping had to come off first. A narcotics deal was never something you conducted with any elegance.
Quantity, price, place, method. That was the whole of it. So I answered her dry on purpose.
"Great Elder. Peace has already been established. The conflict is finished, is it not? The Empire has withdrawn every enterprise it maintained in the Great Forest, and drawn its armies back. …Why, then, must I go so far as to offer up heroin, merely to purchase your goodwill?"
Even so, no answer came for a long while.
She never imagined the day would come when she had to beg a human for favor.
The Great Elder was somewhere in her six hundred and fifties, if I remembered right. She had kept watch over the Great Forest since before the Empire was even founded, and lowering herself before a human some six hundred and thirty years her junior could not have come easily. Giving up the heroin, though, would have been harder still.
I added a little pressure.
"I, too, should like to pay the proper respect to the leader of the Great Forest and the representative of the League of the Five Great Clans. If, however, you have no concrete request to make, I would prefer we end this communication spell here. I am pressed for time. I must return to the Imperial Capital."
"Human…! No — Allan Madoff, was it?"
"Human will do. Call me whatever suits you."
"..."
"Have you nothing to say? Unless something unforeseen arises, I leave this place tomorrow."
Notice served. This was her last chance to buy heroin.
At last, even the Great Elder raised the white flag.
That was more like it.
I didn't plunge straight into the haggling. I sighed — deliberately, loud enough for the Great Elder to hear — and turned over what terms to set. Until the arrangement took root, better to supply her at a fair price, and leave her with the impression of an equal trade rather than a surrender.
I have to let her keep her pride. For now.
While I was weighing that, another elf came to mind.
Marcella.
The first among the elven leadership to taste heroin. I needed to know how she was faring. She was no elder, but the hardliners backed her with a stubborn loyalty, and judging by the last time I had seen her she was almost certainly glazed and drifting herself. Still, it bore asking.
I inquired after Marcella as if the thought had only just crossed my mind.
The answer that came back was not what I expected.
"Sending Great Warrior Marcella as our representative was my mistake."
"Marcella tried some petty scheme to keep the heroin you gave us all to herself, and I caught her at it. She even tried to snatch my pipe, telling me not to smoke. Marcella will not be representing the Great Forest in any further negotiations with the Empire."
"That aside — when can we receive the heroin, and how much of it? There is also something I wish to ask. That strangely shaped pipe. We tried it in the pipes we use, but it would not burn properly. If it is at all possible, that as well…."
She's not even bothering to hide it anymore.
But the Great Elder's fretfulness was nothing to welcome. I had just been told that Marcella had tried to stop her own people from smoking heroin.
I didn't believe it readily. This was a woman I had watched chug lemon tea and weep. It might have been simple greed, just as the Great Elder claimed — a hunger to keep the lot for herself. Coming to grasp how dangerous heroin was, in so short a time, was nearly impossible.
Even so, I can't afford to let my guard down.
Marcella's martial strength, at least, was the real thing. She had stood as a master for over fifty years — an old power, long settled at that height. It was only natural.
The imperial army had boasted overwhelming numbers and still struggled badly in the Great Forest, and Marcella, with the handful of guerrillas she led, was a great part of why. Her temperament matched her arm. Ferocious. Had the elders ever approved an all-out war, she would gladly have taken the van of the elven host and carved the imperial troops to pieces. That was the woman she was.
It isn't only her own strength. Her standing in the Great Forest runs deep — deep enough that even the elders can't ignore her.
And if she truly meant to keep the heroin from coming in?
Then, for the first time, I had met a wall.
Marcella alone couldn't stop it from spreading, but she could certainly obstruct it. If I handled the trade in person, there was a good chance she would try to kill me outright. I had already told her I was the one who made the stuff. It struck me then, cold and clear, how close I had come to dying — a morningstar swinging in my hand, and a sword finding me all the same.
Fortunately, the Great Elder looked like a means of keeping Marcella in check. I started working the angles at once.
"…Great Elder. A warrior who represents the Great Forest has branded heroin a poison? From where I stand, that is deeply insulting. And yet you say you wish to trade for it. I find that difficult to accept. I was hardly inclined toward this in the first place."
"Human. Marcella does not represent the elves."
"Then why did you send her as your representative before?"
"That is…."
The Great Elder hedged, as if she had nothing left to say.
I let the pause draw out, then spoke into the communication orb.
"If you truly want the heroin, I am prepared to supply it at a reasonable price, for the sake of reconciliation between our two sides. I am a businessman before I am a diplomat, and so I cannot provide it free of charge. …In exchange, I have a condition."
"Speak quickly."
"I will decide how the trade is conducted. You need only comply. I will inform you of the particulars in due course."
Terms meant to let me sell the heroin safely — and to keep Marcella in check besides.
The Great Elder accepted what I set out without a moment's hesitation. So long as she could lay hands on the heroin, the manner of it seemed not to matter at all.
Three days later.
The day of the first trade with the elves.
The meeting place was the barracks of an army brigade stationed in the frontier city of Antrim. If I crossed into Medellin myself just to sell a little heroin, Marcella might well come charging with her subordinates, blades leveled, fixed on a single thought — kill that one man, and all of this is solved. So I had chosen this place instead.
Before long, the elves arrived to buy.
"I am Escenia of the Olivar Clan. Where is the heroin?"
Their representative was an elder, pressing me with a face tight with urgency. She looked young enough, but she had to be five hundred at the least. It drove home, all over again, that the elven leadership had acquired a taste for heroin.
To put her at ease, I showed her the goods first.
"Here it is, elf."
"Oh…!"
Three kilograms of heroin, portioned into hundred-gram lots. Smoked at a proper dose, that came to roughly three hundred thousand hits — a quantity that didn't bear comparison with the dainty little sample I had handed over before.
Last time I had packed it in a pretty porcelain bottle. There was no need for that now. Addicts don't fuss over the wrapping.
I did include measuring tools, though, to keep them from overdosing, and I slipped a notice in alongside them, explaining that taking too much would only diminish the pleasure.
"Human…! The pipes?"
"I prepared a few extra. If you still run short, spoon some out, heat it, and take the smoke. You could roll up a scrap of paper and draw through that, couldn't you?"
"That would be… beneath our dignity."
Dignity, of all things. I didn't laugh, of course.
"The effect is the same. Simpler, even."
The elder nodded, as if to say that settled it.
Now it was time to collect payment for three kilograms of heroin.
"Did you bring it?"
"Here."
Elves with eyes as clouded as the elder's set the payment down before me. Goods I reckoned at somewhere between four and five million thalers. I left the figure vague because the mix was strikingly varied — gold ingots, of the sort I guessed they used in their fitful trade with the Darien Kingdom, the one realm on decent terms with the elves; high-denomination notes issued by the Imperial Bank, which were gold deposit certificates in all but name; heavy silver coins I took for Jin's, though where the elves had come by them I couldn't say. There were even several sizable chunks of amber.
It brought home how little accustomed the elves were to trade.
Fine. This was never what I wanted.
What the Empire wanted, in the end, was the Great Forest's resources. Minerals, natural saltpeter, vast stands of timber, and the rest. It was still too early to demand those outright, so I had let them settle the account this way. Sooner or later I would have to drag the Ministry of Finance into it. First, though, I needed to stamp it into them that heroin was not free.
"Good. This will do."
"Mm!"
The elder barely seemed to hear me. She only stared blankly at the heroin, no doubt itching to get back to Medellin and take a hit before another minute passed. Or perhaps she wanted to try it the new way I had just shown her.
There was one matter left before the trade was done.
"Does Marcella still oppose the heroin?"
"She does."
The elder's face darkened, just a shade.
"And yet you managed to bundle up this much wealth and come buy it."
"..."
"You didn't tell Marcella, did you."
"I will not… answer."
So she really had come in secret.
The look on her face said Marcella's opposition ran hard — hard enough that the elders themselves, the leadership, smoked their pipes while quietly watching their backs. She might even have drawn in the elves who supported her and set them to keeping the elders in check.
To think she actually beat the heroin.
Honestly, it surprised me. She could have smoked whenever the urge took her. How had she held out at all? She wouldn't even have known there was a reason to resist.
Either way, once she learned another three kilograms were coming in, she would raise hell. That didn't particularly trouble me. All I had to do was turn that hard line inside out and use it.
"Good. Then work with the other elders, and do as I say. It isn't difficult."
"Human. Why would I follow your orders…."
At that, the elven elder faltered and bent an ear toward me. I began to give her instructions simple enough that even a junkie could carry them out.
If this worked, Marcella's resistance was as good as finished.