“That sounds well and good, but where?” Merritt asked. “I don’t know a place safe enough that Emperor Sulachan couldn’t get to it. After all, it was hidden—in the Temple of the Winds in the underworld—and he managed to get to it.”

“Well,” she said, “if he didn’t know where to look he—”

Magda went silent as the thought tickling at the back of her mind suddenly became clear. She blinked. She wondered if it could work. She wondered if it was even possible.

She seized Merritt’s shirtsleeve. “A gravity spell?”

Lord Rahl’s face scrunched up into a frown. “A what?”

“A gravity spell,” Merritt said, ignoring Lord Rahl, his attention focused on Magda because he realized from the look in her eyes that she was on to something important. “What about a gravity spell?”

“That little gravity spell you created and gave to me draws those little clay figures to it.”

“Right,” he said in a drawl as it started to dawn on him.

“What if you created a bigger gravity spell that would draw the dead that Sulachan’s forces have animated, and draw the half people to it as well? Naja helped create them. She knows how they function and how their spirits have been manipulated, so maybe she could give you information on the spells involved and then you could create a gravity spell specifically designed to draw them both in, right?”

“For someone born without the gift,” Merritt said with a smile, “you sure have some pretty interesting ideas of how to use it. You make a pretty good maker’s match.”

Lord Rahl was looking from one face to the other and back again. “Draw them into where?”

Merritt ran his hand back over his neck. “That’s the problem. It needs to be someplace where we could trap them. Once we draw them in, we would also have to keep them there.”

Magda snapped her fingers. “Isidore’s symbols.”

Merritt was already nodding. “We could use Isidore’s keeper spells to make a barrier to help prevent them from escaping.”

Lord Rahl still had the serious scowl. “You mean that you think you could create a spell that would draw Sulachan’s walking dead people and his half-dead people to it?” When Merritt smiled and nodded, Alric Rahl went on. “And then you would place a barrier spell to ensure that they were trapped?”