Chapter 10
Mithridates
Baronial Precinct, Tianjing
Yasuko was dressed as a servant to avoid drawing attention as she wandered through the market district of the Baronial Precinct's Baihu Quarter. While most of the space in the Capital was dedicated to the estates of the noble houses, each quarter of each precinct had a market district that felt more like an ordinary town. The shops and restaurants on the main thoroughfares catered to the nobles, but the back alleys were where the baseborn and the occasional eccentric aristocrat would go. It was more like the surface, the domain of real people, so Yasuko found herself feeling more at ease, not that she could afford to lower her guard.
For this latest phase of her training, Prince Sturla gave her an address and told her to go there. Nothing else. Surely it was nothing good, but she had no choice but to play along. She found herself at the door of a tiny druggist's store wedged between a curio shop and a potter. When she opened the door, she found walls lined with jars of every manner of traditional remedy and rows upon rows of little cubbyholes with various other ingredients.
The old man behind the counter looked at her and said, "Welcome, young lady. How can I help you today?"
"I'm looking for some shejiu," Yasuko said, 'shejiu' being the password to identify herself to the person she was supposed to meet.
"Ah, shejiu," the old man said. "Some people say it is a cure-all, but let me tell you, it is just booze with a snake in it. No good at all, especially if the snake is not dead yet. Ha ha!"
Yasuko had heard stories about people getting bitten by the vipers in the shejiu, but she figured they were just tall tales, much like the supposed curative properties of the shejiu. She was surprised the old man was being so honest about how worthless shejiu was as medicine. She was under the impression that these traditional druggists were nothing but quacks who played to any superstition to turn a quick coin.
"I have been expecting you, child," the old man said. "Come closer."
Yasuko walked up to the counter and when she did, the old man held up one of his hands, opened it, then blew some white powder in her face. Yasuko staggered back, coughing and gagging.
"What the hell!?"
The old man dipped his hand in a jar of water, then took out a handkerchief to dry it off. Reaching under the counter, he pulled out two books and laid them out side by side.
"You have just been poisoned, Yasuko Suzuki," the old man said. "You have approximately sixty minutes to identify the poison and prepare the antidote. Pay close attention to your symptoms to help you identify the poison. That is your one and only hint. Good luck."
Yasuko's first thought was to grab the old man and beat the antidote out of him, but before she could even raise a hand against him, he calmly stuck out his tongue to reveal a small capsule.
"Just in case you were thinking of an alternative approach, I would literally rather die than let you cheat on this test. Now get to work."
For some reason, Yasuko didn't want to test his resolve. Already her eyes, nose and throat were burning. The book to her left was a guide to poisons. She looked to the indices and the contents were arranged several ways, such as by category, vector and symptoms. She looked at the list of poisons delivered via inhalation and would have also cross-referenced with the list of poisons absorbed via the mucous membranes, but she didn't know the characters for 'mucous membranes'. Did it have the same character as 'phlegm'? No time to waste on that. She looked for powders and also started fumbling through symptoms. Burning sensation, fever, increased heart rate...
The old man offered her his handkerchief and said, "Please do not bleed on my books."
Add nosebleeds to the list. Even with them being divided up in the indices, there were so many poisons to sort through, a lot of characters she didn't know... She started flipping to the articles of some likely candidates for her poison. Lots of small print. Not good when your eyes were watering. Her chest was starting to feel funny with her heart acting up like it was. It was getting more difficult to focus, but she had to keep her head on straight.
She was pretty sure she'd identified the poison, so she went to the second book, which had recipes for antidotes. She found the page for her suspected poison. Still a lot of characters she didn't know, but all she needed was to know what they looked like. She started going over all the jars on the walls and looking through the dozens of cubbyholes to find the ingredients she needed. Dried leaves, shriveled roots, even some bugs. She checked and double-checked, then brought them back to the counter.
The old man already had a mortar and pestle and a small scale set out for her. It was becoming difficult to breathe and her hands were starting to shake, but she measured out the ingredients as carefully as she could and went to work grinding them into a powder. When that was done, she dumped the contents of the mortar into her mouth and swallowed it.
She felt lightheaded. Her nose was still bleeding, but as she tried to hold up the handkerchief, her arm lost its strength, Her legs followed, giving out under her. Had she gotten something wrong?
* * *
When Yasuko came back around, she found herself in a little room probably no bigger than three-by-three. She was facing a squat coffee table, where the old man from before sat smoking a long-stemmed pipe.
"Awake, are you?" he asked. "Come, have a seat."
Having a seat basically meant all Yasuko had to do was get up and reposition herself slightly. It was a very small room, after all. On the coffee table was a tea set with one of the cups already sitting in front of the old man and an odd handheld device that looked similar to the electronic thermometer the nurse used on her in the infirmary.
The old man set down his pipe and poured a cup of tea that he then set in front of Yasuko. She gave him an incredulous look. The old man laughed.
"You think it's poisoned, do you? Find out for yourself."
He nodded to the handheld device. Yasuko picked it up and looked at it. There was a button where her thumb rested and a black bar that seemed to be some kind of display. The tip must have been some kind of sensor and she was about to dip it into the tea when the old man held up his hand to stop her.
"You just have to wave it a centimeter or so above the tea," he said.
She did so, pressing the button and saw a wavering green line at the bottom of the display.
"That is a poison sniffer," the old man explained. "Just about everyone with any rank to them has one. It is capable of identifying over twelve thousand toxic compounds. The greater the toxicity, the higher the meter. Anything in the red would require immediate medical attention."
Though still a little suspicious, the tea seemed safe enough, so Yasuko set down the poison sniffer and took a sip from the cup. The tea was bitter as almost all tea in the Capital tended to be. Still, something about it seemed to make her feel a little better.
"I am called Mithridates," the old man said. "That is, of course, not my real name. In my legitimate trade, I am a physician, but I think you can figure out what my side job is."
"You're a poisoner," Yasuko said.
The old man nodded.
"Yes. I am one of the foremost experts in poisons. I have helped design the past three generations of the poison sniffer you see there."
"Then that means you can get around it too," Yasuko noted with growing unease.
Mithridates smiled.
"Very good. I am glad that you are reasonably intelligent. That will make things go faster. Do you know what your mistake was?"
Yasuko could feel herself getting short of breath. Dammit.
"I took tea from a poisoner."
Mithridates nodded slowly. Yasuko could feel her body getting warmer, her pulse increasing. Parts of her were starting to throb with her heartbeat. It didn't make any sense, but it was like she was being turned on. She didn't really have that much experience with it, but she felt it a little around Prince Sturla, only this was much stronger.
Mithridates' voice seemed to adopt a seductive quality as he said, "Do not worry. That blend will not do any harm, but you are no doubt feeling a little more... pliable, yes?"
Yasuko nodded. It felt like she was burning up with a fever, but also that she would do just about anything he told her. She wasn't thinking of him as an old man. She wasn't thinking of him as much of anything except as a being she wanted to obey with every fiber of her being.
"Tilt your head."
Yasuko did. She was panting like a bitch in heat. Even now, part of her was infuriated, but what fragment of her consciousness remained was completely helpless as her body had its own plans.
Even though her muscle suit was in stealth mode, the old man seemed to know it was there as he stuck a finger under the collar and pulled it down. Just his finger brushing against her skin sent a wave of pins and needles through her. She craved to be touched more. She wanted to feel his skin against hers all over her body, even as that powerless fragment of her consciousness recoiled at the thought. Mithridates pressed something against her neck and she felt a brief, sharp pain.
Mithridates sat back down and folded his hands. What was he doing? Yasuko's jaw hung open and she tried to mouth something, but no sound came out. Then, little by little, her heartbeat slowed, her breathing calmed and that all-over sensation of warmth started to subside.
When she was back to her senses, she weakly asked, "What... what the hell was that?"
"Another special blend of mine," Mithridates said. "Your body will now be able to metabolize most poisons without any long-term damage to your body. You will still feel the effects for a time, but you should not have to worry about anything like your experiences today. I do not normally share it with my pupils, but I am making an exception for you."
"Why?"
"You are here because Prince Sturla wants you to learn a little about my trade. You are not the first and I doubt you will be the last, but you are different from the rest. He went out of his way to request I give you poisons that would do such things as make you vomit until you bleed or lose control of your bowels. He seems to have a particular interest in humiliating you and I find that rather disagreeable."
That bastard. It was pretty bad when a poison master finds you distasteful, but that was Prince Sturla.
"I could see a man like that using my little love potion on you, so I thought I would give you a taste before giving you immunity to it. Now, what have you learned?"
"Not to take tea from you."
Mithridates chuckled.
"That is not a bad thing to learn. As one of the designers of the poison sniffer, I of course know how to work around it. The first lesson of poisoning is that anything can be poisonous in the right amount. Observe."
He took an apple, split it in half and offered one half to her.
"Use the sniffer on the apple."
She did and saw only a slightly higher reading than the tea.
"Did you know apple seeds have cyanide in them? Not enough to do much harm to an average human, but a dog, for instance, will likely have to vomit it up. However, some compounds do not have to have a dangerous level of toxicity to have an effect on you. That is part of the reason my love potion can evade the sniffer."
"Won't it be a problem if Sturla finds out you've made me immune to poisons?" Yasuko asked.
"Not if you do not tell him. One of the challenges of the trade is that there are many factors influencing a poison's effectiveness, so there are few guarantees, especially if you are trying to be subtle. Poisoning a person is easy, but doing so in such a way that it is undetected is not. Unless, of course, you want the poison to be detected. And why would that be?"
Yasuko shrugged.
"Oh, come now," Mithridates said. "Use your brain a little."
Yasuko thought about it a bit and the answer came to her.
"Maybe if you wanted to frame someone else?"
Mithridates grinned.
"You have the raw material, it would seem. Yes, it is one thing to poison with such sublimity that no one ever knows about your work and it is another to feign an amateur's job to kill two birds with one stone. Now, let us begin with a discussion on the vectors of transmission. This is one of the most important aspects of the trade."
And so Yasuko began her training under the fabled poison master Mithridates.