The Emperor
What was the Emperor really thinking?
And what, exactly, was this “extraordinary honor” he had decided to bestow on me?
If Sienna’s guess was right and the Empress had a hand in it, then this might be a situation that called for real caution. The great empires of the East were always more systematic than the West in the handling of meritorious subjects, and far crueler, and far colder. Being entered on the roll of distinguished service was, for all practical purposes, the same as being written into a death ledger.
This was not Jin, so talk of death ledgers might be stretching the point. Besides, the Empress was still dependent on the psilocybin I supplied her. She played her instruments while she was tripping, and lately, she said, she had even taken to composing scores—Eastern notation no one but the Empress herself could read, but scores all the same. In any case, she was living each day with genuine pleasure, as if determined to be repaid for all the years she had lost.
And then, out of nowhere, she decides to put me under the knife? What reason would she have?
She had a purpose of her own. Of course she did. The trouble was that I had no room to find out what it was. She had kept her mouth shut even in front of Sienna, and the two of them were as close as a true mother and daughter. Wracking my brains over a problem with no answer was nothing but a waste of effort.
And I had other work.
Marcella, now both consul and grand warrior. I had promised to help the blood kin she had lost to heroin break free of the drug, and I was keeping that promise even now. By the time I gave my word, the withdrawal had already started, so there had been no room to delay.
…
“Give me the heroin. No—don’t. I won’t smoke it. I’ll only look. That pretty powder.”
An elf, face and nape slick with cold sweat, writhing where she lay. I had come to bring her an oral rehydration solution, and this was what I walked in on.
“I’ll endure it. I won’t endure it. …But is there even a reason to endure? Of course there is. From now on it won’t be just the elders—no, it isn’t only the adults, is it? Either way, I don’t want to live in the Hohen District. If I want to survive, I have to look good to Marcella. Even so, I like heroin.”
So she wanted to endure, and she was determined not to. The words came in a faint murmur from an elf with the same green hair as Marcella.
She turned out to be Marcella’s younger cousin. Her name was Hotallin. The elf shivering nearby, wrapped tight in a blanket, was kin to Marcella as well. She had said they were close blood, and every word of it had been true.
Which is probably why Marcella accepted my proposal in the first place.
I knew that giving someone a drug and then snatching it away was a filthy thing to do. But seeing a promise already made all the way through to a proper break was better than taking the promise back. The people in question were suffering for it even now.
Muscle pain, fever and chills, insomnia, loss of appetite. At the peak of withdrawal they had even cried out that it felt as if gooseflesh had risen along their bones, begging against the violence of the pain. And all the while, the hunger for heroin would only be growing. They knew that ten milligrams would wipe every last trace of that pain away. If Marcella had not set her subordinates to keep them under control, they might well have run straight for it.
Perhaps the sight of her cousins like this had moved her. Even in the midst of negotiating the armistice with the Empire’s officials, Marcella found gaps in which to come and look in on them.
“Allan Madoff. Why do you keep making them drink water? …They only bring it back up.”
“It isn’t plain water. It’s a rehydration solution, and I’ll give you the proportions now. The truth is, the most dangerous part of quitting is dehydration.”
“…How long does a state like that last?”
“It varies a great deal from person to person.”
Quitting on one’s own strength, the way Marcella had, was impossible. She had simply forced her way through it.
“I know that. On the second day I thought it would kill me, but after that I began to feel I might live. The others were different, though. Far too different. …Even a rough guess will do. Tell me.”
“A state like this will go on for about two more weeks.”
“And once they’ve endured that?”
“The pain in the body will ease. The craving will remain.”
That was the terror of it. Even someone taking methadone—a substitute for heroin—and working faithfully through a sixteen-month program of withdrawal, someone who even held down a job, would reach for heroin without knowing they had done it the moment the drug was set before their eyes. Even after body and mind had come back sound, the nearness of heroin could wake the craving all over again. And these elves were quitting in a short span, with no tapering of the dose at all.
“A truly vicious substance.”
“……”
“And you, who made it, are a human every bit as vicious as the heroin.”
I didn’t answer that. Her cousins were in this state from the withdrawal; that she had stopped here was generous.
“Then I suppose I should send them somewhere they can’t see it.”
“And you’d do better to give them a reason to stay quit. In the end, these elves resolved to break the drug because they don’t want to live in the Hohen District. From here on, you should be thinking of other motives.”
“I’ll think on it. Oh—and congratulations.”
“……?”
Congratulations? Something was off. I turned to look at Marcella.
Green hair, eyes of cobalt. Set aside the body honed by training, and the face alone gave no hint of a warrior. She didn’t seem to be mocking me. More precisely, she didn’t seem to know how. If she were angry she would simply be angry; she had no look of a woman who knew how to needle someone with words.
So there really was something worth congratulating. And when I heard it, there was.
“They say your emperor will soon come in person to the border city of Antrim, to conclude the armistice. He wishes to receive you there, and asked that you be sent along properly. I know that meeting an emperor means a great deal to a human like you.”
He could have summoned me outright. To call me through Marcella, Medellin’s new leader—there was intent in that. Was he determined to hide everything to the very end, so I couldn’t take a single hint? Whatever the Emperor wanted, there was no way to refuse his call. The man on the other end was the master of the Empire.
Four days later, I was able, for the first time in a while, to leave the Great Forest.
My destination was Antrim, the border city beside it. Once it had been a garrison city, built to support the war against the elves, but from here on its character would change a great deal. All those resources pouring out of the Great Forest would pass through this place. Its rise as an economic hub was already certain.
Perhaps that was why the mayor of Antrim looked so desperately eager to keep his seat.
“Er—Consul Allan. Haven’t I been of considerable practical help to you, in one way and another? If you should happen to go somewhere better, please don’t forget me.”
He bowed and scraped without shame, and I let it pass. I had been summoned here for an audience with the Emperor, who had come all this way in person.
Edmund III, Emperor of the Britannia Empire.
In the original tale, he had simply been a father who loved his daughters. A middle-aged man who offered a measured check, and a little jealousy, toward Leon—the one his youngest, Anais, adored—before helping the boy under the pretense of giving in; who flew into a rage every time his second daughter, Sienna, caused some incident, declaring that this time he absolutely could not forgive her, only to forgive her in the end; and who, for the rest, leaned on his eldest, Victoria, while he stewed inside.
The man before me now was not so easy to read.
Even if he’s moving on the Empress’s advice, that changes nothing.
That Edmund III had accepted the Empress’s political counsel meant, in the end, that he agreed with her. He had not even revealed his intentions to his own daughters, they said. If the Emperor had already settled how he meant to dispose of me…
Then turning a few phrases on the spot was unlikely to change the decision. Even so, I would have to try as far as trying could go.
“Consul Allan. His Majesty bids you enter.”
“Yes.”
At last, the moment of audience.
The door opened on the mayor’s office, which the Emperor had taken for a temporary study. I had been in constant contact with the First and Second Princesses, and had worked alongside them; I had even shut the youngest, the Third Princess, away in a convent with my own hands. The Emperor was another order of being entirely.
I advanced before him, observing every point of ceremony. Nor did I forget to praise him, with all deference, as the sun of the Empire.
“Allan Madoff.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. I await your question.”
I waited in silence. The Emperor only looked at me.
It wasn’t that I felt my thoughts laid bare merely by standing still, but the tension filling me was beyond my control. The look in his eyes was a long way from friendly, and a powerful frame that would have put most knights to shame only added to the weight of him.
After a stretch of time had passed—
“Your merit is exceedingly great.”
“Your Majesty.”
“We shall recognize Consul Marcella’s right to rule and accept the terms of her armistice. In exchange, we intend to lease territory amounting to half of the Great Forest. No term has been set upon it, so it is no different from a cession. The negotiations are already concluded. The arrangement will take effect in two months.”
“All of it is Your Majesty’s—”
“No. It must be regarded as a merit raised by you alone. Anyone who knows what lies beneath would think the same.”
“……”
So it had already begun.
The words were plainly praise, yet the Emperor’s face was set hard. Not quite hostility—more the sense of a man holding me at a distance while he studied me. As I thought. The Emperor was taking someone’s advice…
“Allan Madoff. First, I will ask you one thing.”
“…Yes, Your Majesty.”
“The adviser I trust above all others said this to me. That you would be well able to read the shadow standing behind me. And that you would know whose shadow it is. …Yet also that you would give no sign of it.”
“……”
“Is this true?”
Denying it would win me nothing. He would not believe me. I simply lowered my gaze, all deference.
And by that, I came to a certainty. The certainty that the presence standing behind the Emperor was Empress Yeonhwa.
Once a woman sunk deep in depression, now a musician and a stateswoman, imperial blood of Jin—and the Emperor, by every sign, was following her counsel to the letter. When I held my silence, he shook his head, as if in wonder, or perhaps in bitterness.
“A reward. …Yes. I certainly summoned you in order to speak of a reward. And I do intend to bestow one. Commercial rights in the territory we will take by lease, a title… ah, and should you wish it, I am minded to extend privileges to your family as well.”
“……”
“But the greatest reward is a separate matter.”
“Pray tell me.”
“My adviser said that the more difficult the vassal, the closer one ought to keep him. That to hold him at a distance and shut him out is, rather, the worse move—and she went so far as to instruct me in the precise method. …I, too, judged it effective, and agreed.”
The Emperor let the silence hang.
Then the command came down.
“Allan Madoff.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”