The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

The Ailurin word was so vile that Rhiow was tempted to go straight over and clout him one, except that there might have actually been a good reason for the anger. “What?” she said.

He glared at her, then at Urruah. “Nothing,” he said. “I can’t see a thing.”

Urruah looked over at Rhiow. “It should be easier to feel now that he’s let that go,” he said to Rhiow. “Rhi, can you feel it? It’s as if there had been a gate here once. But not now. And no way to tell when.”

Rhiow sat down on the carpet, and half-closed her eyes to see better. All around her, the hyperstrings that ran through the structure of everything became clearer to her view – an insubstantial weft and weave of light, like interwoven harp strings, piercing through the room from ceiling to floor and crisscrossing it from windows to walls. Normally, except for local gravitational disturbances or other strictly natural perturbations, hyperstrings ran straight. But here the straightness of many of the strings was interrupted by slight curves, places where the strings’ supracolors shifted unreasonably. As if local space remembers how a gate was here once…

Hwaith? she said silently.

Yes?

I need you to have a look at something.

In absolute silence, Hwaith appeared. Urruah and Arhu and Siffha’h all started.

Rhiow flicked an ear. “He does that,” she said. “Hwaith, take a look at the strings in here.”

He got that unfocused look, then glanced over at Rhiow, confused. “A characteristic perturbation,” he said. “But here?”

“is there the slightest possibility that your gate’s ever made its way over this far in its travels?”

“In my time?” Hwaith said. “Never. That big a jump, I’d have noticed. In my predecessor’s time? I don’t think so – I’m sure he’d have mentioned. Before that? No idea. I’d have to check the gate’s logs.”

“Something you should do when we’re done here,” Rhiow said. She wandered around the room, looking to see where the strings were showing the most alteration. “It’s mostly over by this wall, isn’t it?” she said.

“Seems so to me,” Hwaith said.

“Arhu?”

“I had a look at the wall, too,” Arhu said. “I can’t see a thing.”

“Not even with me boosting him,” Siffha’h said.

“I’m no expert in the Eye,” Urruah said. “But I know someone who is…and she tells me that, with sufficient power and intent, it can be blocked.”

“Yes it can,” Rhiow said. “And she has some other concerns, too. At least one person here tonight is friendly with the ‘friend’ of the Lady in Black. That person, and I think some more such friendly types, are going to be meeting here, for a while at least, tomorrow night. We need to be ready for them, and ready to find out what they have to do with this.”

They all stared at her. “What did she tell you?” Urruah said.

The scream of utter terror from the upstairs level could be heard right through the ceiling. “Dear Queen around us!” Urruah said, and tore out through the open door.

Everyone was sidled before they’d gone more than a few yards down the hall. The crowd of ehhif plunging up those stairs in the next few moments were quite unaware of the invisible shapes running up the stairs with them, in Urruah’s case even jumping up onto the banister to be able to run unhindered by all the ehhif legs. At the top of the stairs they turned right, for the sound had come from further down, and ran on to where a door on the left-hand side of the hall stood open, and a tall blonde queen-ehhif in silks and diamonds was comforting another one who huddled against her and shuddered and wept.

It was a bathroom, ornate with golden faucets in the sink and bathtub, brocaded curtains hanging down, reeking with expensive ehhif fragrances. The wide, mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink stood open: there were bottles open on the counter, spilled-out pills scattered across it and onto the floor. And on the floor among them, a pale-gowned body with short dark hair lay sprawled on the thick soft rug, loose-limbed and inert as a puppet with its strings cut.

Like the ehhif all around them, the People stared. Then Rhiow looked over her shoulder at Hwaith.

“You were saying,” she said to him, “that the ehhif here do something besides kill each other? I’m beginning to wonder.”

The Big Meow: Chapter Seven

Rhiow slipped in past the ehhif and went to more closely examine the queen lying there on the floor. As soon as she got within touching distance of the queen, though, she realized that the situation was both less grim than she’d initially thought, and more complicated. The she-ehhif’s scent had none of the chill about it that to a Person would speak of death within seconds, while the body was still warm. Rhiow put her face down by the queen’s pale one, felt the slightest stirring of breath. But not normal breathing at all. And no way to tell whether it’s going to last much longer. She glanced up at the ehhif crowding the doorway, none of them coming close as yet. But how long will it take an ahhm’vhuwlanss to get here? And bringing what kind of care? In a city of this time, ehhif medicine wasn’t advanced all that far. Possibly not far enough to do this poor queen any good before her body failed —

All right… Rhiow thought. “’Ruah,” she said as he came in behind her, “she’s not dead yet, though I can see why this other poor queen started screaming: she looks the part. I’ve got to try to put her right. Or at least find out what’s happened here, if I can’t fix what’s wrong. Make sure no one kicks me or anything, will you?”

“No problem, I’ve got a forcefield ready….”

Rhiow hurriedly slipped behind the toilet, well away from any ehhif who might come to help the one on the floor. There she crouched down and closed her eyes. I hate having to do this at such short notice, but not much choice — Any gate tech working in the train stations in New York routinely found herself having to deal with sick or injured ehhif: hurt ones got down onto the tracks sometimes after a mugging or a chase, or else they tried to hide there in the dark for some reason and came to grief afterwards, usually by making contact with a third rail… or a train at speed. At least there’s no big external damage with this one, Rhiow thought, settling into the dark place in the back of her mind where she kept pre-assembled spells that worked on ehhif in a strictly physical mode. But as for what else might be going on –

One of the spells lying dormant in her mind was a diagnostic. Silently Rhiow wove together its words in the Speech, then knotted the spell into action with the Wizard’s Knot. In that interior darkness, the queen-ehhif’s body began to describe itself in networks and areas of light, a shifting play of interwoven energies. Bloodflow traced itself outward from the heart in a slowly throbbing network; a faint stuttering lightning of neural fire ran up and down the nerves. This pattern in particular looked very uneven to Rhiow, and it was one she’d seen before in some of the unfortunates who wound up collapsed on the tracks down in Grand Central. Drugs, she thought. And there were all those pill bottles scattered around by the sink. But at the same time – what pill works so fast? It makes no sense –

In the spell’s darkness, Rhiow got up and paced over to more closely examine the simulacrum of the queen’s bodily processes. The breathing was steady enough for the moment, but still very slow: too slow for Rhiow’s liking. Urruah, she said, do me a favor. Go smell her breath.

Rhiow looked more closely at the bloodflow, then reached into the lightweave of the diagnostic and hooked a claw into one of the Speech-words which would shift the view so that it focused on the ehhif’s body chemistry, pointing up anything that didn’t belong there. Immediately, as she concentrated on the big vessels around the heart, where the volume was best for diagnosis, she saw the subtle glittery light of a myriad tiny shapes floating in the blood: not only the expected lines and tangles of alcohol molecules, but a lot of something else, a shorter molecule, with a double branch at one end and hydroxyl radicals hanging off it. Outside the darkness, That’s strange! Urruah said.

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.”