"What do you remember?" Andoris asked.

"One moment I was sitting in the library of the Shadow Consortium, reading and enjoying my morning tea, and the next, I found myself in my laboratory, face-to-face with this… creature. I thought it was a doppelganger at first, and only realized what it must be after I tried to magically bind it-and it dismissed the binding as if it had cast the spell itself. That's when I realized it must be a shadow double."

"Did you try to command it?"

Blamira nodded vigorously. "Immediately-but it didn't work. Somehow, the thing must have become free willed."

Free willed?

Back in the bedchamber, the homunculus was sitting on the edge of Andoris's four-poster bed, riveted by the testimony.

"Did you try to dismiss the shadow double?" Andoris asked.

Blamira nodded. "That didn't work either."

"Did you try dispelling the magic that sustained it?"

"Of course I did," Blamira said, curling her lip disdainfully. "I'm not some newly initiated apprentice, you know."

Andoris thought for a moment, then asked, "When did the constabulary arrest you?"

"At shadowfall-dusk," Blamira answered. "That was the first I heard of the missing research notes."

"Did you steal Ptack's research?" Andoris asked bluntly.

Blamira looked pointedly at her double and said, "One of us did. It may or may not have been me."

"Do you know where the stolen research notes are now?"

"No."

Throughout Blamira's testimony, the mantle of truth echoed her words with a continuous harmony, without striking a single off note. Blamira was telling the truth.

Andoris tried a different line of questioning. "When your memory returned, what was the shadow double doing?"