Her instinctive answer was no. Thoughts followed instinct as she shook her head. “Not yet. I think we have to lead the two of them here before we make the attempt.”

“Why?”

She hesitated then. “Because I’m not sure that what will come out of the paintings will be what got trapped inside them. The ghosts in Mrs. Erickson’s house—the children—died at different times, but always at the same age. I found one report in historical missing persons for one of them—but it was marked resolved. She was found.

“And thirteen years later, she was arrested for mass murder, and she was executed. But the ghost remained trapped in Mrs. Erickson’s house. I don’t think that’s where they died—if died is even the right word for it. I think the ghost of 14 Orbonne, the building Azoria owned, is where they met their end.”

“But Amaldi and Darreno weren’t ghosts.”

“Not in the same way. I think they must have escaped their confinement—a confinement of which they were unaware—when the High Halls became whole again. There might have been fractures, small cracks in continuity, when the change happened.”

“That is entirely possible,” the Avatar said, voice soft.

“Can you discern what was done here?”

“Not yet, but I will. Is it important to you that the two mortals survive?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. I must ask: Why?”

“Don’t ask that,” Teela told the Avatar. “You’ll be here all day. Kitling?”

Kaylin, who had opened her mouth to offer a heated reply, snapped her jaw shut.

“The rest of the paintings, please? If, as you suspect, the shadows imply entrapment, it is possible that disentangling those who did not—as Amaldi and Darreno did—escape will give us answers if we wish to fully free them.”

Serralyn remained in the center of the hall, closest to Kaylin. From what she assumed was safety—or as much safety as unknown arcane arts could allow—her gaze swept the gallery. Terrano, however, locked his hands behind him and drifted toward the paintings.

“Can you see the shadow?” Kaylin asked.

He nodded. “I don’t see it quite the way you see it.”

“How is it different?” She aimed this question at Serralyn, not Terrano; Serralyn could see what Terrano saw, but had a better chance of explaining it.

“The paintings that you and Teela see as flat paintings with the usual brush strokes aren’t what Terrano is seeing. No, don’t look this way,” she snapped at her fellow cohort member. “I hate it when your eyes look like that, and I think Kaylin has suffered enough portal trauma.”