Naja was clearly alarmed. “We need to leave, now.”

“They’re dead,” Merritt said. “They can’t hurt you.”

“Yes they can,” Naja said.

Magda slid the door closed and turned to the woman. “What do you mean?”

“Emperor Sulachan uses the dead.”

Both Merritt and Magda stared. Magda, having fought a dead man, was not all that surprised by Naja’s claim.

“Uses them how?” she asked.

“To serve him.”

“How can the dead serve him?” Merritt asked.

“For Emperor Sulachan, the dead can serve him as well as the living. In some cases, better.”

“Better.” Merritt repeated as he stared at her. “They have no heartbeat. They have no life in them. How can they do anything?”

“Chickens can move and flop for hours after their heads are cut off. They have no heartbeat, either,” Naja said, “and that doesn’t even involve any magic.

“The emperor has rare, gifted people called makers,” she said, leaning in, speaking in a quiet, reverent tone. “I never met any myself, but I do know that makers have remarkable powers of originality. They imagine what others never envisioned before, and through that mechanism are somehow able to create what others never could.”

Magda glanced up at Merritt. “We understand. We have makers as well.”

“Then you understand the wide range of the totally new and unexpected creations they can sometimes come up with. Most people’s minds travel along the same road traveled by everyone else, never straying off the route of conventional wisdom. Makers know no such boundaries. They have a rare ability to make their own roads of thought. Their minds venture through the wilderness of all that exists, combining random bits of knowledge in ways that have never been imagined before.”

“We understand that much of it,” Magda said. “What does this have to do with making the dead walk again?”

“The emperor’s makers have created new forms of magic, new spells, that function in part by altering the nature of the grace. Through the new forms of power envisioned by the makers, along with the help of the emperor’s many gifted, they have learned to use magic to control the dead.”

“How do you know all of this?” Merritt asked.

“I know because I was one of the gifted who helped them. Though the manipulation of the spirits of the dead in the underworld, and investing powerful magic into the corpses that those spirits came from, the dead are made to respond. That was the secret that the makers unlocked, using the spirits of the dead from the spirit world, linking them back to corpses they came from, using that connection in the Grace, the spark, that runs through creation, life, and into death, connecting it all. With the new spells designed by our makers, the dead are made to serve the wishes of Emperor Sulachan.”

“Against their will, then?” Magda asked.