The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 13 - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Lahan and the Dangling Corpse (Part One)

For Lahan, it was simultaneously a good thing and a bad thing to have his father back from the western capital.

“You must go to your office today, Honored Father. You should put up a good front, at least on your first day back,” Lahan said as he watched Lakan drowsily eat his congee. Three children stood beside Lakan: From the biggest downward they had been dubbed Sifan, Wufan, and Liufan—numbers four, five, and six. They were a trio of orphans Lakan had picked up somewhere who now performed menial chores around the house.

Sifan was assiduously bringing the spoon to Lakan’s mouth. Lakan was really just being lazy, but the wrong onlooker might have thought he had a thing for young boys. Had he been forced to feed himself, however, he would have drawn the meal out forever—much like a kid, in fact. So this was how it would be. In addition to the other three children was another boy, not yet old enough for his coming-of-age ceremony; he was substantially smaller even than Lahan.

Lahan didn’t recognize the boy, but he had appeared the day before, saying he had been instructed to serve Lakan. From his facial features it was clear he came from I-sei Province, but why he had come was less obvious.

“Pardon my asking, but who are you?” Lahan said. “Did my honored father collect you?” Lakan had a certain habit of just finding people; the boy could have arrived that way. That would be all well and good if he was an orphan, but if he had parents, then it became a kidnapping. “If you want to go back to the western capital, just tell me. It’s my father’s mess, but as his relative, I’ll take responsibility for making sure you get back.”

Having the head of the clan back got Lahan out of a number of responsibilities—but it also vastly increased the number of problems he would have to solve. Getting a single child back home, though, that was easy enough. Compared to compensating for an attempt to smash down the walls of the rear palace, he would manage.

“Not at all, sir. I’ve come to work. The Moon Prince commanded me to look after Master Lakan for the time being.”

Lahan had no idea why the Moon Prince would have ordered that, but he said, “I see, I see. May I ask your name, then?”

“Certainly. I am called Kan Junjie.”

“Kan Junjie...”

His name explained everything.

Lahan was a quick thinker, and when he heard this familiar moniker, he connected it with the fact that his own older brother had not returned from the western capital. Why was he there, while this boy Lahan had never seen was here? Now he understood.

His brother and this boy shared the same family name and the same given name, so they must have been mistakenly swapped. It was patently ridiculous, but that was exactly the kind of star under which Lahan’s older brother had been born.

“Now I get it.” Lahan nodded. In his opinion, his brother was a real jack-of-all-trades, but a master of none—except for pulling the short straw, if that were a trade. He’d been left behind in a far land, where he was probably working industriously at that very moment.

Lahan bore no ill will toward his older brother; in fact, he thought he was quite a good brother, and hoped to introduce him to a pretty girl someday.

Sanfan came into the room. “Master Lahan,” she said.

“Yes, what?”

“I’m terribly sorry, but I found this among the master’s clothing, and I thought you’d want to see it.”

Sanfan held out a letter that smelled of a simple but high-class perfume. The sender wasn’t immediately apparent, but Lahan could tell who it was from the writing—lovely characters with just a hint of strength in them.

It was a message from the Moon Prince to Lahan explaining, in terms at once indirect and apologetic, who Kan Junjie was and why he was there.

It was largely as Lahan had surmised: Once his brother had returned to the central region, they would send Kan Junjie back home, and the Moon Prince wished the boy to remain in Lakan’s care until that time. With apologies to his brother, Lahan jumped at the chance to have the Moon Prince in his debt. He would love to do more favors for him, in fact—more and more, until there were so many they could never be repaid.

Lakan had finally finished his congee, and Sifan was wiping his mouth. Wufan and Liufan brought him his dessert fruit.

“Honored Father,” Lahan began, “before you go to court, I’d like to inform you of a few things that are currently going on.”

“Hrm? Everyone’s still doing their jobs, aren’t they?”

“Well, with you gone for a whole year, some breakdown was inevitable.” Lahan placed a Shogi board in front of Lakan. Lakan thought of his subordinates as pieces in a game, and indicated their disposition via the board. It had confused Lahan as much as anyone at first, but after seeing it time and time again, he’d begun to discern certain rules. He wasn’t perfect at it, but he could largely understand what Lakan wanted to communicate from the board.

“How are the pieces moving?” Lakan asked.

“Well, you see, this one has gone here, and this has moved here...” Lahan moved a Silver General inside the enemy camp and took away a Pawn. At the same time, a Lance was stolen by a Bishop.

“The Lance, eh? Always had good spirit, but seemed like a liar.”

As a matter of politics, Lakan never joined any faction—but it was only natural for a faction to form around him, even if that was never his intention. During his absence, his faction had exerted enough pressure to keep opposing groups from running roughshod, but over the course of an entire year, the unwritten rule that one should never cross Lakan had all but eroded. One of Lakan’s subordinates had gone over to another faction—but at the same time, his own group had succeeded in drawing someone from another group to them.

Before he’d left for the western capital, Lakan had given just one order to his people: “When I get back, I want everything to be exactly the same as when I left.”

The result of that order had been the loss of a Lance and the taking of a Pawn. No doubt his subordinates awaited his return with fear and trembling.

Lahan had a thought: Perhaps it had simply been too much to ask a bunch of soldiers, people not normally versed in political negotiations, to maintain the balance of power within the court. He thought they should still get passing marks, but there was no telling how Lakan would react.

“I suppose we should at least see this Pawn we’ve picked up,” Lakan said.

“Certainly.”

Lahan picked up a brush, while Wufan and Liufan brought ink and paper, and then he wrote out the orders in such a way that the aide, Onsou, would be able to understand them. He felt bad for Onsou, telling him to come to work the very day after he had finally gotten to see his wife and child for the first time in a year, but from the moment one became Lakan’s assistant, there was no such thing as time off.

The boy with the exact same name as Lahan’s brother was agog from the moment he got out of the carriage.

“This is the royal court? My! It’s so much bigger than the administrative office in the western capital.”

Lahan had been thinking about what to do with the boy; normally, he might have simply left him with Sanfan, but there was a problem: His freeloaders—ahem, Yao and En’en—had stuck their noses in. For some reason, they’d made a big show of doting on the boy, Junjie.

Sanfan and Yao didn’t get along very well, and sparks constantly flew between them, although Lahan had no idea why—or at least, he wanted to pretend he didn’t.

In any case, at least Lakan and the boy seemed to get along all right, so Lahan had decided to assign him to Lakan as a sort of junior assistant. If that made Onsou’s burden lighter, it meant Lahan wouldn’t have quite so much paperwork piling up, for which he would be grateful. Still, he had trouble imagining it would go as smoothly as all that.

“Say, En’en, are my bangs straight?”

“They’re perfect. You look as beautiful as always.”

From behind Lahan came the voices of his freeloaders. Since they were sending Lakan by carriage, it had been decided to let the young ladies come along. He could hardly have put himself and his father in a vehicle while the women walked.

“Master Lahan, it’s all well and good to be courteous to women, but I don’t think you had to go quite so far,” Sanfan whispered to him. She was serving as their driver once again. Quite frankly, it would have been more efficient to have her doing other work, but Sanfan wouldn’t hear of it.

“That’s not your decision to make, Sanfan,” Lahan said.

After a moment she replied, “Understood.”

“All right. I’m going to see my father to his office.”

Starting tomorrow, he was going to leave Lakan with Onsou—Lahan certainly wasn’t going to spend his days babysitting him.

“En’en, let’s go to the medical office,” said Yao.

That would get the two of them out of the equation, which was something of a relief. Now that Maomao was back, Lahan fully intended to have them return to their dormitory. “See you later, Junjie!” Yao cooed.

“You too! Good luck at work today, Lady Yao. Lady En’en.”

“Gosh, you don’t have to be so formal.” Yao was surprisingly familiar with Junjie herself—and just when Lahan had been so sure she didn’t like men. Maybe it was because the boy was still so young that she was able to show him some decency. “You’ll be helping your brother and your uncle now.”

Yao and En’en were about to leave when Lahan motioned them to stop. “Pardon me, but the two of you seem to be under some sort of misapprehension.”

“What do you mean?” Yao asked, tilting her head.

Young Junjie supplied the answer himself. “Ma’am. My surname is Kan, but I’m not related to Master Lakan or Master Lahan.”

“Really? I heard what Master Lakan said yesterday. He said, ‘Junjie? I think he’s my nephew,’” En’en said, doing an uncannily accurate impression of Lakan. Come to think of it, she’d been making a midnight snack the night before—had she been trying to endear herself to Lakan? Lahan shivered at the thought.

“He’s not wrong, but he’s completely wrong,” Lahan informed them. “We’re out of time at the moment, so I’ll explain later.”

It was nothing short of a miracle that Lakan had remembered the name of Lahan’s biological older brother. He had not, however, managed to remember the man’s face. Thus he had presumably classified the young Junjie in terms like “he doesn’t not seem different somehow, but he’s probably my nephew.” Both of them were studious, hard workers, so perhaps they appeared to him similarly.

Lahan was seized by a fresh desire to help his brother settle down as soon as he could.

“Erm... Is my name causing any problems?” Junjie looked deeply uneasy. Lahan, Yao, and En’en all looked at each other.

“Eh. It’s all very complicated. Don’t worry yourself. More importantly, my honored father has fallen asleep again, so give him a good shove, would you?” Lahan said.

“Yes, sir!” Junjie said, and he and Lahan proceeded to shove the sleeping Lakan’s back.

Lahan was supposed to be done worrying about Lakan once he had deposited him at his office—but there was an unusual hubbub when they arrived. A crowd had formed.

“Well, now,” Lahan said.

“What do you suppose is the matter?” Young Junjie asked. They looked at each other.

Onsou stood outside the office, and now, just hours after getting home, he already had a very grim look on his face.

“Sir Onsou. Whatever seems to be the matter?” Lahan asked.

“Sir Lahan. Perhaps you should see for yourself...” Onsou indicated the office with a significant glance. It would be quicker than explaining, he seemed to say.

Lahan looked. “Well, I’ll be.” Something very un-beautiful hung there. Namely, a man’s corpse, dangling by the neck from one of the rafters.

“Heek!” Young Junjie said, terribly frightened. “Th... Th-Th-Th... That’s...”

“A corpse, dead by hanging, yes. First time you’ve seen one?”

“Y-Yes... What is it?! What is that thing?!”

“I told you, it’s a corpse. A dead body.”

“H-How can you be so calm about it?!”

Young Junjie was all out of sorts, but for Lahan, a human corpse was nothing especially remarkable. The more people there were, the more corpses there would be; that was all.

The capital and its surrounding environs had some one million official family registers, although in Lahan’s mind, that number had to be considered no more than an estimate. Taxes were levied based on the adult population, so in order to dodge the taxman, some people lied and said they had no children when they did, or claimed that their children had died before adulthood when they hadn’t, or reported a man as a woman. Sure, some families probably also forgot to submit death reports, but no doubt there were far more people out there who were off the registers.

The court and the rear palace between them had tens of thousands of people—a significant population. The more people there were, the more chances there would be to see a dead one. If they rarely seemed to be found, well, in the worst-case scenario that was because people were successfully hiding them. Among the soldiers, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to take a hit in the wrong place during practice and die from it. There had been three recorded cases of just such a thing happening in the last year, along with eighteen people who had survived but had been so badly injured that they couldn’t continue in the military. Not a large number, as numbers went, but one had to assume there were other cases that had gone unreported.

Then there were the bureaucrats, some of whom inevitably found themselves so hemmed in by work that they took their own lives.

“Seven cases last year, as I recall,” Lahan said as he stood and studied the dangling body.

This corpse, however, did not belong to a bureaucrat: It was wearing a soldier’s uniform.

“Why, there’s one of those rain-rain-go-away dolls in here! Why, that’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen!”

“Honored father, that’s a human corpse.”

As usual, Lahan couldn’t be quite sure whether Lakan was joking or not. Young Junjie, unable to bear the sight any longer, had turned away and was covering his mouth. That would be the ordinary reaction.

Admittedly, Lahan wasn’t eager to smell the filth the body had expelled, so he covered his nose with a handkerchief.

“What would you like to do, Master Lakan?” Onsou asked. “I can have the room cleaned up immediately, or else you can do your work in a different place today.”

“If you can clean it up nice and quick, then I’m perfectly fine here.”

“You may be, Father, but I’m not so sure about everyone else.”

Lahan did not consider a dead body to be a beautiful thing. For a thing it was, once its life functions had ended; it was a person no longer. Besides, with time it would rot, and rotting was not very good for purity or cleanliness—so, in Lahan’s opinion, not beautiful.

“This room gets good sunlight,” Lakan said firmly. It was still the cold season, and it was crucial to Lakan that he have somewhere warm so he could take a nap. The whole gaggle of onlookers was watching Lahan and his group now. To be very precise, there were seventeen soldiers, ten civil officials, and three palace ladies gawking.

“By the way, who is this person?” Lahan adjusted his glasses and squinted at the man. He wasn’t keen to study the corpse too closely, but it was necessary to establish the deceased’s identity. Lahan didn’t see much prospect of getting his work done today.

“He’s a soldier Master Lakan brought into his fold about two years ago,” Onsou said. “Master Lakan described him as a ‘Lance,’ I believe.”

“This is our turncoat, then?”

“Indeed. I have a record of his service I can give you, although it’s more than a year old.”

So this was the Lance that Lahan had captured on the Shogi board that morning. Lahan had known, and told Lakan, that the Lance had been taken by a hostile faction, but he hadn’t known the Lance’s face. Remembering people’s faces wasn’t Lahan’s job; it was Rikuson’s.

“And he just decided to kill himself in my father’s office,” Lahan mused. He looked around the room. The “Lance” was dangling from a beam in the very middle of the office, which had been given particularly high ceilings with a few good, sturdy rafters after Lakan had expressed the desire to have a hammock. As it turned out, however, he was so decidedly un-athletic that he couldn’t actually get in the hammock. A pointless story of a pointless endeavor—except that the other offices were not built such that one could have hanged oneself in the middle of the room. Not far from the waste that had gathered under the body lay a toppled chair; perhaps the man had kicked it over.

Lakan’s office appeared to have been left undisturbed in his absence. It had been cleaned, but in a cursory manner. Lakan’s beloved couch had been dusted, for example, but the cobwebs on the bookshelves had not been attended to.

“Hmm.” Lahan inspected the rope hanging from the rafters, the Lance hanging from the rope, and the overturned chair. “Father.”

“Mm?”

“Is the culprit who killed this Lance—the man dangling from the rafters—here with us?”

“Mm.”

Lakan indicated the onlookers with a jerk of his chin.

“What?” Young Junjie looked at the crowd, shock written on his face. “Wh-What does that mean?”

“Keep your voice down, if you please. We don’t want the criminal to notice us.” Lahan tried to be gentle in his reproof of Young Junjie. He wasn’t in the habit of wearing kid gloves with men, but when it came to a boy who’d been dragged here by accident due to a case of mistaken identity involving Lahan’s own elder brother, sparing a bit of decency seemed the least he could do.

Young Junjie clapped his hands over his mouth. Obedient children were so much easier to work with.

“Who is it?” Lahan asked Lakan.

“White Go stone...”

The culprit might appear as a Go stone to Lakan, but Lahan couldn’t tell them apart. He narrowed his eyes.

“Ah!” The crowd was dispersing, meaning the killer was going to disappear—but Onsou seemed to have figured it out. He wasn’t quite as good with faces as Rikuson had been, but they were still his specialty.

“Sir Onsou?” Lahan turned to him, thinking what a lot of trouble this all was.

“Sir Lahan. You’re not thinking of abandoning me to handle this on my own while you go do your work, are you?” Onsou placed a hand firmly on Lahan’s shoulder and gave him a nasty smile. He was a soldier in his own right, and his grip was strong enough to hurt.

Lahan let out a breath, considering what to do, and looked at Lakan.

“I wanna sleep,” Lakan said. “But first, I wanna go see Maomao.”

Lakan’s brain was built in a way that was unfathomable to the average person. He could solve problems without using numbers or formulae, but nobody knew how he reached his conclusions. However accurate his accusations might be, making them stick without further proof would be a tall order.

“Ahem!” Lahan flagged down a nearby lower official. “Kindly go to the medical office and tell them we need to investigate an unusual corpse. Those are the words you are to use—don’t tell them it’s a hanging corpse. An unusual corpse.”

“An unusual corpse, sir?”

“Yes, and make sure you get it right. Oh, and since the medical apprentices are finally back at work, could you have them come as well? I suspect the medical personnel will leap at the chance to study a fresh body.”

This was all Lahan’s very indirect way of telling him to bring Maomao. Absolute certainty was impossible, but he figured that there was at least an eighty percent chance that she would come. That ought to help the otherwise listless Lakan muster some motivation.

Lakan would give them their answer, but an answer alone wouldn’t be enough. He would tell them who the killer was, but it would be up to Lahan and the others to figure out the motive and the manner of death. Both Maomao’s specialties.

Lahan made sure his glasses were perched firmly on his nose, and then he sighed. He was going to have to spend a long time looking at something very un-beautiful.