Ethanol
The silver-haired girl was peering around the manufacturing room with keen, restless interest.
To Siena, the place might as well have been a theme park. Morphine, heroin, and ephedrine all came out of here.
In truth, making narcotics was about as far from fun as work could get. In my previous life a drum of solvent could be had for thirty thousand won; here I had to manufacture the stuff myself through mindless, repetitive labor. The only woman likely to find any enjoyment in this room was Siena.
That she was content to leave it at a tour was a relief. I could not leave it at that, though.
I have to tame her, little by little.
I was in no position to reform anyone. Even so, no one but a man like me stood any chance of controlling Siena at all. She was the sort who tormented nearly everyone around her, and for the present I was the only thing she felt any attachment to beyond a toy. If I meant to keep myself safe, I would have to train her by degrees.
"From now on, you will have to live as a good girl."
I said it to her back. She was staring at a distillation flask, and I watched those rounded shoulders flinch.
I could guess what was passing through her head. What is this man saying? Allan really is different from me. Do I have to endure this if I want to keep him? I was not trying to shatter the fantasy of a girl touring her narcotics theme park. I had another purpose.
"I am advising you to become a little more subtle, Siena."
"What did you just say."
"Just listen. When someone with vacant eyes walks around carrying a blade, everyone is too busy hiding or getting out of the way. They cannot tell when they will be hurt, or how. That is also why there has been no one around Your Highness until now."
Even by my own reckoning, it was little short of outright abuse.
Siena only turned to me with a bright smile. I had quietly dropped the honorific, and far from taking offense she seemed to like it. I would rather have gone on calling her Your Highness, but if this made the persuasion land harder, there was no reason to avoid it.
"You mean don't let them read my intentions?"
"Yes. Exactly that."
"I don't know, Allan. All this time, I've—"
"Of course the infamy you have piled up over the years is not going anywhere. No one is suddenly going to revise their opinion of an imperial who had a servant put to death on the spot for stealing a single bottle of wine. It is enough if they come to see you as someone they cannot get a fix on."
"......"
"Succeed at that, and a day will come when you may indulge yourself to your heart's content and scarcely be blamed for it."
At those words Siena drew a finger slowly along her own cheek. A moment later she nodded, conceding the point.
"Actually, I've been thinking the same thing for a while."
"I know. That is why you have been listening to my advice."
"Right."
Without me, Siena would still have been treated as nothing but someone to avoid. As it stood she commanded a faction—smaller than Victoria's, and originally Anais's—and held half the shares in the most promising company in the Empire. Nor was there any public sense that she had been eliminated from the succession.
If she had any sense at all, she would know which choice was the wise one. The best course would have been to do nothing and live quietly, but that was impossible, so throwing a camouflage net over her was the right move.
"All right, Allan. What should I do?"
"Well."
I already had an answer, but I deliberately let the silence hang. I needed to leave the impression that we had found the method together.
Only after I saw her head tip once from side to side did I speak.
"You will not care for it, but save some people."
"Me?"
"Yes. Before long I intend to establish a factory devoted solely to producing solvents. For now I make them as the need arises and use them on the spot... but the work keeps piling up, and I cannot go on doing it alone forever."
"So in the end you want less work, and the credit all the same."
"Yes. Exactly that."
If someone else so much as made the ethanol for me, my labor would be cut in half. Manufacture it in bulk and divert a portion to medical use, and I could shrink the workload while improving public opinion of us along the way. Supplying every hospital in the Imperial Capital was a dream, but founding a few lying-in hospitals where people almost never died was within reach. That alone would do a great deal for our good name.
"It would help, certainly. You especially."
"Yes. I am the one who spread the heroin, after all. If we plant the notion that this is not a company that only makes drugs for harming people, it will serve us."
"......"
"Do you agree?"
Siena considered for a moment, then nodded.
She hardly wanted to do anything that benefited other people. Even so, she seemed to accept the advantage: a solvent factory would make the drugs easier to manufacture. She probably wanted to accommodate me where she could, as well.
That should do.
I was quietly relieved when she, as if something had just occurred to her, lifted only one corner of her mouth.
"But... Allan?"
"Go on."
"You knew how to save people—no, how to kill fewer of them—and all this time you only made morphine and heroin? You could have been praised and made money besides, and you turned it down. And it only occurs to you now."
"......"
Her small hand came to rest lightly on my shoulder. Objecting here would do me no good, so I simply nodded.
"Allan."
"You really do suit me."
Words it was hard to call praise, and hard not to.
Still, the situation was not a bad one. The Siena of now did not seem likely to make trouble for me. To say I felt no unease at all would have been a lie, but it was far better than turning her into an enemy.
"I ought to thank the Empress."
Her touch slid slowly down from my shoulder—upper arm, forearm—until at last she caught my hand and held it tight. All the while those violet irises stared as if they meant to bore through me. She looked full of questions, but I did not answer them. Lay out the whole of my stock in trade and there would be nothing in it for me. I was not so thin that I would be cleaned out in short order, but it would still do me no good.
For now, I decided to stop at permitting her into the manufacturing room.
The moment the tour ended, Siena carried out my request.
She acquired one of the largest lying-in hospitals in the Imperial Capital, sent people out to scout land for a factory, and sat down with the Minister of Agriculture and the chairman of the public agricultural auction. If ethanol was to be produced even a little more efficiently, it mattered that she grasp the state of the raw materials. I had felt it before, but her diligence, at least, had to be acknowledged.
She is only getting it done because of me.
I did not seem to be the only one watching this Siena closely.
…
"Her Majesty the Empress says she has a confidential request to make."
Two days later, the word came by a chamberlain sent from the Empress's palace.
A confidential request—and after I had staged an entire performance before the Emperor, for whose sake? The Empress did not strike me as someone doing this without a thought behind it.
She was probably beginning to test the waters. She would want assurance that I was not about to join with Siena and shove back against her.
The most efficient way to confirm a wish for reconciliation is a trivial favor, the sort one can grant at any time if one feels like it. It might look like being a nuisance, but friendship grows, as a rule, amid favors asked and granted.
True to that expectation, the chamberlain brought an exceedingly easy request.
"It is hardly a matter to lay before someone so occupied with affairs... but I wished to ask whether you might gift a little more psilocybin."
"For what purpose?"
"There has recently been a large-scale purge in Jin, I am told. A close friend of Her Majesty's from childhood has lost her husband. Her Majesty wishes to send psilocybin, that the woman might have some small comfort."
"Someone wrote presumptuous lines into a memorial again, I take it."
"I do not know the reason, but more than a hundred are said to have died or been sent into exile."
That country was as brutal as ever.
I did not think the Empress was doing this out of worry for a childhood friend. She meant to sound out my intentions with a trifling request. If I helped her readily, she could take it that Siena's temper had cooled.
That she was confirming it with me, and not with Siena herself, spoke to the Empress's skill in statecraft—and to the care she took not to provoke her violent daughter.
Accept this, and she will summon me in person before long. She will decide the mood for a conversation has been set.
I had no intention of accepting. Agree too readily, and the Empress would bestow a title and a decoration as if she had been waiting for the chance, then shove me on to the next stage.
"Tell her it is too soon. This is not a refusal. It is a deferral."
"Pardon? Too soon?"
"There is plenty of psilocybin, of course. Refine only what we have on hand and, on the assumption Her Majesty takes it three times a week, there would be enough for more than ten years. What Her Majesty truly wants, however, is not some paltry mushroom powder."
"......"
"Convey my words honestly, and Her Majesty will understand."
"...Yes."
The Empress's chamberlain withdrew looking baffled.
As expected, the Empress's palace showed no displeasure. If anything, it went quiet. They had not asked because they actually needed the psilocybin.
They would not keep sounding me out this gently forever. A real bite would come. Before long they might ask to fix the date of a decoration ceremony, or try to invite me to an official function of the imperial house—a charity for wounded soldiers, perhaps, or a banquet for foreign ambassadors.
My mere attendance at such an event would put the Empress halfway to her goal.
Just now, though, I had no time to spend guessing at her inner thoughts. Not because I meant to ignore her, and not because I was busy commissioning distillation equipment.
"...Um, President Allan? I just went to deliver medicine to Leon Lauderdale and heard something strange. At first I wrote it off as nonsense, but the more I think about it, the stranger it seems. I thought you ought to know."
It was an employee, come to me with a puzzled face to make that report.
Leon, the original protagonist, had been taking drugs for free for months now. I had an employee supply him, on a regular schedule, with two daily doses of Thumpy and Dreamy. The condition was that he keep a certain standing in the swordsmanship faculty.
Until now the boy had managed to comply, one way or another, but the employee's expression said his condition was far from good. Had it only been begging for a little more of the drug, they would never have brought it to me.
I hesitated a moment, then decided to look into how he was doing. It was something I would have to face sooner or later. Best to settle it while I still had the leisure.