“But I can tell you from my general knowledge and familiarity that there are only a couple of ways to stop them that I know of, other than cutting off the magic that drives them. One way is to rip them to pieces. Not as easy as it sounds, because the magic also hardens them to an extent. It’s not intended to create a better weapon out of the dead person. Its purpose is rather straightforward. It’s meant to counter the decomposition of the body that would otherwise allow tissues to break down.

“Even then, if a disembodied arm is close, it will try to grab you, try to attach itself to your leg to slow you down, or if it managed to use the fingers to pull itself across the ground into camp at night, it might clamp on to a sleeping soldier’s throat to choke them to death. But as you might expect, body pieces don’t have much of an ability to come after a person, so they aren’t nearly so serious a threat.

“Your forces will try to use shields, but I can tell you from experience that shields don’t work. Shields key off life. They have nothing to latch on to with the dead.”

“That’s true enough,” Merritt said, still deep in thought as he listened. “Keying a shield to things that aren’t alive would paralyze the shield because it would try to ward the world around it.” He looked up. “What about fire. That would have to work.”

Naja nodded. “That’s the second way to stop them. Fire, any kind of fire, is effective because it can reduce the dead to ashes. That certainly would be one sure way to stop them.

“Wizard’s fire would obviously work because it would stick to them and keep burning, but as you can imagine, the effectiveness of using it would degrade over time because Sulachan’s gifted can send endless ranks of the dead into the face of the wizard’s fire.

“I can also tell you that his gifted are working on ways to shield the dead they send in from wizard’s fire. I don’t know if they have perfected that sort of shield, or if they ever will, but you need to be aware that they are trying. Even if they don’t come up with a counter to such conjured fire, it’s not a significant setback because they don’t care about losses.

“Eventually, the wizards summoning such fire would begin to tire. It takes effort to keep up such conjuring. That is the advantage of using the dead. As I said before, they don’t tire. Enough of the dead would eventually make it through.