Do not touch the painting, Hope told her.
“They’re Amaldi and Darreno. Two of the so-called ghosts.”
Hope nodded.
“These are the ones you could see only with the aid of the familiar’s wing?” Teela asked.
Kaylin nodded.
“Should we attempt to unravel or destroy the painting?”
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.”
Kaylin was curious what Terrano’s eyes looked like, but chose not to ask, given Serralyn’s vehemence. The word portal, however, caught her attention. She had felt that the parlor’s floor was similar in atmosphere to portal space. If magic caused her arms and skin to ache—or worse—she preferred pain to the nausea portals caused.
“You’re right,” she said quietly. “This space—it’s like a kind of warped portal space. Not all of it—but closer to where the shadows you can’t see are.”
“I can see them,” Terrano said. “I can see the threads of something that looks a bit like a spell—but not like the ones our people generally use. There are places near the paintings that you don’t want to stand.”
The Avatar’s attention was either on Terrano or on what Terrano could see.
“You probably see them as shadows or darkness,” he continued, “because the threads of them aren’t visible to you, but the marks of the Chosen offer a glimpse of what they look like to someone who doesn’t have the right eyes.”
“I can see them through Hope’s wing.”
“Or that.”
“This is some pretty seriously twisted work.” Coming from Terrano, that couldn’t be good. “You said she was Barrani, right?”
“Yes,” the Avatar replied. “She was not like you.”
“Maybe she didn’t start that way,” Terrano replied. “I’m not sure even I could accomplish what she accomplished here.”
“You were not concerned with caging others; you were concerned entirely with your own freedom.”
“And revenge.”
“I do not believe that.”
Terrano shrugged. “Believe what you like.”
“I can hear your thoughts. You make even less attempt to mask them than Lord Kaylin.”
“You better not be listening in when we play chess, Abel.”
Everyone in the hall froze—except the Avatar.
“It is, I am told, a diminutive. A sign of friendship or affection,” the Avatar then said—the Avatar who had not introduced himself by anything remotely resembling a convenient social name.
“It is, from Terrano. Most Barrani consider it rude, with all the fallout that entails.”
“Ah. Mortals do not?”
“Teela calls me kitling all the time, and I’ve yet to be offended.”
Both of Teela’s brows rose. She didn’t humiliate Kaylin by recounting every time Kaylin had, as a teenager, complained about being treated like a child.
The Avatar shocked them all. He laughed out loud. “I am grateful to all of you,” he said. “It has been so long.” The laughter faded. “Have you chosen a painting?”
Terrano nodded. “They all have these...vines, for want of a better word. Can you see how they’re connected to you?”
The Avatar said, “No. I can see what you see. Please continue.”
“You’re a sentient building, and in theory all of this is yours. How can you not see it?” Kaylin demanded.
“That’s the part you’re not supposed to say out loud,” Serralyn told her, eyes once again close to their normal green.
“It’s why she isn’t seconded to any investigation of the various caste courts,” Teela said. “She tends to speak before thinking. I will say, however, that her exposure to the Barrani High Court—and Sedarias—has made the incidences of that far less frequent.”
Because Sedarias, within Helen, said whatever she was thinking. Most of it angry.
“I can see what Terrano sees,” the Avatar replied. “There is a reason Terrano was able to escape Hallionne Alsanis. His attenuated connection to his name allowed a flexibility that most Barrani do not possess, and he utilized it.”
“He has a name, though.”
“Indeed—but what he became did not change. His vision is flexible in ways that even I find astonishing. What he sees—what was done here—would evade my notice. But Azoria was not, when I was at the peak of my power, like Terrano.”
“She was probably more subtle about it,” Kaylin offered.
“She was indeed. Yes,” he added, although no one had asked him a question. “I am prepared. I can see the shape of the containment—I cannot see what it contains.”
Terrano said, “Neither can I.”
Serralyn inhaled breath on a hiss, and stepped forward instantly; she placed both hands, palm flat, against his shoulder blades, as if to shore him up. The effect was disturbing; her hands passed through his shirt, vanishing beneath its folds as a wave of...transparency flowed up her arms.
Kaylin started forward and ran into Teela’s outstretched arm. “Just watch with Hope’s aid. Touch nothing.”
“But Serralyn—”
“This is not the first time they’ve done something like this,” Teela replied. “I would help but I am not nearly as adept or flexible as they; I lack experience. I do not want to develop that experience, either.”
“Can you even see what he’s doing?” Kaylin asked her familiar.
Don’t talk. I am concentrating.
Kaylin took that as a no. Or as a maybe—Hope didn’t really care for uncertainty, or at least not his own. Through his wing, however, she could see the shadows...billow. She could see them both darken and brighten, and realized that Terrano was somehow unwinding things, and as he did, the dark filaments had become more solid, more visible.
Those filaments were centered around the paintings that hung on the wall; he had chosen one at random, ignoring the two she had forbidden him to mess with. This painting was of a well-heeled Barrani woman. Her hair wasn’t braided, her eyes were a martial blue, and the corners of her lips were turned up in what would, on a different face, be a smile.
“Do you recognize her?” she asked the Avatar.
“Yes. But I do not see what you see; I see it only because you do.” His tone was odd; the words seemed to crackle.
Terrano stood facing this Barrani woman of long ago. “I’m going to start,” he told them, without turning to look at them. To the Avatar, he said, “Don’t let any of these touch anything,” his words a biting bark of sound.
Kaylin didn’t argue. There was something about the ebon vines that screamed hunger and death; she felt the air drop in temperature as he worked. She would have thought this fanciful had her breath not become visible, just as it was on winter patrols when the day was cold.
“I have them,” the Avatar said. “They will not touch your friends.”
“You didn’t even see them!” Terrano snapped.
“Kaylin has her familiar, and Teela is standing with her,” Serralyn said, in her most reasonable tone.
“You’re not.”
“No. But you need me here.”
Terrano didn’t argue. They were physically almost one thing, which was disturbing in a different way—and why, given she’d seen them as literal splashes of angry color in Helen’s training room, she couldn’t say.
“I apologize for the temperature,” the Avatar said. “But it is necessary. Ah, please do not be alarmed.”
Kaylin meant to tell him that cold didn’t alarm her, but she had no time to utter the words; the ground cracked in front of her feet. Hope squawked.
“Yes, but I have asked him for his aid.”
Something dark and distinctly shadowy rose through the fissures created by that cracking.
“Please don’t tell me that he called the Adversary here.”
“That is not what we now call him, and yes, I did.”
Shadow filled the hall.
The cold no longer bothered Kaylin; the Shadow did. She knew that the Shadow was no longer under the control of whatever lived in Ravellon—if lived was even the right word—but everything in her tensed at the sight of it. It had killed so many of the Barrani who had come to face it during the Test of Name. Killed them and yet kept them locked in torment as ghosts—ghosts who wept and pleaded, continuously, for freedom, for an end to pain and torment.
She understood that he had been enslaved, that he had had no will—but even so, he carried out the orders he was given with anger, with malice.
He is not what he was.
But he’d done those things; she’d witnessed them briefly but they remained with her, as did the unsettling pain of the damned.
They are not damned now, Hope continued. They have returned to their source. He contains or entraps nothing. But...containment and entrapment was his sole activity for a long time; the Avatar has asked for his aid for a reason.
She wished she had gone with the Consort.
But no, no—that was simple cowardice. Had she gone, Terrano might have attempted to untangle one of the paintings of the two mortals, to possible disastrous results for those mortals. She needed to bring them here, as much “in person” as out-of-phase, trapped souls could be.
And to do that, she needed this room to remain in one piece. She had a feeling that the Avatar couldn’t just re-create it at whim, as Helen could; something would be lost.
“Yes,” the Avatar said. “He will not harm you, Lord Kaylin; he avoids the Barrani because of their mutual past. Those who are fully Lords of the High Court—as you are—find him alarming.”
With good reason. She said nothing as it approached Terrano—who did not seem at all surprised. Or alarmed. Kaylin almost shrieked when a Shadow tendril reached out from the mass of the Adversary—as she privately called him—and planted itself in the nape of Terrano’s neck. Taking shallow breaths, she forced herself to remain still; Serralyn didn’t seem alarmed, and she realized belatedly that the Shadow was doing what Serralyn herself was doing.
“They provide an anchor for him,” the Avatar said. “But he is...in too many places at once, and some of those, Serralyn cannot safely reach. My friend can.”
Friend. “You really have been spending a lot of time with Terrano lately, haven’t you?”
“Yes. It is enlightening. To my friend as well; what Terrano now does is clearer to him.”
“Was this Shadow magic?”
“He does not entirely understand that question, but Azoria did, indeed, reach a source of magic that is not normally accessible to those born Barrani. He recognizes the taste of it.”
Taste. Kaylin didn’t ask.
She could hear the whisper of the Shadow’s voice; it was a chorus of sound, forced into syllables, as water, scooped out of the ocean, might fill a glass.
Terrano cursed in Elantran. The Avatar stiffened; it was not Terrano’s lack of good manners that alarmed him. As Terrano unwound the nimbus of darkness that surrounded the painting he had chosen, as the strands took on color—some a gray and some a deep black—the painting itself began to bulge, the canvas contorting the careful brush strokes that had formed the image of a woman.
“Don’t let them touch anyone!” he shouted.
It was late; the filaments, unbound, were far more like slender tentacles than they had been, and they reached out, as if grasping at air, looking for something to twine around. They passed through Terrano—just as the vines on the doors to these chambers had passed through the Avatar; they passed through Serralyn because she was, in a very disturbing way, part of Terrano at the moment.
They did not pass through the Shadow.
Terrano shouted a word Kaylin didn’t recognize and couldn’t pronounce if she tried.
It is their name, Hope said. Do not move. Teela can avoid what is to come; I must protect you. It is not you personally they seek, he added.
No, she thought, as her arms began to glow. It was the words they sought. The marks of the Chosen.
Yes.
“Why?”
They will not find what they seek in the Shadow.
The Shadow, the Adversary of old, lifted a limb—not a hand, it was too shapeless for that. The darkest vines, the ebon vines, stopped their grasping search then; they came to the Shadow, whose limb was the same color, almost as if they were part of the Adversary himself.
He spoke. Kaylin lifted her hands to her ears—or would have, if Hope weren’t in the way of one of them. This was not a language she recognized; it was an echo of, a distortion of, something familiar. A wave of nausea struck, as if she had, without warning, entered portal space.
Hope bit her ear.
The shock of pain swamped nausea as he smacked her face—hard—with his wing. What Terrano had attempted, the Shadow finished. The darkest of the vines, the ebon ones, were...absorbed. Or devoured.
“Yes,” the Avatar of the High Halls said. “It causes some discomfort. But I can now absorb the rest of the mass.”
“What did you need Terrano for?”
“To see it, Chosen. To see it, to begin the disentangling of it. Neither my friend nor I would have noted what was done, for Azoria entwined perfectly the elements of two things that otherwise could not coexist. It was masterful.”
Kaylin had an entirely different word for it.
“Yes, it would have been considered an abomination. But the Ancients understood that if they created, if they gave their creations some freedom of will and thought, they might grow in directions of which the Ancients themselves could not conceive. Almost, I am in awe.”
It was a dark awe—the other side of horror.
“What was the...spell meant to achieve?”
“You will now see for yourself,” the Avatar replied. He gestured at the bulging, distorted canvas, and it continued to stretch, the image now pulling away from the canvas on which it had been painted, the flat dimensionality of the figure stretching and shifting in place to become an actual person.
No, not a person. A perfectly preserved corpse.
“I am grateful that we sent the Consort away,” the Avatar said.
Kaylin was certain that the Consort had seen her share of corpses. A long dead Barrani woman—one whose death had probably occurred before the Consort’s birth—would be unlikely to upset her.
“You do not see as she does. If you can fulfill her function in an emergency, what you see are the words, as if they were the marks that adorn your body.”
“What would she see?”
“A vessel,” he replied, voice soft. “A vessel emptied of that light, that life.”
“But...that’s what a Barrani corpse is.”
“No, Lord Kaylin, it is not. You have encountered those who have attempted to divest themselves entirely of the dependency of True Names; they are closer to this, but they are not the same; the attenuated connection exists.”
“The words flee the body when the Barrani dies.”
“That is what should have happened, yes. It is not what happened here. You cannot see it—or perhaps you could, if you knew how to look. Perhaps your familiar can aid you in this, perhaps not. The words did not leave the body; they were entrapped, and they were slowly destroyed. Devoured.
“They were devoured while I maintained this suite of rooms, these hidden cages.” She heard cold anger in his voice.
It is not anger, Hope said. It is beyond something so simple, so superficial.
She looked down the long hall. “Don’t destroy this place,” she told the Avatar. “Destroy the paintings if you must—you know how, now, and Terrano can help the two of you. But don’t destroy the paintings of the two humans—preserve them, if you can. I’m not sure what she intended—we don’t have True Names, and she must have known that—but she told them that she was sending them somewhere, hiding them somewhere, to save their lives.
“That’s clearly not what she intended, but...it’s possible we can free them. I think, if you destroy those paintings now, they might never return to their bodies.”
“I will do as you ask, Chosen. But I will, as you’ve suggested, destroy the rest of the containments.”
The Shadow spoke in a rumble.
“My friend believes that this was meant to create a space where those words could be siphoned for power; you are in danger if the marks of the Chosen can be likewise consumed.”
They could. Hope had eaten one.
“My words aren’t names.” Kaylin’s tone was quieter. “They don’t quicken life. They don’t sustain it or they wouldn’t be on my arms. Whatever purpose they’re meant to serve, it’s not that. The Barrani names—the True Names—can be used to sustain life, even if that life was not originally Barrani in nature.”
“The words have power, regardless. Perhaps Azoria did not understand the difference. Or perhaps she found a way to drain the source of her life of that power. She might still exist, but she would not be what she once was. Perhaps,” he added softly, “she required the power essential to Barrani life, and did not realize her own could be so consumed: the Barrani are eternal.”
“The Barrani can die,” Kaylin countered.
“You do not believe she is dead.”
“No,” Kaylin said. “I believe she was alive—and mobile—at least eighty years ago. I think she created a home for herself in amongst the mortals somehow. That home is visible but...out of phase. And I think we need to reach it if we’re to end the threat she poses. Or posed.” Kaylin grew more thoughtful. “I think she continued her experiments. A painting such as this—but far darker—exists in a purely mortal home.”
“I do not see the point. Mortals are not born the same way, and they do not require—do not possess—the names from which power was apparently leeched.”
“No—but who would have seen the point of this when it was done?” She gestured to the walls in general, where the paintings, in their frames of death, still hung. “It’s possible she had no other choice; she could not randomly kidnap Barrani without alerting them to her presence, her existence. But she had clearly begun to experiment with mortals centuries ago; Amaldi and Darreno are here.
“And the children are trapped in Mrs. Erickson’s house.”
Teela cleared her throat.
“But those children are dead. We know that their ghosts remain—and those ghosts aren’t like Amaldi and Darreno. We know that their bodies became vessels for...something. Something murderous. Something that looked like them, that grew as the bodies grew, and that eventually went on a killing spree for which they were duly executed.”
“All of them?”
Kaylin nodded. “All four. Whatever she had learned to do creating these paintings must have been refined or changed somehow. I don’t know if these paintings ever contained flowers—but the flowers in the green, or one of them, was brought to a mortal woman’s house, and it is part of the painting she created there.
“I don’t see any hint of those flowers in any of these paintings—even the ones that contain the two humans.”
The Avatar was silent for one long beat. He then turned to Serralyn. “That is a possibility,” he said.
“Serralyn, share.”
Serralyn said, “I’m beginning to agree with Mandoran. Everyone else heard what I was thinking—if you had our names, you’d hear it as well.” She winced, no doubt at Sedarias’s reprimand. “It’s clear from what was done here—or from what was undone—that the power for these cages, the...soil in which these vines were rooted, was the potential of the outlands, of the miasma from which the High Halls forms all things within his boundaries.
“She doesn’t have that now. She didn’t have that when she did whatever she did almost a century ago. But if she didn’t have power and needed it, if she studied the green and the areas in the world that were older than the High Halls, she might have found some way to root things...in the green.”
“She was pretty far from the green,” Kaylin pointed out.
Serralyn nodded. “But the flower grew, regardless—and it grows nowhere else. There must be a reason she brought it, a reason she made those braids, a reason she planted the flower in Mrs. Erickson’s hair. I think whatever power she needed to create the enchantments she created she intended to draw from a very tenuous connection to the green.
“And...from Shadow. Shadow seems—given what little we personally know of it—to be more elemental in nature. Fire, earth, water, wind—they’re called, and they answer, but the location of the summoner doesn’t seem to matter.”
Kaylin said, “I think it’s mostly rooted in Shadow; the nimbus of darkness is stronger around the painting.”
“But Mrs. Erickson isn’t dead and she isn’t trapped,” Serralyn pointed out.
“Because Azoria was very unlucky, in my opinion.” Kaylin hesitated. “She may have been attempting to do...something with the children, but it ended up killing them.”
“Legally, they weren’t dead.”
“They’re dead. They were dead the moment she did...whatever it is she did.” Kaylin exhaled. “We need to get into that damn house.”
“The one no one can see?”
“Teela could sort of see it—I think it’s dependent on time of day and magical aptitude. But I’m certain it’s there. We need to get into it.”
“Have you considered that getting into it, as you put it, will bring you face-to-face with possibly the greatest criminal the Barrani have ever known?” Teela snapped.
“Yes—isn’t that the point?”
Terrano laughed. Serralyn didn’t. Teela rolled her eyes.
But the Shadow that had come, at the Avatar’s request, approached Kaylin, two limbs lifted. She stood her ground, although her first instinct was to dodge; Hope was with her, and Hope didn’t seem alarmed. He was alert, but he wasn’t quivering with tension the way he often did when danger was present.
She watched as the Shadow began to cohere, to condense; limbs formed, and if they didn’t quite conform to Kaylin’s version of normal, they were definitely arms and legs. A head formed with an unfortunate number of eyes, but those eyes receded until there were only three. Kaylin realized that the Shadow was attempting to adopt a form with which she might feel more comfortable.
“He is no longer imprisoned here, but he is very wary of the world beyond my borders,” the Avatar said. “Like Spike, he is free now, to make his own decisions, to pursue his own path. He has chosen to remain within my borders for the moment because he is certain that here, he will remain free.
“But the people to whom he once spoke, the people to whom he once listened, are either dead or enslaved as he was enslaved. He is not what I am; he is not what the Barrani are. But he believes that Azoria did, indeed, utilize Shadow to create these cages; she balanced them with the material from which I create.
“She is not here; he believes she attempted to create similar cages, but without access to the materials that comprise a building such as I. Shadow, however, she could more easily access.”
“Could she draw power from Shadow?”
“She did not draw power directly from me—that, I would have noticed. But it is possible she did not choose to do so because she did not wish to attract attention. The power that she might wield is not power in the sense the Arcanists use the word; she might make or create with it, but she could not make or create life; she might sustain it in a minor way—we can create food, and that is consumed.
“My friend believes it possible—but transformative, should too much power be drawn; subtle alterations might occur. Azoria was not stupid; she was demonstrably capable of caution, of hiding intent and work. Shadow is more subtle than fire; one can make a statement of power by summoning fire, but one cannot innately consume that power.”
“So...he thinks she used too much Shadow?”
“He thinks it likely.”
“But...he’s Shadow. Like—that’s most of what he is.”
The Avatar’s brows rose. “Are the fish that swim in the ocean the ocean?”
“No, they’re fish.”
“Exactly. They breathe water. They thrive in it. But they are not water. The analogy fails when we consider my friend, as fish probably do not understand water in any absolute way. He is considering the wisdom of leaving the High Halls.”
“I think it’s a terrible idea,” Kaylin said immediately. “We know he was powerful, and we don’t know that he’ll remain safe—and free—if he leaves. He’s not certain, either; if he were, I’d give you a different answer.”
“Is your permission required?”
“Yes,” was the flat—and possibly inaccurate—reply.
The Avatar was silent for some time; the Shadow—still trying to compress itself into mortal form—rumbled. Kaylin was confused. The Shadow had very clearly taken on Barrani form when it had been trapped in the High Halls.
“That was illusory,” the Avatar said quietly. “And it was not a form taken; it was a form evoked. What you saw was born of your own experience, manipulated; it was not what the Shadow was. The attempt is being made to...be themselves in your presence, but I agree it lacks a certain visual acuity. We are not the same, and my attempts to teach what I instinctively know have not been as successful as one could hope. But they have a suggestion: take Spike with you. Spike is capable of recording and storing information gained, and Spike has clearly been entirely free of compulsion since first gaining freedom.
“Spike is also accustomed to you, and to your Helen; I feel that this suggestion is the most flexible and the most reasonable. Spike will not have the ready answers my friend might have, but Spike will certainly have more information than Terrano, his friends, or you.
“Spike also has the same immunity to Shadow—to unaspected, unenslaved Shadow—that my friend has. Listen to Spike if a warning is offered.”
Kaylin nodded. Spike then emerged from the Shadow that was not quite the Adversary but definitely not person-shaped. He was, as he had been before, a ball with protrusions—he looked like the head of a mace, removed from any useful way of wielding it.
Kaylin held out a hand, and Spike flew to her palm; she could feel the protuberances as he sank, quite literally, into her flesh. This was not the first time it had happened. Hope squawked at him; Spike clicked in response, but adjusted his spikes so they didn’t dig further into her palm.
“I think we should confer with Helen before we make our way to fourteen and a half,” Serralyn said, voice subdued.
“What she means is Sedarias wants us to come home first.”
“I’m against it,” Teela said, joining the verbal part of the discussion. “If we return home first, we’re likely to approach Orbonne Street in the company of the entire cohort.”
Plus one, Severn said.
Kaylin winced. It was, no doubt, dark now—but darkness seemed to be the time to attempt to approach the absent number fourteen. It was also the time when Ferals came to hunt; it was the time when Shadow was the strongest.
She lifted a hand—the one that didn’t contain Spike. “I think,” she said, “that we should find Amaldi and Darreno and bring them here, first. We don’t know what the enchantments Azoria laid are—but when we free them, we’ll have a better idea.”
“And if, in attempting to free them, you instead cause their death?”