“Through the process that animates them, some of the dead will be dedicated to the task of going after specific targets, such as your gifted. If it takes a hundred, or a thousand dead to take out one wizard on the battlefield, what does Sulachan care? If it takes ten thousand he wouldn’t care.”

Magda thought that Merritt was looking numbed by such horrifying accounts. It was overwhelming and she could see the despair in his eyes.

“What about these others,” Magda asked when Merritt fell silent. “The half people?”

Naja ran her fingers back through her black hair, clearly unsettled by the mention of the half people.

“The half people are worse. Far worse.”

Chapter 77

“What do you mean, the half people are worse?” Merritt asked. “How are they worse?”

“They were actually created to control and guide the dead. They are living people who are stripped of their souls, so the dead and the half people share certain things in common.”

“Things in common?” Merritt asked. “Like what?”

“They are not alive, at least not in the accepted sense.”

Merritt let out an angry breath. “What do you mean by accepted sense?”

“The accepted sense of life means having a soul. That is part of existence as we understand it, part of what it means for us to be in the world of life.”

Naja reached out and lifted his hand with his ring and with her finger tapped the Grace on it. “Creation, life, death, with the Light of Creation running through it all. The half people are a perversion of the Grace. They are separated from that spark of the gift that is their soul, that spark they are supposed to carry through life and then after death into the spirit world.

“But these souls from the half people did not pass through the veil in the normal manner, didn’t carry that spark through the veil themselves. They have been ripped asunder. They are neither dead, nor alive. Though they are alive in the sense that they breathe, eat, even talk some, they are not really alive because they have no soul, no connection to Creation and the Grace. It is a living body that is just a vessel that has been torn away from the conventional sense of the Grace.

“If Emperor Sulachan dies before he can complete his grand scheme, he will be reanimated to be an extension of his soul in the spirit world. But the emperor is hoping that when the method is perfected, if he is still alive, his soul can be sent on to the underworld, while his living form remains here to rule the world of life as one of the half people, or should I say, what is left of the world of life. It is his way of achieving a form of immortality.”

“How can that make him immortal?” Merritt asked, his impatience growing by the moment.