Marcella
I still had forty-six kilograms of heroin. Of the load I had carried in at the start, a mere 4.9 kilograms had been enough to bring me all the way to the World Tree. Even so, I could not begin to judge how long what remained would last.
Not because I meant to scatter it without measure and therefore could not estimate. The elves were simply burning through heroin faster and faster. Give it a month, and they might truly be smoking a kilogram a day.
I can't carry that.
If I absolutely had to, I could manage it. Manufacturing alone would not be enough, though, so I would have to share the formula with the other staff — and I would also have to reckon with the off chance that the supply flowed back into the Empire, and with every problem that would branch from that.
Even without Marcella, it was not as if I had no way to hold consumption where it was and bring the situation to a close. Still, there was no denying the work would be easier if she helped.
"What are you trying to do, Allan Madoff?"
"First, I'll clear the surroundings."
I tipped my chin at the elven warriors posted to my left and right and sent them off. I had not done anything so mad as facing Marcella one-on-one. The knights I had brought from the Empire were standing in for that role. Even so, the plain fact was that they were inadequate before Marcella, a mage of the higher circles and a master besides. She seemed to know it.
"I could end you right now."
"You have no intention of doing that anyway, Marcella. And by this point, you ought to know that killing me alone will not finish the problem. For your information: if I die, a royal by the name of Sienna will put herself forward as my successor. Quite happily."
"The Second Princess, you mean."
"You know her?"
"I've heard the officers we took prisoner cursing her. They said she has a real talent for killing people."
Marcella nodded as she said it. So Sienna was famous even in the Great Forest. I let it pass. All that mattered was that Marcella had come to the table without a fight.
I went straight to the point.
"It's simple. Separate the elves already using heroin from those who aren't."
"How dare you."
"Don't misunderstand. I'm not proposing we treat them as prisoners. We lock ours in the military police cells, but I know you have no prisons at all."
"......"
"I'm only saying let them live apart, so they can enjoy the heroin in comfort among their own."
Users with users. Non-users with non-users.
There was a suitable place for it, too: the Hohen District, on the outskirts of Medellin. I had only learned of it after infiltrating this city, but the Hohen District was where elves in their twilight years spent what remained of their lives — a retirement town on a grand scale. To go there, I was told, was to be released from the obligation to labor. To my eye, even an elf of five hundred looked merely drawn, still young enough in the face. But elves had an old age too.
"There... the heroin users...?"
"The elves who already live in that district can simply be moved. Of course, I know it's an inconvenient proposal."
"Of course it's inconvenient. That is where the aged clanless live. However ruined the Council of Elders may be, how could you even suggest such a thing?"
The notion of driving aristocrats into a retirement village of commoners seemed to sit badly with her. I hesitated to call it mere class feeling. The elves of this world did not live in any particular luxury simply because their blood was noble. Five Great Clans or not, food, clothing, and shelter came to much the same thing. But Marcella was not recoiling over nothing.
Because it means deposing the elders — and every elf who might one day become an elder — by her own hand.
In effect, it was no different from asking her to bring the regime down herself, and to do it in league with a foreign power: the Empire. She had already attempted a coup and failed. She would not accept this lightly. Worse, the one proposing it was me, the very man who had turned heroin loose in the Great Forest. She had no reason to want to plot something this large with a member of another race she had been trying to kill only moments before.
A short while later she spoke, glaring at me through eyes full of distrust.
"...I should almost thank you for showing your true colors, Allan Madoff. But what will you do if I refuse? What if I carry your scheme to the Council of Elders — no. The elders are not in their right minds. What if I take it to the Guardians, or the Enforcers?"
"I'm sorry, but how many elves do you imagine will believe you? You stormed a diplomatic negotiation today and tried to kill me."
"......"
"I don't think you have many choices."
Even that notice was enough. Marcella turned on her heel without a word. Only after several steps did she leave me a single line.
"I know."
I could take it to mean she would think it over. If she was bound for the plaza, the decision might come all the faster. That was where the spread of heroin was concentrated. One look at the state of Medellin, and she would understand that she did not have much time either.
Would Marcella choose to work with me?
The chances are good. I can't be certain.
Waiting on her answer, though, called up something from my previous life.
To put my father, Choi Heejun, into a detention center, I had gone back and forth to the annex of the Southern District Prosecutors' Office — the Joint Securities Crime Investigation Division — and cooperated with them. I had meant only to pass along a tip. Then my father's business partner threatened me in that contemptible way, and I stepped in for real. It was what I did after the vault-keeper rumor, the story that I was the one sitting on the family's money, got me doxxed until I quit my job, once I had decided that this could not go on.
The prosecutors had not believed me at first, either. Some of them looked physically sick at it. He's your family, and you'd go this far? They even suspected my cooperation was some kind of internal feud. Before long they saw that I was in earnest, and they worked with me.
Borrowing a power from outside — in that one respect, it might be similar. Marcella, of course, isn't borrowing it of her own will.
Take that away, and we differed in everything else. The cause, the aim, the feeling with which we faced the thing. I had been at odds with my father, yet blood had never eaten at me. Marcella was probably in agony even now. Once she made her move, she would also have to worry over what sort of figure she would become in elven society.
But — ah. Thinking on it, there was one more thing we shared. Once she decided, she acted. That was the kind of elf Marcella was, as I saw her.
She'll answer soon. One way or another.
The prediction held.
Dawn, the next day.
Marcella sent a young elf of eighty to summon me. The place was the plaza before the World Tree. Perhaps because of the hour, there were no elves gathered in knots, smoking heroin and murmuring among themselves. Once the day brightened, they would begin to appear. There would be elves who took up heroin without even knowing they were learning it.
The moment I arrived, Marcella pointed to a small brazier off to one side.
"I watched all through yesterday. They left without even clearing it away. They must have left it because they'll smoke again today regardless. ...And I saw something strange. They were mixing the heroin with incense and putting up smoke. Did you teach them that as well, Allan Madoff?"
"You won't believe me, but no. I never even had them smoke in the plaza."
"If that's true... then more inventive methods will turn up before long."
Marcella could no longer even manage a bitter smile.
"I know what you people want is resources."
"Yes."
"So far you have been after timber, ore, things of that sort. In the end you will try to lay hands on the World Tree. I know you humans nurse fantasies about it. For hundreds of years you have run every kind of swindle over the thing, haven't you?"
"......"
Her face was so grave that I could not offer the explanation that what the Empire truly wanted was not the World Tree. That she had said this much at all was itself proof her mind was made up.
"Allan Madoff."
"Yes."
"Your proposal, to separate users from non-users. To make it real, I will have to pull the leaders down with my own hands. ...I cannot do it alone, so in the end I will have to set the Empire at my back. That is what you want, isn't it?"
"......"
"Before you answer, I have three conditions."
"I'm listening. Speak."
"I will never tolerate anyone reaching for the World Tree."
"......"
The first was an exceedingly easy condition. Plenty of humans coveted the World Tree, and it did have its uses. Weapons made from its branches were said to answer mana with exceptional sensitivity. Even so, they were nothing beside the high-grade timber, natural saltpeter, and ore pouring out of the vast Great Forest.
This one I can grant on my own authority.
The second condition, coming right after, was harder.
"...Also, no elf is to leave the Great Forest against their will. Even where the leaving is voluntary, I will not recognize the consent of a heroin user. This applies, as should be obvious, without regard to blood or age."
In the end, it was a ban on elves being reduced to slaves. Slavery existed in this world, of course. Half the Empire's slaves were beastkin. In the popular mind, beastkin simply were slaves, or slaves in waiting, and humans were worked as slaves in no small number either. If, on top of that, the Great Forest were brought under the Empire in all but name, a new age would open in the slave markets. The money I took in selling morphine or heroin would look like nothing beside it.
This one isn't easy for me, either.
It was possible, but it was a matter I would have to take up with those above me. Stalling while I said I needed to think, however, would be a bad move. From the force of Marcella's manner, the instant I hesitated she would decide that this bastard meant to do it.
"Very well."
Accepting was the right play. This would be her line as well. I had no intention of shouldering it alone, of course. I meant to borrow the princesses' weight.
One condition remained. Fortunately, the last was comparatively simple.
"Allan Madoff. Until I am convinced those two conditions will be kept, you are not to leave Medellin. That is the final condition. ...I will not speak of what happens if you betray the compact later."
No approach to the World Tree. No enslavement. Break it, and retaliation she would pursue even at the cost of her own life. Agree to that much, and the rest would go as I wished. That was what she was offering.
"I agree to all of it."
"Good. Then—"
The instant the Great Forest's only force of resistance was turned into a collaborator.
The settlement lay before my eyes.