The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 5 - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Ukyou

Maomao wondered how this could be. Shishou’s stronghold was supposed to have been sealed off; it made no sense for something from there to be here. Even if the clan’s possessions had been moved out of the fortress, the fact that she had found one of them here in this marketplace implied some shady dealings somewhere along the line.

Hrrmm.

Well, if that was the game that was afoot, then Maomao had an idea.

She found the culprit quickly. And how? It was really quite simple.

“Young lady, you can’t call me all the way out here just for something like this.”

The annoyed speaker was Lihaku, and despite his complaint, he was eagerly trying to get a good look at the Verdigris House. They were in Maomao’s apothecary shop, Lihaku’s considerable bulk making the place feel even more cramped than usual.

“I don’t have time to go chasing after petty thieves,” Lihaku added, glancing toward the ceiling of the atrium, hoping to catch a glimpse of a countenance like a blossoming flower. Specifically, of Pairin, one of the Three Princesses of the Verdigris House.

Lihaku, a soldier and acquaintance of Maomao’s, was head over heels in love with Pairin. Coming to a brothel, however, took money—so Maomao, as a friend of Pairin’s, knew that Lihaku would come running whenever she might have a request to make of him. And today, her request was this: that he keep an eye out in the market for any stolen goods that might be circulating. Specifically, books.

Encyclopedias were unusual; if one had been stolen, it would be easy to trace when it was sold. And because the thief might go to any number of shops besides the used-book place Maomao had visited, she wanted Lihaku to be on the alert.

“Hah! Well, you’ll be glad to know I’ve been watching the place all morning.”

“You didn’t ask one of your subordinates to do it?” Apparently he’d been so set on making a good impression that he’d handled the matter himself. Given that it was still the cold season, it was a pretty good effort to stake a place out.

Lihaku handed Maomao a package. A gift of rice dumplings. He accompanied it with another glance toward the atrium. He seemed to be suggesting that he and Maomao should have tea together—and that she should call Pairin to snack with them. But Maomao still needed something from him first.

“Where’s your captive?”

“Out front. One of your guys is watching him.”

“Ah.”

Maomao looked out the window to see two of the brothel’s guards standing on either side of an emaciated, beardless man. He was wearing fairly heavy clothes—in fact, Maomao recognized the cotton-padded jacket. It was dusty and obviously hadn’t been washed in days, but she knew it.

Well, now... Where had she seen him before?

“Hey!” Lihaku called, but Maomao ignored him; she put on her shoes and headed toward the men. Flanked by the two large guards, the thief looked smaller than he actually was.

“Don’t get any closer. He’s dangerous,” one of the guards, a long-serving manservant, said, catching Maomao by the collar. She hated being handled like a cat, but this was how it had always been, ever since she was little. She didn’t bother squirming away, but only looked at the thief.

He didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything. But their eyes met, and he studied her face for a second—and then he went pale. He opened his mouth, and what should he say but, “Snake girl!” He shouted so loud, he sprayed flecks of spittle.

“Hey, I think you mean cat girl,” the guard said teasingly. The other one laughed.

Oooh, Maomao fumed.

She didn’t have much memory for faces, and the man’s appearance was altered by his hollow cheeks, but she was almost sure he had been at the fortress. He was the one who had been guarding her room, the one who had helped her escape from the torture chamber. The one who had interrupted her delicious meal of snake meat.

At least it makes sense now, she thought. When he’d told her to run, that it was dangerous, he’d looked like someone who’d just looted a burning building. Since he’d been guarding her room, it would have been a simple matter for him to snatch the books out of it.

“What’s the matter, young lady?” Lihaku arrived on the scene and looked at the man, who trembled visibly. If they found out he was a runaway from that fortress, they’d treat him as something much worse than a thief.

Hmm. Maybe, Maomao thought, she could use that to her advantage. “I’m sorry, sir. He’s an acquaintance of mine.”

“Huh?” Lihaku said, taken aback by the bluntness of Maomao’s declaration. She smirked at the criminal.

Lihaku was clearly dubious, but when Maomao produced some snacks and called Pairin, he quickly went off wagging his tail. And so it was that Maomao was left in the apothecary’s shop: herself, the thief, and...

“Y’know, you don’t really have to be here,” she said, shooting a withering look at the long-serving manservant. Everyone else had gone on tea break, but this man had insisted on following Maomao. He’d cleverly helped himself to a handful of dumplings.

“’Fraid I can’t leave you two alone. If anything were to, ahem, happen, I’d catch hell from ‘Mr. Fox’ and ‘Mr. Mask.’” The fox referred to the monocled strategist, while the mask was presumably Jinshi, who covered his face whenever he came here. Even with his scar, he was still a valuable jewel of a man. His looks would make him stand out, and his position only complicated things. “Don’t worry about it,” the manservant added. “I’m just sitting here, eating dumplings. I won’t hear a thing.”

So saying, he went and sat by the wall. He was in his forties, and had been around the Verdigris House since before Maomao was born. He had earned the madam’s trust by always doing things diligently and accurately. His name was Ukyou.

He’ll squeal to the old lady. I just know it. In other words, she would have to restrict this conversation to things she would be comfortable with the madam knowing about. Stuff that won’t get us in trouble if she finds out...

Maomao looked at the man sitting across from her. Two books lay on the table between them: the one Maomao had found at the used-book store and the one the thief had intended to sell today. “What happened to the rest of the books?” she asked.

The man refused to look at her, like a recalcitrant child. It wasn’t a good look for a full-grown man.

I don’t have time for this. If he’d sold them at other shops, someone else might already have bought them. Maomao slammed a fist down on the table. “That soldier we saw? He was part of the assault on the stronghold,” she said, quietly, slowly. “Are you saying you don’t care if I tell him you were there?”

The man’s color got even worse. Maomao hated to threaten him after he’d helped her, but this was no time for scruples. She needed to know where those books had gone.

Ukyou munched thoughtfully on a dumpling, taking his time with each mouthful. He might look easygoing, but if things got physical, he was clearly strong enough to overpower the likes of this guy.

The man frowned, fighting with himself, but in the end he bowed his head, defeated. “I still have three of the other volumes. Two of them I sold in another town, and the rest I left.”

Assuming the fire from the explosions hadn’t reached Maomao’s room, it might still be possible to get their hands on those last volumes. That meant the real problem was those two books he’d sold. The ones on the table had to do with birds and fish, respectively.

“Did you sell the one about bugs?”

“No, I’ve got one of them still.”

One of them? That piqued Maomao’s curiosity. The volume about birds had a number on it. If there was a I, there must be a II.

“Can you get it to me, immediately?”

“Can you promise you won’t sell me out?”

“Depends if you’re willing to cooperate,” Maomao pressed. Ukyou, who had been reclining by the wall, could be heard to sigh deeply. “Come on, Maomao. Now you’re just threatening him.” He arranged himself on the cramped floor of the shop and gave the man a friendly smack on the shoulder. “Listen, you must be hungry, right? Looks like you’ve been through a lot. Why not relax?”

The thief didn’t say anything. Ukyou, meanwhile, simply left the shop. He was soon back holding a tray with a bowl of rice and a side dish. The side dish was nothing more than the leftover stewed locusts, but no sooner had Ukyou offered the man chopsticks than the thief took them. Maomao was surprised by the man’s enthusiasm.

Ukyou slapped her on the shoulder. “Not there yet.” The thief, virtually obsessed with his meal, didn’t even look at them. Ukyou dropped his voice and said to her, “Just look at him. I think he had a hard road to the capital. Maybe he did sell the books, but it looks like it was either that or starve. The books themselves seem to have been treated well. I don’t think he’s a bad person.”

“You might be right...” Maomao said, but she was absolutely dying to know what had happened to the other books.

“You have to know when to use the carrot and when to use the stick.”

“I know that, dammit.” If the old madam was the stick of the Verdigris House, this man seemed to be the carrot. He wasn’t notably tall, and his face looked like that of any other middle-aged man, but it was his decency that endeared him to the courtesans.

Suddenly, the thief stopped shoveling food into his mouth. Ukyou looked at him with curiosity. “What’s the matter?”

“This is awful.”

“You don’t like locusts?”

“This ain’t a locust,” the man said, holding one of the bugs in his chopsticks.

“Isn’t it?”

“They might call everything a locust around here, but farmers make a distinction.”

“What sort of distinction?” Maomao and Ukyou looked closely at the man. He went to work on the mountain of stewed bugs, picking them up one at a time and taking a bite, then separating them into piles. The ratio between the two ended up at close to eight to one.

“These are locusts. Farmers stew ’em and eat ’em. But these, these are grasshoppers. They look alike, but grasshoppers taste terrible.”

“Are they really that different?” Ukyou asked. He’d never realized the two were so distinct. Nor had Maomao; she’d always mentally classified them together.

“Take a bite, and you’ll figure it out. When you pull off the legs and stew them, they all come out the same color, so the less scrupulous sell them to ignorant merchants. Grasshoppers give real locusts a bad name.”

Ah ha. Mr. Owner would have made the perfect mark for a scam like that. With just one locust for every eight grasshoppers, of course the resulting dish was terrible. Maomao took a locust and put it in her mouth. The thief wasn’t wrong: it had more body and a better flavor.

The man gave the grasshoppers a grim look. Before Maomao could speak, though, Ukyou said, “If there’s something going on, tell us.”

The man said, “There might be a famine this year.”

At that, Maomao practically jumped toward him. “You think so too?!”

“H-Hey, now, I can’t be sure. But when you get a lot more grasshoppers than locusts in a year, it usually means a plague of insects the next season.”

It was a simple matter of the ratio between the two. And it accorded well with what Chou-u had said. Maomao gave the man another look. “You seem awfully knowledgeable about bugs for a guard. I also seem to remember that room had plenty of things in it more obviously valuable than a set of encyclopedias, yet you went for the books. Why not just leave them?” Wouldn’t a thief normally choose something easier to pawn?

The man scratched the back of his neck, somewhat abashed. “I actually, uh, didn’t want to sell the encyclopedias.”

“But you told the bookseller you’d be back with more later.”

“You have to schmooze with those types, otherwise you can’t get a decent price. Besides, I was hoping to come buy it back if I could scare up the money. I mean, nobody would voluntarily buy an encyclopedia.”

Ahem... Someone would, Maomao wanted to say, but she stopped the words before they came out.

The man obviously had only the clothes on his back to his name. It was still winter, so that was fine as far as it went, but his face was grimy; he was so dirty that Maomao had somewhat balked at letting him into the apothecary shop. In any case, he wouldn’t find it easy to earn much money looking like that.

“The guy who used to live in confinement, back at the stronghold. I was the one who brought him his meals.” Maomao’s eyes widened; this was unexpected. “I guess they brought him there to make some kind of new drug or something, but that wasn’t the only thing he was researching.”

“What else was there?”

“This, right here,” the man said—indicating the grasshopper.

“You mean how to prevent a plague?”

So that was what her predecessor had been trying to discover. Maomao swallowed heavily and was about to press the man further when there was a great crash and the door of the shop flew open.

“Hey, Freckles! Can I eat your dumplings or what?”

It was Chou-u, holding a skewer of dumplings in each hand.

The thief blinked several times. “Wha? Young Mas—”

Before he could get the words out, Maomao grabbed some medicine she’d been pulverizing and flung it into the man’s open mouth.

“Ugh! That’s bitter!” He practically convulsed. She felt bad for him, but he had been about to say something extremely inconvenient for all of them. She’d do it again if she had to.

I should have realized... Of course he would know about Chou-u. He’d said the whole reason he’d helped her was because Chou-u had asked him to. Publicly, the Shi clan had been destroyed root and branch. The fact that one of them was actually right here was bad, bad news.

Chou-u watched the man flail with evident amusement. He seemed to wonder what this ridiculous stranger was doing.

“Yeah, sure, eat the stupid dumplings,” Maomao said. “Just go away.”

“Don’t shoo me! What am I, a house pet?” Chou-u complained. He must not have recognized the man, because he paid him no mind.

“Hey, Chou-u, how about I let you ride on my shoulders?”

“Whoa, really? Awesome! Let me up!”

Maomao was grateful to Ukyou for his well-judged distraction.

I can’t be sure...but I ought to let him know, at least, Maomao thought, and crooked her fingers, counting the days until Jinshi would visit again.