“How could she try? The gallery was in place when Berranin was wiped out. It’s been tucked away in the folds of the High Halls. You can’t think that she’d be able to return to it?”

“Before the High Halls rose again? I do. It would have to be subtle, and it would imply a knowledge of the High Halls—at least in its severely hobbled state—that no one would be comfortable with. It would be, if not easy, simpler: she was dead. She was no longer a concern.”

“So...Jamal and the other children were test cases?”

“What do you think? They’re the only ones who are trapped as they’re trapped; the ghosts Mrs. Erickson freed in here are, to her eye, different.”

“Do you think they were experiments and sometime between then and now she perfected the ability to...to kill people, leave their bodies intact, and take over?”

“Yes. Serralyn says yes.”

“And Mrs. Erickson?”

“We don’t know how she gathered the others, but it seems clear to me that Mrs. Erickson was special; the intention when it came to Mrs. Erickson was also special. My guess? Some of the ghosts on this side of the building were servants who ‘quit’; they disappeared. Mrs. Erickson’s mother wasn’t one of them—but she was pregnant. It’s possible that Azoria attempted to influence the...shape of the baby, the baby’s mortality. To imbue it with something extra.”

Kaylin glanced at Mrs. Erickson. “Sorry about this—we talk about people in the third person who are actually right beside us all the time. I think it’s a Hawk thing. Or bad manners.”

Mrs. Erickson shook her head. “The truth often sounds awful—but I did not have an awful life.”

Kaylin doubted that her early life had been good. A child who had literal imaginary friends? A child who could see the echoes of the dead? How many friends wouldn’t be totally creeped out by that? How many would believe her? How many would think it was just a cry for attention?

Your friends are not without intelligence, Hope said. But they are, in my opinion, wrong. Azoria sensed something in the quickening. It was not a certainty. The introduction of the painter was proof, if it were needed, that she had mastered the art of taking human form, human body, well enough that she understood how to use her knowledge and her power in a different form.

“Mrs. Erickson never displayed the power that Azoria was hoping for.”

“Not until our interference, no. I believe Azoria would have been gratified had she accompanied us to the palace. I think her experiments turned toward the unnamed, the mortals who live and breathe without our dependency on True Names.”

“Or eternity.”

“Pardon?”