“I can’t give poison to someone that important, not even at your command, milady. And the only thing I know how to make is a poison—it enables a resurrection in name only.”
“It’s not a poison,” Maomao replied. “In the right dose, it’s a medicine.”
“Someone may be trying to entrap Lady Ah-Duo. What would you do then?”
There was some logic to what Suirei was saying—a lot of logic, in fact. Ah-Duo’s villa was a veritable haven of dangerous elements, if anyone cared to look there. Ah-Duo herself was in a unique position, kept outside the rear palace even though she had been dismissed as a consort.
The wrong faction could easily see her as a political enemy.
So, what to do?
If only there were some way to convince them...
That was when Maomao remembered, of all things, a name.
“Tairan,” she said.
It was most unusual for her to remember someone’s name. Maybe it was because she had heard it recently, or perhaps she remembered it for its associations with the episode with Suirei.
“Tairan...” Suirei murmured, her dark expression becoming even darker.
“That’s right. A physician at court. Three years ago, he was relieved of his duty and demoted because of you. I hear he used to be an excellent doctor.”
Suirei wouldn’t look at Maomao.
“He was especially gifted at formulating anesthetics, I’m told. Sui, you approached Dr. Tairan precisely to learn what he knew about that field, didn’t you?”
Suirei was silent. Ah-Duo and Chue likewise said nothing, but only watched her.
“He’s looking for you, you know. I don’t know what’s going through his head, but he’s desperate enough to find you that he even asked me about it.”
“I presume he wants to kill me,” Suirei said.
“I don’t think so. If you ask me, he looked like he was worried about you.” Maomao, at least, hadn’t sensed any desire on Tairan’s part to do Suirei harm. “You took the wind out of his sails and left him in a proverbial ditch. It was so bad that he even failed a selection exam he should really have passed.”
“And what? You want me to apologize to him?”
“No. I won’t say a word to him about you.”
“Miss Chue would be in very dire straits if you did!” Chue piped up, striking one of her trademark cute poses. “She’d have to destroy the evidence!”
“I promise I won’t say anything, so don’t say such unsettling things,” Maomao replied.
“I do feel bad for Tairan,” Suirei said. “I had immense respect for his knowledge.”
Respect, huh?
So, Maomao realized, Suirei could be forthright about her feelings when she wanted to.
“Don’t you think we could pass along your knowledge back to Dr. Tairan?” Maomao asked.
“I can’t be sure it would help,” Suirei replied.
“True enough. But one thing I think we can say: You’ve tried using thornapple more times than anyone else here.”
Maomao knew that Suirei had sacrificed innumerable rats to her experiments—and of course, she had used the drug herself. The trembling in her hand was the result of her experiment.
“The more case studies we have, the better. The degree of danger would be vastly reduced in the experiments that we’re about to do, Sui, if you would so much as offer us your records.” Maomao stared hard at Suirei, unwilling to let her get away. “It’s not like we’re going to use it on the Emperor immediately. There must be other patients who would benefit from mafeisan. What if I simply told you we would use it for them?”
In addition to using it in the current drug trials, they could test whether it would be useful in surgery. It was hardly risk-free, but it might be better than not being able to do anything about the pain.
The Emperor on the one hand, the lives of his subjects on the other. Maomao wasn’t sure how she felt about that, but she had no choice except to close her eyes to it.
Suirei gave a defeated sigh.
“Does that mean you’ll do it?” Ah-Duo pressed.
After a long moment, Suirei said, “Yes, I will. Give me a little while.”
Maomao clenched a fist in triumph: She finally had Suirei’s agreement.
“And so Miss Chue told her little brother that the duck would be especially tasty if we ate it now!”
“That’s true. Ducks are most delicious when they’re young.”
While they waited for Suirei, Ah-Duo, Maomao, and Chue chatted together. Mostly it was Chue showing off her sleight of hand or gossiping about her family, which was all well and good in Maomao’s eyes. All Maomao had to offer were jokes from the brothel, which tended to fall flat at court; meanwhile, if she tried to chitchat about social matters, she was afraid she might say something she shouldn’t.
“But that duck of ours, she’s too smart for her own good. She’s got the children on her side. So I couldn’t—”
“I’m back,” Suirei said. She entered carrying a sheaf of paper. “These are all of the ingredients I could recall. I burned all of my past materials, so it’s only what was in my memory. There may be some oversights. You’ll just have to work with what’s there.”
She handed the notes to Maomao—it was a lengthy list of poisonous herbs, headed by thornapple.
“Deadly poisons all, eh?” Maomao said.
“Yes. The drug does cause death, after all, even if only temporarily.”
“At least you wouldn’t feel pain.”
“Unless you were to wake up...” Suirei didn’t sound the least bit enthused, but she had written careful notes. “I’ve also added Shaohnese knowledge, although I haven’t tested it yet.”
Shaoh was the country bordering Li, and its former shrine maiden was among those hiding at Ah-Duo’s villa.
“If the goal is to prevent the patient from feeling pain, I should think you could use some of these drugs as well,” Suirei said, writing down another list of names.
“Probably not this one,” said Maomao. Suirei had written cannabis.
“Why not?” she asked.
“It works well at first, but it creates dependency, and the body can become used to it, weakening the effect.”
“I gather the standard way to administer it is with warm wine. It should work very well the first time, at least.”
“I’m not sure we want to involve wine,” Maomao replied.
“I see—because it would blunt the pain but increase circulation.”
It was true, you could dull pain by making a person slightly drunk. There was no perfect anesthetic. The task was to find something suited to the situation and which had the fewest side effects.
“What about needles?” Suirei said.
“I gather they’re already exploring that possibility. The effectiveness depends on the individual body.”
“True, needles alone don’t inspire much confidence.”
“You need something else if you’re going to cut open their stomach. Maybe we could just knock them unconscious?”
“What if the person who went unconscious could have you beheaded for lèse-majesté?”
“We’d just have to explain the situation and tell them to suck it up.”
“I tremble to think if they started thrashing from the pain.”
“We’d just have to cope somehow.”
“Even if you could, no one else at court would approve.”
“Ugh. The Imperial family is such a pain.”
“Agreed.”
During the second half of the conversation, Maomao and Suirei both became quite garrulous.
“I didn’t know you could talk this much, Sui,” Ah-Duo said with amusement, sipping her tea.
“You know how it is, Lady Ah-Duo,” said Chue, still working her way through the snacks. “When two aficionados get to geek out together, they can really get going!”
“I doubt we’ve mentioned anything the physicians aren’t already trying,” Suirei said, clutching the notes. “I assume any doctor worth his salt would have already done these things more than once.”
“True enough,” said Maomao.
In medicine, there were no shortcuts—only case studies and trials in sufficient quantity got results.
“Medicine is tricky,” Suirei said. “You might think that if you cut the amount in half, the person would be asleep for half as long, but it’s not that simple.”
“Yeah. The wrong amount sometimes doesn’t have any effect at all,” Maomao agreed. She would know; she’d tried it on her arm.
“May I offer my personal opinion?” Suirei must have been talking too much, for she drank some tea now as she spoke. “I don’t know what kind of person the Emperor is. But is he really the sort to refuse surgery just because he’s afraid of the pain? If you can work out an effective treatment, I have a sense that the anesthetic itself isn’t that important. I think what’s really going to matter is the before and after.”
“The before?” Maomao asked. The “after” she understood: Many were the surgical patients who had died from infection after a procedure.
“I mean whether the Emperor has any inclination to undergo surgery to begin with. And whether the people around him will let him.”
Maomao paused, then at length she said, “That’s not our job.” Jinshi or the other high officials would have to take care of it.
“Fair enough. In any case, I’ll send you any new information I learn about the anesthetic. I think it would be more efficient for you to look into what drugs you’ll use after the surgery.”
“Understood.” Maomao put the notes into the folds of her robes.
“Tairan might ask about me when he sees those notes,” Suirei said—not just because of the content, but because of the handwriting.
“If he does, I’ll tell him they’re personal effects. You left them in your room.”
“Please do.”
It was most likely true that Suirei respected Tairan—which was exactly why she didn’t want to be involved with him.
“All right!” Maomao said and smacked herself on the cheeks.
I’ll do whatever I can do. And whatever I can’t, I’ll leave to someone else.
She wasn’t under any illusions that she could do it all by herself. She wondered, sometimes, just how skilled you would have to be to grow proud enough to think that you could.