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!”