Maybe human children were similar, somehow, to the cohort: too young to be fully formed—if that was even a possibility for mortals, given how much age and experience changed them. She couldn’t hear these ghosts; she couldn’t ask Mrs. Erickson their names and rush off to the Halls of Law Records to see if these people appeared in Missing Persons—or worse, in legal files about their executions for mass murder.

But...they were here. They weren’t in Mrs. Erickson’s house. They served a purpose; Kaylin couldn’t imagine that it was a purpose they themselves had any say in choosing.

She glanced at Mrs. Erickson and her huddle of moving ghosts. Mrs. Erickson’s quiet voice was a constant stream of gentle words, first to one, and then to another. Interestingly enough, the ghosts could, apparently, see and hear each other.

The hall came to an abrupt end at a T-junction, but aside from a cursory glance to the left and right, the halls that continued were of far less interest than the last of the paintings hung in this hall. All of the other paintings had been portraits; the hall seemed to have been designed to house them. This, too, was a portrait—but it was much larger than life; it was of a Barrani woman.

The background was not landscape as Kaylin understood it; it was almost, but not quite, formless—the fog of the outlands; the fog that existed as material from which sentient buildings created everything. She could almost swear that fog was moving. In its center, as if she were the heart of a building herself, stood a Barrani woman. Her eyes were not Barrani eyes, but everything else about her was: her raven hair, her perfect skin, her relative height.

All of the ghosts huddled around Mrs. Erickson froze in place, but Kaylin didn’t require their reactions to know what she was facing: this was Azoria Berranin. She had painted herself.

Through Hope’s wing, Kaylin saw no hint of the enchantments with which Azoria bound the Barrani in the High Halls; she saw no hint of the darker enchantment that hovered around the painting she had made of the Erickson family. This was a painting on a very, very strange canvas.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Erickson said, in the softest of voices. She turned to Kaylin. “I think we should go upstairs before we make any hasty decisions.”

Hasty decisions? Kaylin frowned. “What do you see when you look at the painting?”

“I see a door in the center of the painting, encompassed by Azoria. You don’t see it?”

“None of us see it.”

“I can,” Terrano said.

“Fine. None of us with the eyes we were born with can see it.” She exhaled. “Terrano, scout upstairs?”