Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

What?

Her breath. It’s a fruit smell, I’d say. Pears. But I didn’t see anything with pears in it downstairs…

Since when would you be interested in the fruit salad? Arhu said from behind him.

Oh, come on, I don’t want to eat it but I’d have noticed –

Our resident foodie has you there, Rhiow said. Where’s Helen?

Coming, said Helen’s voice in her head, sounding unusually dark and grim. Did you say you smelled pears on her breath?

He did. Helen, what is this? Her respiration’s very depressed: I’ve got to do something before it stops. But what kind of stuff acts this fast? It’s too early for what your kind call date rape drugs, and anyway those don’t act this way —

If Urruah’s smelling pears, then it’s chloral hydrate, Helen said silently. Maybe something else as well, though I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter: chloral by itself can act really fast if it’s concentrated enough. It was a favorite ingredient in what they used to call a Mickey Finn— knockout drops was another name for it. And she’d been drinking, too: that’d speed things up considerably. What are her eyes doing?

Wait a moment, Urruah said. Rhiowcould feel him walk carefully up to the queen-ehhif’s face, put a cautious pad against one eye and pull on it a little, just enough so that the eyelid moved. The pupils – they’ve gone very tiny. Don’t think I’ve seen an ehhif with such tiny pupils, ever –

Pinpoints, Helen said. That’s it: it’s either chloral or an opiate. But no opiate they’ve got right now works so fast – at least none you’d take by mouth.

All right, Rhiow said, and thought hard for a moment, looking again at the ehhif’s breathing. It was slowing. I’d just pull all those drug molecules out of there if I had more time to make sure I wasn’t compromising her blood plasma, but I don’t have that kind of time. Makes more sense to just break the molecules so they’ll stop functioning. Might as well break the alcohol as well – it’s only making things worse. Her liver’ll detox the fragments soon enough —

Abruptly the diagnostic image moved, like a puppet of light that had had its strings suddenly tugged upward: the body was being lifted off the floor. Rhiow ignored this for a moment, being more occupied with finding the Speech-words she needed to ask the chloral hydrate and alcohol molecules to kindly break themselves into pieces. What’s happening out there?

Some more ehhif are in here, Urruah said. This one’s a tom. He’s picked her up a little. Another one’s just given him a bottle, they’re waving it under her nose –

Oh, not really, Helen said, and her interior grimness lightened a little. Smelling salts! What a time this is. Be there in a moment –

Rhiow strung together in her mind the words that she needed, knotted the spell closed, turned it loose. Simple chemical compounds like these, when spoken to politely, rarely argued the point of dissolution with a wizard: unless they were very complex, they tended not to consider participation in a compound to be their major job in life. The joined hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the alcohol and the chloral hydrate obligingly came undone along the lines that Rhiow was suggesting, leaving water behind and not much else but some free hydroxyl radicals that the liver would deal with in due course. Rhiow shifted her view of the ehhif’s physical structures once more to concentrate on the breathing and neural structures. The nerves are a little better already. But the breathing – better have a word with the brain —

The body she was working on changed position again. Okay, I’m here, Helen said. Yes indeed, smelling salts, I can’t believe it… I’ve taken over the job of waving it under her nose from her friend. I’m assuming that’s who this is, Rhiow? You said this lady was talking to a gentleman earlier?

More than talking, Rhiow said. All right…let’s see how she does now. I had a word with the receptor sites in her brain that were already blocked up with latched-on chloral molecules. She looked down the length of the diagnostic: the heart was already beating a little better. Some improvement there –

She’s moving a little, Rhi, Urruah said. Not conscious yet, but she will be in a bit.

Rhiow let out a long breath and came out of the darkness, blinking a little. Her breath was coming hard, her heart pounding, the inevitable result of doing a moderately complex wizardry on such short notice and without enough prep time. She gulped, licked her nose a little, and stayed where she was for the moment, peering out from under the toilet at the strange tableau which the bathroom had become. The door was still crammed full of ehhif staring in, open-eyed, open-mouthed, whispering, and not one of them doing anything useful. Inside, the tom-ehhif who’d been talking to the queen down in the garden was partially supporting her, looking distressed: across from him, Helen was patting the queen’s face. “Dolores! Dolores! Come on, wake up, that’s right… come on, Dolores, you had a little faint, that’s all…”

Rhiow blinked at that. From behind the ehhif, Hwaith came skirting carefully around them, sidled, and crouched down by Rhiow. “Are you all right?”

She licked her nose again. “I’m fine. Or I will be in a few minutes. You know how it is, though: you do a wizardry you weren’t anticipating, and without a lot of prep – “

“It takes it out of you,” he said.

Rhiow was surprised to see those big brassy eyes were looking at her with such concern. She waved her tail a little, intent on reassuring him. “Hwaith, believe me, I’ve had worse! I’ll be all right.”

In the middle of the floor, Dolores stirred, moaned a little. After a second a hand came up to feebly try to push the bottle away: an understandable reaction, as the stuff in the bottle stank vilely enough to make Queen Iau lying on the hearth of Heaven sneeze. Then Dolores’s eyes opened: she looked hazily around her.

One by one, Urruah and Arhu and Siffha’h came around to join Rhiow and Hwaith, all of them huddling down well out of the way. The room had started to become increasingly full of ehhif, which was amusing in that this was only happening now that the trouble seemed to be resolving itself. Helen, glancing unnoticed at the four in the corner, straightened up a little. “She’s all right,” she said to the people who were starting to crowd into the room. “It was so hot downstairs, it’s no surprise someone might feel a little faint – “

The misdirection was typically wizardly: not a lie as such, but designed to suggest to the hearers that something besides the obvious was going on. Rhiow, however, thought with regret that the suggestion wasn’t likely to affect this group of listeners much. Their expressions generally indicated that they were far more interested in believing the worst than in giving anyone the benefit of the doubt.

“Listen,” Siffha’h said, twitching an ear. Distantly, Rhiow heard sirens approaching.

“Finally,” Urruah said. “Took them long enough!”

“’Ruah, this isn’t Manhattan,” Rhiow said, “and it’s not our time, either. And consider this city’s size. Either way, she’ll be all right: we were here, lucky for her. Or maybe it was more than luck: it’s not as if there aren’t Powers that work for ehhif as well as against them.” Her eyes narrowed a little as she glanced up at the pills scattered over the counter by the sink. “Except for us, this would most likely have been a murder scene now. Or, as the ehhif would have thought, a suicide. Now all we need to know is how she was drugged so quickly, and why, and who did it.”

“But who would drug her? And why?” Hwaith said.

“I had no time to tell any of you,” Rhiow said. “Just before we went down to the room where the strings were strange, I heard this ehhif having a very interesting conversation with her friend there.” She eyed the ehhif called Ray. “Now I find myself wondering – did someone else hear some of that conversation, and not like what they heard? Did somebody maybe not want this poor queen to go to the meeting the tom-ehhif was proposing she attend?”

Rhiow looked over at Arhu. “This would normally be your department,” she said.

“Normally,” he said, sounding very annoyed. “But remember about downstairs – “

“I know. Try again,” Rhiow said. “And hurry, before too many more ehhif come in here and start making it harder for you to See.”

Arhu sat up straight, curled his tail around his feet, and went unfocused for a few moments, holding perfectly still. Then his tail started to lash. “Nothing clear,” Arhu said, his eyes going down to slits in anger. “It’s as it was downstairs. Like the whole place is fogged over. It’s impossible to get a focus. Shadows, moving in shadow – ” He sounded unnerved. “She came in here, all right: that’s hardly news, since here’s where we found her. But I can’t see anyone else here for certain until that other she-ehhif came in and found her – “

Rhiow breathed out in annoyance. “Well, when she wakes, she’ll be able to tell what happened. One of us at least will need to be with her when the police are asking her to tell her story.”

“And there’s another question,” Siffha’h said. “Who called the cops? And what were they told?”

Sif slid out from behind the toilet, glanced around to make sure that no ehhif seemed to be heading her way, and jumped up on the bathroom’s windowsill, peering downward. “Because there’s no ambulance out there,” she said. “Two police cars, though. No, here comes a third one.”

“Maybe it’s running late?” Urruah said.

But the people who came up the stairs in the next few minutes, more or less in a crowd, and talking fairly loudly, were policemen, not any kind of ambulance crew. “Okay, okay, could we have some room here please?” said a voice from outside. “Thanks, sister – Come on, how’re we supposed to move in here? Thanks – ”

Into the bathroom came a big beefy sandy-haired man wearing a dark blue police uniform and a huge gun at his hip. He looked around the room and at the people in it with what to Rhiow seemed like an expression of faint scorn. “So where’s the corpse?” he said. “Lady who called said there was a stiff up here.”

“I think the report may have been premature,” Helen said, standing up over Dolores and Ray. Her tone was cool: Rhiow could just imagine what she was thinking about this policeman’s way with a crime scene.

“Okay, what happened?” said the cop, glancing around the room, taking in the expensive people, the expensive clothes, the spilled pills, and finally Dolores, now sitting up on the floor half-supported by Ray, and looking very woozy and sheepish. “You pass out or something, lady?”

“I don’t know,” Dolores said. “I was downstairs and I didn’t feel well. I thought maybe it was the heat. I came up here to try to freshen up – and then – then I – ” Dolores stopped suddenly, as if she was having second thoughts about what she was saying, how it might sound. And indeed the pressure of all those eyes on her – and the expressions on the faces looking into the bathroom, like people trying not to look too eager to hear something that would turn into juicy, sordid gossip later – “I don’t know,” Dolores said. “I woke up here. Oh, Ray, I’m so sorry, I feel like such a fool!”

“It’s all right,” Ray said, “it’s all right…” He was rocking her a little, stroking her hair and trying to soothe her.

Watching this, the cop’s expression let go a little of its previous scorn: he started to look more kindly, though annoyed. “You want my advice, lady,” he said, “lay off the sauce. Don’t think I didn’t see the spread downstairs. Had to be enough booze to float the Queen Mary in.” He turned around and, no longer seeming inclined to use his annoyance on Dolores, pointed it at the people in the doorway and the hallway instead. “Okay, what’re the rest of you doing? Come on, nothing to see here, let the lady have some air, you’d think you wanted to see a corpse or something!”