“Easy. One of those loyal to him prepares a dead body, here, at the Keep or in Aydindril, and then has it laid to rest out there in your catacombs among the other dead people. How would you know? How would you know that the body that was being laid to rest down here wasn’t one of the ones that had been prepared to serve Sulachan’s purpose? Any of his people hidden here as spies or traitors at the Keep could then bring the dead out of their death sleep”—she snapped her fingers—“as quickly as that.”

Magda had to remind herself to breathe. “Dear spirits, I never thought of that.”

“I hadn’t either,” Merritt admitted. “Is there a way to check the dead, to know which have been prepared in this way?”

“Before they are called into service, they are nothing more than a corpse. There is no way to tell, unless you were to find a way to contact their spirit in the underworld. As a spiritist I can tell you that would not be an easy task. I could probably venture into the spirit world to probe for the spirit of a dead body, but that could take days of searching, and that’s for one dead body. You have thousands out there. Do you have thousands of spiritists who could be assigned such a monumental task?”

“We might have a handful of such gifted,” Magda said, “but I’m afraid that the only one that I actually know of was killed by one of the emperor’s dead servants.”

“Then you have no way to test a corpse being laid to rest even if you wanted to. Worse, though, those seeking to use the dead wouldn’t even have to go to that much trouble. Do you have guards who check the people who come and go from the catacombs? Escort them to see what they might be doing?”

Merritt arched an eyebrow as he grasped her meaning. “No. There are wizards who work down here on countermeasures to Sulachan’s weapons. They come and go all the time.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Any of those wizards could be a spy, secretly working for Emperor Sulachan’s cause. They would have their pick from thousands of dead. They merely find a suitable corpse and prepare it to be awakened from death. The spells have already been well developed by Sulachan’s makers to use on the dead. Such spies would also be able to identify important targets among the gifted and set the dead upon them to cripple your efforts.”