Daughter

	Ardali entered the apothecary's shop solemnly this time, and maneuvered her tender burden carefully between the stacks. Gone was the swagger. What was left was the practitioner of dark arts, and the mother whose grief is scarred over.
	"Pristine…" muttered the apothecary behind the counter, his whitened eyebrows raised in mild surprise.
	"I've preserved her by spell, yes." She laid her daughter's preserved corpse across the counter, which the apothecary had cleared while she was away.
	"My apologies, madam, but you asked for fresh yerit blossoms, I just assumed you're a warlock… But only a weak warlock could maintain such an uncorrupt spell of preservation for months, let alone years. So you aren't a warlock, are you?"
	She held back the hood of her cloak, its blackness more for theater than relevant to her magic. Long enough to show her face, long enough for him to see her eyes without irises or pupils, only clouds of purple. Devil eyes. But not too long, lest he see through the illusion making her eyes look that way. She let her hood drop to cover her face again. "Not exactly."
	Judging by the widening of the pale wrinkled skin around his eyes, he'd been fooled. "Well then… Let's see how she synchronizes. You said the aethyr of her birth was Nithaya Of Anatreth, yes?"
	"Accurate." She nodded slowly.
	"And what was the aethyr of her first blood?"
	"Ieilael Of Iudal."
	"An auspicious pair for what you're trying to do." He dialed that in, under the counter. Presumably he'd already dialed in Nithaya. "And with two points, we can begin on the ephemerals…" he muttered. He brought up two silver buttons, already wetted, and placed them on the girl's temples. Spells began to dance within the counter.
	Ardali watched the dance through solid wood, fascinated. The advancements made in the north were truly a revolution, allowing mundane men like this apothecary to work magic. How fortunate for her, since a magician would likely object to what she's actually trying to do.
	The dance settled to a stop. "First saw a cat under Chabuiyah Of Methiax, first loved romatically under Deneyal Of Ruax — irony, that — and her trust was first betrayed under Livoyah Of Tepsisem. One of the empty decans, oddly enough."
	Ardali was more bothered by the first of his pronouncements. Chabuiyah's reign was in the summer, but Mia had been very interested in Shalari's infant months, in the depths of winter. Was Mia not truly a cat?
	He finished dialing in the remainder of the aethyrs, but then frowned at the result. "First spell on her, beholden to Yeichavah Of Anostêr? That's impossible, and I'm not explaining the decan to you. Although…" He considered her thoughtfully.
	"First spell on her was beholden to Shaliah Of Phthenoth. The midwife insisted."
	"Now now, hear me out. I've never done this for… what you are… before. Suppose your body's workings count as Yeichavah's magic?"
	She snorted. "If it were Nefthada's, then I might entertain the notion." Implying that she's a succubus, nevermind that her body's workings were made of meat.
	"Mm. I see…" He rubbed his wizened jowls. "Then let's try this the other way."
	She frowned as he adjusted the dials. "There's another way?"
	"Mm, rather, the opposite direction. Given the first spell on her being Yeichavah's, she was born under… Livoyah Of Tepsisem." He leaned back and settled his hands over his barely-filled shirt. "Contradiction."
	"Then the givens were wrong? I'm /fairly/ certain of Nithaya." Her tone was dry and drying.
	"Not all of the givens are aethyrs. I can perform a test, but it'll consume fully three libra worth of materials, and that's if you supply a deben of mana."
	She drew a pouch from the shadow-magic folds of her cloak and counted out silver, two weighty guilders and a score of falcons. "Do it." Her confidence was something of a sham, but he had to focus tools on something to analyze it — he couldn't tell her for a mistweaver just by seeing her supply some raw mana. She kept telling herself that as she returned her coin pouch to the folds of her cloak.
	He busied himself setting up an apparatus of brass and glass, arranging the little enchanted windows in a rough dodecahedron, minus one face set aside. "Can we pluck a hair or cut a bit of fingernail without disturbing your spell?"
	"Yes." She nodded and reached for her daughter's hair, hesitating to give him time to object, then plucking one and offering it to him.
	"Thank /you/…" he muttered absently, intently watching the apparatus as he inserted the hair through the open face and then closed it. Of its own accord, the hair balled up in the center of the dodecahedron. "And now, the mana here?" One wizened finger indicated a mesh on the side of the apparatus base.
	Ardali reached in nearly to touch the mesh, and energized it with a trickle of Mist. With mistweaver's eyes she could see the stray Mist pooling around her hand, but to a mundane it would be invisible. Once she'd measured out a deben of mana, she took half a step back and loomed, deliberately invoking the patience of a mountain to cover her nerves.
	He struck a spark in the base, igniting a blue flame under the dodecahedron. The view through the windows distorted, forming colorful close-ups of the hairball even from an angle, and he peered through each window in turn. Gentle murmurs to himself enumerated a litany of things Shalari was not; a sorcerous simulacrum, a faerie stock, and so forth. After entirely too long, he tapped one of the windows, which showed a colorful nimbus around the hairball. "Aha! She is no one of those things, but she is three of them…"
	Ardali bit back a harsher reply, then tried again. "Explain."
	"A fox shifted, likely by fey magic, was killed in human shape. That body was used as raw material, in place of plants somehow, for a vegetable maiden. A sorcerous homunculus was then formed, in place, from the blood." He peered up at her. "Someone went to a /great/ deal of trouble for this deception. Each of the three had this likeness."
	She reeled. All these years, she'd been trying to restore life to an elaborate hoax in the shape of her daughter?
	"I'll give you some time." He swung little windows aside, and removed the hairball from the center, burning it to ash in the blue flame. The windows showed none of this, remaining frozen on their images of the hairball until he extinguished the flame, whereupon they went clear and plain.
	Years. Years and doubtless her soul she'd devoted to this. She raised her left hand and flexed her fingers, Mist dancing invisible between them. This thing she had become. The things she had done to learn to weave Mist. Worthless…
	"I had prepared a package for you, nine fresh yerit blossoms and three pennyweight of mandrake like you said, but it seems you won't need those —"
	She stepped forwards and clamped that hand on his shoulder, extracting a wince but no sound. Her true eyes burned saltily, and she knew not what the illusion did with that. "Five pennyweight of mandrake," she intoned, "two full yerit stalks, preserved, and nine flozz of vitriol. I have the rest."
	His pale skin still managed to blanche at this. "But you're no warlock…"
	She looked him dead in the eye. Whatever the illusion was doing, it was enough for him to find her eyes in the shadows of her hood, and she held his gaze like the World Serpent might hold a deer's. "I can become one."

		*	*	*

	But such extremes could be saved for a later resort. Three days later, she stood with the manufactured corpse, before the door of the warlock Kerith. With a waggle of her fingers, she used a minor spell to knock.
	After mere moments, the door opened. "Ah, Chosen One, you honor us." Kerith was in male form at the moment, but as sarcastic as ever. His left lower arm held the door, and his left upper held something unseen beyond. With his right arms he gestured her welcome.
	"I patronize you." She entered, habitually careful of her burden, but once inside the hut was wide open. At the far end, Kerith's netherworlder familiar sat on the edge of the bed in a form nearly human, and female for the moment. It wore a complex web of leather straps, dyed purple and waxed to a high gloss, on its right arm and hand, which held a hand of cards. It waved with its left, and Ardali nodded in reply. More cards were arranged face-up on the low table in front of it, and just past that was the big round rug covering the metal door to the workshop below.
	He closed and triple-locked the door. "So, you're here for help refreshing your daughter's preservative spell? No? Something else?"
	"This is not my daughter."
	He looked over the corpse, to his credit with fresh eyes. He'd known Shalari in life. "You could've fooled me."
	"They fooled /me/!" She took a deep breath, centering herself, then explained what the apothecary had discovered. "I want to track down whoever did this."
	"Mm." He stood quietly, staring into the distance, contemplating the problem. Then, aloud: "Fresh mana!"
	His familiar trotted over, shifting as it went, to a form less-human — hooved feet, legs covered in hairy setae, big black membranous wings, and male everywhere it mattered. Warlock and familiar exchanged a kiss, and with mistweaver's eyes Ardali saw mana pass through the kiss, nearly a dozen debens. However much it looked like the two of them had been goofing off with a card game, that was a ruse. They'd been busy working warlock magic.
	"Mm. Yes. Well." With a gesture, Kerith triggered the spell on the floor, rolling aside the rug and lifting the door and deploying the stairs of conjured force. This had been a wizard's tower once upon a time, razed before Ardali's birth, and a number of powerful enchantments remained, and had been repurposed. "I'll need reagents. A mandrake. A large venom sac, basilisk is best. A golden —"
	"I have," she intoned darkly, "everything you'll /need/." She led the way down into the chthonic workshop.
	"Ah." He said nothing more, the tinges of smugness and disappointment in his voice echoing after.
	His familiar followed behind, hermaphroditic now, but still inhuman, its hooves clip-clopping on the hard spell stairs.