The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 4 - Chapter 14

Chapter 14: The Worksite

When they got back to the inn, Suirei was waiting for them. She’d left in the middle of the day to go somewhere, and they hadn’t seen her since then. Now she was sitting at a table with several books on it, reading. When she noticed Maomao and the others, she closed her book gently, the lamplight flickering with the breath of air.

“Dinner?” she asked.

“We’ll eat, if there’s anything,” Shisui replied, and Suirei took a basket from the shelf. Inside was fried youtiao bread. She poured out two glasses of soy milk; the fact that she put one of them in front of Maomao seemed to mean it was acceptable for her to eat. Maomao took a piece of the cold, slightly hard bread and dipped it in the milk before eating it. The soy milk was sweet; it seemed to have a luxurious touch of honey in it.

Soy milk was a simple byproduct of the production of tofu, but the unpleasant smell meant most people didn’t like it very much. The aroma of this milk, however, had been attenuated by the addition of fresh ginger, and it was quite drinkable.

The three women sat around the round table as if at three points of a triangle, Maomao eating silently, Shisui relating the events of the festival. Suirei gazed impassively at her book. For a moment, Maomao thought it looked like the book might be about medicine, and she took a keen interest in it—but it turned out to be an encyclopedia of insects. It wasn’t a printed volume, and it bristled with handwritten comments, so many that it looked more like a notebook than a proper book.

Maomao stared hard at Suirei.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing. Just thinking it was about time I held you to your end of our bargain.”

“You mean about the resurrection drug?” Ah, it was always nice to work with someone who was quick on the uptake. “Do you understand the position you’re in?” Suirei demanded. Maomao was, in effect, a hostage, although she was treated awfully well for all that. Reasonable enough: if she tried to run, they would almost certainly catch her more or less immediately. And if she were to somehow escape, there were no towns or villages nearby where she could go for help. And she didn’t know how to ride a horse, at least not quickly. Even so, she would have expected to at least be confined somewhere, or maybe tied up. The way the two women were acting didn’t seem to make any sense. If she asked them what they were after, they might actually tell her—but she had more important things on her mind at the moment.

“Is it thornapple and blowfish? And what’s the ratio? What else do you add? How much do you need?”

Suirei didn’t answer immediately.

“Tell me about what it’s like right after you revive. I assume you’re not able to move immediately.” Without realizing what she was doing, Maomao had slid closer to Suirei, provoking a scowl from the other woman. Her hand was twitching. It hadn’t done that before.

After another moment Suirei said, “I don’t think you need thornapple.”

“You don’t?” Maomao said.

“It was written in a formula from another country. But I think the intention was to sustain a catatonic state in order to artificially produce slaves. I’ve heard that was the drug’s original application.” Then she held up her shivering left hand—a limb that had worked perfectly well before. The shaking was a result of the resurrection drug. “I got off with no worse than this, but a serious mistake could have cost me my memory.”

She didn’t talk as though that were speculation; she sounded sure—so there must have been other test subjects besides Suirei. Creating a drug demanded a commensurate price. Trial and error was the only means to figure out the proper way to proceed. Maomao was well aware that this involved human testing—but she couldn’t suppress her other feelings about the subject.

“What about the revised formula, then?” Maomao asked, leaning slowly toward Suirei, her eyes widening, feeling gooseflesh all over her body.

“We’ve only tried it on animals,” she said. Not humans, then. After all, for all they knew, they could be wrong: it might turn out that without the thornapple, the subject never revived at all. Of course one would try it on animals first.

Maomao’s eyes sparkled, and she leaned in so close that she was practically nose-to-nose with Suirei. She placed her hand on her own chest, indicating that here, right here, was the perfect experimental subject.

“We’re not trying it on you.”

“Why not?! Be my guest!”

“You’re our hostage,” Suirei said flatly. Maomao had to resist the urge to grab her by the collar and shake her until she acquiesced to giving her the drug. She couldn’t waste this chance to find out more about it. Instead she simply backed down.

“Hee hee! It’s so nice to see you two getting along,” Shisui chirped, taking a bite of fried bread. “After all, you and Maomao could both use some more friends, Big Sis.”

“Shut up,” Suirei snapped.

“Quiet,” Maomao said at the exact same time.

They certainly hadn’t meant to speak in unison, but there it was.

Maomao was sleeping in the same room as Suirei, while Shisui took the other room, the one with just a single bed. She whined that she wanted to sleep with the other girls, but Suirei chased her out and she went away muttering to herself.

It wasn’t as if Maomao and Suirei were spending the night chatting and gossiping. They hadn’t last night, and they wouldn’t tonight. Frankly, there wasn’t much Maomao wanted to say to Suirei, but even if there had been, she doubted Suirei would have responded much.

Maybe Maomao should have started by asking what the girls were after, but she never had. Finally, she thought maybe she should—but when she opened her mouth, she found a completely different question coming out.

“So you’re pretty close with Shisui, it seems?”

“You think so?”

“Looks that way to me.”

That was the end of the conversation. Well, then. It showed how much of a social buffer Shisui provided for Suirei.

When she got up the next morning, Maomao discovered a profusion of books on the table, lavishly illustrated encyclopedias of medicinal herbs. There were even some foreign volumes mixed in among them, depicting a wide variety of plants Maomao had never seen before. She was unable to read most of these books, but here and there papers were tucked among the pages with notes or translations.

“I’m going out. There’s a guard outside, so don’t get any ideas about running away,” Suirei said as she left the room.

“I wouldn’t worry. I don’t think she’ll want to,” commented Shisui, who was already up and having some congee for breakfast.

“What’d you do to get a guard posted on you?” asked the little shit, Kyou-u, who was there for some reason. He was dipping some fried bread in his congee. He was annoying, yes, but Maomao wasn’t bothered; she was more interested in reading through the treasure trove of books in front of her.

“Huh? Not gonna eat?” Shisui asked.

“Later. I can wait,” Maomao said, intent on at least flipping the pages. Shisui, however, shoved some congee-softened bread in Maomao’s mouth. She chewed obligingly.

“How about a change of clothes? You’re still in your sleepwear.”

“Later. I can wait.”

“It bugs me.” Shisui loosened the belt of Maomao’s pajamas; Maomao obediently stretched out her arms and kept reading while Shisui slid an overgarment onto her.

“Geez, lookit this girl. She must think she’s hot stuff. She acts like Lady Shenmei,” Kyou-u said.

Shenmei? Maomao was wondering who that was when Shisui smacked her in the small of the back. She rose out of her chair so Shisui could slide a skirt on her.

“Yeah, thanks, Kyou-u. Go clean up your bowl.”

“Aw, why should I? Isn’t that what servants are for?”

“So you can’t do anything without the servants? My, still such a child, I see...”

She knows how to press his buttons, Maomao thought; and indeed, the little boy who wanted so much to be seen as a grown-up did an about-face, noisily picking up his bowl and putting it on a tray and carrying it out of the room. Maomao half watched him, then nodded appreciatively. “He’s from a decent family, isn’t he?”

“He he. In the land far to the east, they have a saying: ‘the mighty must wane.’” She seemed to be saying that everyone, no matter how strong, eventually got old. That any house, no matter how great, would ultimately fall.

Maomao paged quickly through the books while Shisui moved on to her hair. “Where’s your hair stick from yesterday, Maomao?” Maomao pointed silently at the bedroom. Shisui jogged in and took the hair stick from beside Maomao’s pillow. Then she combed Maomao’s hair and tied it up. She let one bunch drape beside each ear, holding them together with hair ties. “This is a really nice hair stick,” she said. “You have to be careful with it. You wouldn’t want someone to steal it and sell it.”

“Think it would be worth much?”

“Worth much?” Shisui flourished the hair stick in front of Maomao’s face. “Whoever made this was a very talented craftsperson. There aren’t many of them in the capital. If an expert looked at this, they would know who had made it, and from there, who was likely to have placed the order. Just look at the care they put into the design they carved in it, all the little details you won’t even see.”

Maomao remembered once when a courtesan had sold off an accessory a customer had given her as a gift, only to have the same customer buy it from the pawn shop and give it to her again as a present. It hadn’t been comfortable. And she knew how persistent the giver of this particular hair stick could be, leaving her with the uneasy sense that it would one day come back to her.

“I can’t sell it,” she said finally.

“Only thing to do is to melt it back down for the metal, then,” Shisui said, but somehow Maomao thought that felt wrong too. “It’s still...lacking something,” Shisui said. She reached up and pulled the hairpin off her own head, placing it in Maomao’s hair instead. “There, that’s perfect.”

“You’re used to this.”

“You get pretty good at it when you’re beaten for being too slow,” she said, the words sounding as natural as anything.

“Beaten?”

“Uh-huh.”

It was hardly uncommon for a maid’s employer to discipline her, but this sounded strange to Maomao.

“If I couldn’t give a decent massage, I got boiling water poured over my hands. I was so scared of it,” Shisui said.

“That is scary. Sounds like your mistress was a terrible person.”

The old madam had meted out discipline to Maomao more than once, but even that old bag knew where to draw the line. Hit ’em where no one will see it; slap ’em so it won’t leave a mark. Sure, she was probably thinking at least in part of making sure she didn’t lower the value of her merchandise, but it was still a kind of mercy.

“Heh! That was my mother!” Shisui said, laughing.

“Hope I never meet her,” Maomao said, wondering what kind of mother would treat her daughter that way. No... I guess some are worse, she thought, looking at the disfigured pinky finger on her left hand.

“I get that. And that’s why you have to be sure to just do what you’re asked, Maomao.” Shisui began putting away her comb. “I’ll be going out today,” she added. Then she left the room.

It had been perhaps six hours. When Maomao got hungry, food was brought to her from the inn’s kitchen. And there were so many books to read. The only thing she really had to frown about was that when she used the bathroom, her guard—a man—had to accompany her.

When she had gone through the books from cover to cover and learned all that was in them, Maomao gave a big yawn. She was sore from sitting so long. She poked her head out the window to get some fresh air. Her room was on the third floor of the inn, the uppermost story, and as there were no taller buildings around, it provided a spectacular view.

She could see steam drifting up from hot springs here and there. No, she couldn’t peep down on anyone from her elevated vantage point—the baths were suitably covered—but even so, she could see most of the village. Beyond the palisade, a river flowed among rice paddies, and she could see the forest surrounding it all. The harvest was mostly over, the paddies bereft of their crop, which was now hanging out to dry.

Hm?

She spotted one field that hadn’t been harvested. Just a corner of it, actually: there, the rice still hadn’t ripened. It was standing smack in the shadow of a building, maybe a storehouse for the crop or something. It was quite an impressive piece of architecture.

She recalled what the children had said the day before about a place where the rice didn’t grow well. Maybe that patch was going unharvested while the owner waited for the crop to mature. Maomao stroked her chin: Hmm.

The plot didn’t appear to be malnourished. And it was strange: the leftover part of the crop occupied a perfect square, tucked just within the shadow of the building. Could it be...?

She leaned out, staring intently at the patch of rice—when there was a huge crash. Maomao almost tumbled out the window in her surprise. She managed to grab hold of the window frame, though, and then took a second to steady her breathing.

“What’re you doing?”

It was the little shit! He’d come into the room, throwing the door open as hard as he could. Maomao marched over, stopped in front of Kyou-u, and, without another word, gave him a noogie.

“Ow! That hurt! What’s wrong with you?”

“You should learn to enter a room more quietly.”

True, she’d struck him partly out of sheer spite, but it was his fault too. Maybe if he could have watched his mouth.

When she finally let him go, Kyou-u looked at her reproachfully. “All right, you. Where’s my big sis?”

“Not a clue.” Shisui hadn’t told Maomao where she was going.

“You should’ve asked her!”

Maomao wasn’t sure Shisui would have answered. Anyway, the field was of more interest to her at the moment.

“Why d’you keep looking outside?”

“Do you have any idea what that building is? Is it a storehouse?”

“Huh?”

Maomao pointed to the structure on the edge of the village. It was the biggest of several around it.

“Aw, that’s the chief’s storehouse. I guess all the fields around there belong to him.”

“So I was right...”

“Uh-huh. But they don’t use it much,” Kyou-u said, opening his mouth with its ridiculous gap in his front teeth. “We’ve got these other storehouses with high floors, to keep the rats out, and that’s where they put everything. That building over there, I don’t think they’re even using it right now.”

“But it’s still there.”

“Yeah, ’cause the chief’s a skinflint. He won’t even pay to have it knocked down.”

Maomao’s response was a heartfelt: “Huh.”

Huh? She stepped away from the window and began to page frantically through the book she had just finished. I’m sure it said...

She found one of the pages with a piece of note paper stuck to it and swallowed heavily.

No doubt Shisui and Suirei had assumed that having so many books to read would keep Maomao quiet, but they had failed to reckon with the nature of her curiosity. It was an emotional force that bubbled up from within her, filling her entire body. She found it almost unbearable to be just sitting in this room reading.

“H-Hey, what’s going on? You look...scary,” Kyou-u said.

No! Damn. Her personal quirks were showing themselves again—and when she got like this, she couldn’t stop them, even if she knew intellectually that she should. Even if they were about to cause her to do something impossibly foolish.

But if she had been any other way, she wouldn’t have been Maomao.

“What, you want to go there?” Kyou-u asked.

Yes, but there was a guard outside. And she couldn’t get out the window; they were three stories up. Actually, getting out wasn’t impossible: she could use sheets to make an improvised ladder, or even work her way down clinging to the wall if she really wanted to. But it would have been much too obvious. The window faced the street, and she would have been noticed and recaptured immediately.

“Can I get there?” she asked, not really expecting much.

Kyou-u smirked at her. “It’s not impossible.”

“Tell me how.” Maomao’s eyes were round. Kyou-u, evidently pleased by this reaction, trotted over to the adjacent room, the one Shisui slept in. “C’mon, help me,” he commanded. Maomao wondered what she was helping with—it turned out to be pushing a chest of drawers. She pushed, not entirely sure why, but then with a heavy scrape the chest began to move, revealing a door behind it. “This actually goes to the room next door,” he said. “That one’s mine.”

Placing a large chest of drawers was certainly one way to divide off the rooms in whatever manner was desired.

“And there isn’t another chest on the other side of the door?”

“It’s fine. I moved it already. I thought maybe I could give Sis a good fright, but this thing was in the way.” Then Kyou-u opened the door. It wasn’t even locked; it must have been assumed that no one would actually bother to move the chests on both sides of it.

Kyou-u’s space was laid out the same way as the sleeping chambers Maomao and the women occupied. The bed was covered with a mess of paper and brushes. She was reminded of a thought she’d had when they were painting the masks—that in spite of appearances, the brat was quite the little artist.

“C’mon, this way,” Kyou-u said, but he wasn’t pointing at the exit. The bedroom looked the same as in Maomao’s space, but the living room was a little different. Unlike the decorative window in her room, this one had a big door that led onto a balcony. The balcony ran past the next room over, and the room beyond that; there were dividers, but they were just decorative bars that it would be easy to slip past.

“Go as far as you can, and you’ll see the roof of a covered walkway that leads to a separate building. Jump down and you can get away, no problem.”

The separate building was behind the inn, so she would probably escape notice as long as she was careful.

“You really know your way around.”

“Heh heh. I’m the only one who doesn’t have any studying to do.” In other words, he’d been sneaking out of here every day. The brat seemed awfully knowledgeable about this town for someone living in a travelers’ lodge; he must have been here quite a while. At bath resorts, it wasn’t uncommon for people to stay for long stretches as they sought to cure an illness. Kyou-u, though, didn’t appear weakened by any kind of condition.

Maomao, not particularly interested in pursuing the subject anyway, slipped through the bars, grateful that she was such a twig. Kyou-u followed her. She looked at him as if to ask what he was doing, and he said, “If you’re gonna go to all the trouble of sneaking out, I figure I might as well come with you.” He sounded awfully condescending.

Bah, fine.

And that was how Maomao finally escaped.

Once Maomao was out of the inn, the rest was easy. Unlike when she’d entered the village, the guard was more than happy to let her out (maybe because it had been dark when they’d arrived). The fields, empty after the harvest, gave her a good view of whether there was anyone around, and she didn’t expect any trouble with wild animals in broad daylight.

“So, uh, what’re we doing?” Kyou-u asked.

“There’s something I want to check,” Maomao answered, and then they were there: standing in front of the as yet unharvested patch of rice.

Kyou-u tore off an ear of the crop. “Think they just aren’t getting enough nourishment here?”

“Unlikely.” Maomao looked at the storehouse next to the field. There was a big window in the plaster wall—a simple opening without bars or anything, though at the moment it was shut tight. Maomao picked up a twig and used it to compare the width of the window with that of the patch of rice. The rice patch was slightly larger.

“I think this rice gets light on it all night long,” Maomao said.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

A growing plant could be influenced by changes in the environment. Just as Maomao had induced her blue roses to bloom out of season, something external might have affected this rice. Generally, plenty of light was beneficial for plant growth—but there were times when it could be just the opposite. Maybe the constant light, even during the night, had caused this rice to mature slowly. Something similar sometimes happened near the pleasure district, itself a place that never slept.

“You mean the rice didn’t grow because it’s always bright?” Kyou-u asked.

“Just my guess,” Maomao replied.

Judging by the location and size of the window, though, she seemed to be on the right track. Since it had no bars, it was probably left open all during the long, hot summer days of work. That, however, raised a question: why would there have been a light on all night in a supposedly disused storehouse?

Maomao had a thought about that. “I assume there are rats here.”

“Oh, yeah. Doesn’t matter how many traps we set, they keep coming.”

“In other words, you could catch as many as you wanted.”

She thought back to what Suirei had said. About how the new drug hadn’t yet been tested on human subjects. It had, however, been tested on animals—and what kind of animal might it have been tested on? Something small and easily caught, perhaps? Moreover, the books Maomao had been given contained several marginal notes detailing the results of experiments on rats.

There had been too many books in the room for Suirei to have been carrying them all around by herself. They must have been brought from somewhere in the village. Maomao did a quick circuit around the storehouse. In addition to the window, there was a single door, but it was locked.

“Move.” Kyou-u suddenly had a piece of wire in his hand; he worked noisily at the lock for a moment, and soon undid the simple latch.

This kid’s trouble, Maomao thought. But she was also grateful for his help. They entered the storehouse to find it divided into two rooms. Maomao decided to start with the one with the window.

She found both exactly what she expected—and much more. What she expected was the rats in cages; they were accompanied by a veritable pile of papers covered with notes, not to mention the bones of mysterious animals, dried herbs, and what appeared to be some kind of innards. They carried a very distinct smell.

There was a shelf lined with small bottles. A piece of paper was posted by each one with a date, the ingredients, and the amounts thereof. Kyou-u was looking at them with interest—but it distracted him from the far more shocking thing in the room.

It looked like a metal tube, but it was in pieces; it would have been impossible to tell what it was from the individual bits. But Maomao recognized it. It was a feifa gun, like the ones the assassins had used in the attempt on Jinshi’s life.

What are these doing here?

Their presence would explain a good deal—but there was no time for Maomao to gather her thoughts, for there was a loud click from outside. Maomao slapped a hand over Kyou-u’s mouth and hid in a corner of the room.

“Hm?” said a woman slowly. “Is anyone here?” Her footsteps went clack-clack-clack. “Perhaps someone forgot to lock the door?”

“No, ma’am, I highly doubt it,” a man’s voice replied. But there were more than two sets of footsteps.

“And yet it was open. Who was it who was supposed to lock up?” The words were slow, almost languorous, yet for some reason, her tone sent a shock of fear through Maomao. And it seemed she wasn’t the only one. Kyou-u was shaking in her arms. Very slowly, she took her hand off his mouth.

“—ad...” he whispered. She gave him a questioning look. “This is bad. It’s her...” His face was twisted.

The footsteps came closer, and with them came another new aroma, mingling with the unmistakable smell that already filled the room. There was a rustling of cloth that suggested the woman was looking one way and then the other, but Maomao could only see her feet. Or rather, their feet: there appeared to be six women’s feet and four men’s. Or was that just two feet belonging to men? The other pair was dressed in a man’s outfit, but Maomao thought she recognized it—it was the one Suirei had been wearing that morning.

“Any problems?” one of the women asked. She had a distinctive accent—something else Maomao recognized. She began to shake all over, sweat pouring off her, but she saw it: the woman’s eyes were covered by a veil. It covered her hair, too, but it couldn’t conceal the color of her eyes. A piercing sky blue—a foreigner’s eyes.

“No, it’s nothing. It seems I was imagining things.” The woman turned and made to leave the room. Maomao was just about to let out the smallest breath of relief—but then the woman reached for the waist of the man, whom Maomao assumed was a guard.

The next instant, Maomao caught her breath again as a bit of her hair went drifting to the ground. A sword was lodged in the wall beside her, still vibrating audibly. It had happened so quickly that she’d hardly seen it. The next thing she knew, however, the curtain had been pulled aside and an older woman was staring down at her. She was in her fifties, perhaps, dressed in ostentatious makeup and clothing—she was beautiful, but age would have its way with her in time.

The woman wore hair accessories as garish as her outfit, and there were nail caps on her pinky and ring fingers that extended the nails by a good two sun. Her rouged lips curved gracefully as she stared down at the puny girl curled up in front of her.

“It’s just another rat,” she said, and she did indeed look as if she were staring at a filthy rodent. “Suirei.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Suirei took a step forward—and the woman struck her hard with the folding fan she was holding. Maomao privately gasped.

“You need to at least keep your rats under control.”

“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” Suirei said, her eyes on the ground.

“Hmm? This boy, I know him.”

“L-Lady Shenmei, I’m s-s-sorry...” Kyou-u was trembling violently; it was all he could do to squeeze the words out.

“That’s honorable Shirou’s son,” Suirei said, even as she pressed a trembling hand to her face.

“Hm,” was all Shenmei said. Then she turned to the other woman with her. This person was about the right age to be her daughter, and like the woman called Shenmei, she was wearing garish makeup.

“Mother, dear, it’s only the mischief of some little children. Let’s hurry and go,” this other woman said. There was no trace of the innocent lilt that normally characterized her speech. She’d put aside her village-girl outfit in favor of a lavish dress. Her hair was tied up high, and decorated with an accessory in the shape of a bird from a foreign land.

So that’s what was going on...

Maomao had deliberately decided not to pursue the matter. She’d been on the verge of asking back when the connection with Suirei had first become apparent, but then she’d chosen not to. She’d been so sure that it wouldn’t matter what she knew or didn’t know—but now it seemed perhaps she should have taken things a little more seriously.

Now who’s the tanuki?

“Heh heh. I’ve got an idea. Since they’re here, why not bring them along?” said Shenmei. Age had somewhat dimmed her beauty, yet in her time she must have been astoundingly lovely. She was smiling, but Maomao felt that smile grasp her heart like an iron vise.

“You don’t mind, do you, Loulan?” Shenmei said—to Shisui.