“When he needs the same sorts of things done that the dead do well, but with some intelligence behind them, he uses the half people.”
“Half people?” Magda leaned in. “What are half people?”
“Living people he has stripped of their souls.”
Chapter 76
Merritt folded his arms across his chest. “How much, exactly, do you really know about all of this? How complete is your understanding of it?”
“I told you, I was Emperor Sulachan’s spiritist.” Naja heaved an impatient sigh. “Must we discuss this now? Can we please go and talk about it later?”
“We need to know some things, first,” Merritt said.
Naja gestured toward the door. “What you need to know is that any one of those dead could be a servant of the emperor. You wouldn’t know it until one of them sat up, grabbed you by your throat, and ripped your arms off. If the emperor or his minions knew we were in here, they could set one or a dozen of the dead on us to tear us apart.”
“She’s right,” Magda said, recalling the horror of what had happened with Isidore. “We should get out of here.”
“How could he get any of those dead people down here to do his bidding?” Merritt asked, not ready to leave before he had a better grasp of it all and exactly what they faced. “He may be powerful, but he’s all the way down in the Old World. How could he do a thing like that from such a great distance?”
“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.”
Merritt wiped a hand back across his face in exasperation. “Naja, this is all pretty hard to take in. I need to have an idea of what, exactly, it is that we’re up against—the larger picture. Not just about some traitors assassinating people here, but how it all fits together in Sulachan’s larger purpose. It’s important for me to be able to grasp the totality of it.”
Naja took a deep breath as she nodded. “I understand. It must be difficult to hear this all for the first time.”
“It certainly is,” Merritt said.
“Well, you see, Emperor Sulachan is old and sickly,” Naja said. “He fears that he will not live to see the Old World unite all people into his vision of a just world. He calls that vision the People’s Alliance. He wants all people ruled under that alliance.
“Emperor Sulachan sees this as a just cause that transcends his life, as a larger cause for the good of all existence—the world of life and the world of the dead as one interconnected entity, one whole, just as the Grace is one whole, interconnected concept. To that end, he believes that all people must have common rule for that greater good of all, both the living and the dead.”
Merritt looked incredulous. “The living and the dead?”
“That’s right,” the sorceress said.
“Setting aside for the moment the issue of thinking he can rule the spirit world,” Merritt said, “how does he think it’s going to be possible for him to accomplish this merely with the world of life if he’s dying? He won’t be around to carry out his plans.”
“He seeks to continue to exist and function without life in the conventional sense, so you can’t separate the issue of ruling the spirit world. They’re interconnected. You said that you wanted the larger picture. The larger picture is that he seeks an alternate form of existence, you might say, so you have to understand it in those terms.
“What he seeks is a way to remain connected after his death to a functioning form in this world, in the world of life, so that he can rule it all. He believes that if he rules the spirit world, he can not only rule through his spirit in that world, but rule this world as well through his spirit’s connection to his reanimated body. In that way he unites it all.”
“It’s madness.” Magda shook her head as she let out a deep sigh. “We stand at the twilight of everything we hold dear, not only our liberty, but our very existence.”
Merritt looked stymied by a thousand questions he wanted to ask all at once, so Magda asked a question instead. “How do the dead fit into this plan of his?”
“As I said, he uses them for assassins and is preparing to use them as warriors. They are mindless at that task, once set to it. They are very difficult to stop. If you cut them, they don’t bleed. If you chop off an arm, they don’t feel it and will attack with the one they have left. If you cut off their legs they will use their arms to continue to pull themselves after you. They don’t rest. They are tireless, bloodless, relentless, remorseless killers. More corpses can be animated as needed. The dead are plentiful.”
“They just keep going forever?” Magda asked.
“Well, no, not forever, I don’t suppose. The dead rot away, but the magic that possesses them forestalls that process as part of its function, but the magic that has been invested in the dead is not a perfect solution. It has limits. It decays with time, much the same as a corpse would decompose. As the magic breaks down, so does the effectiveness, and so do the dead it possesses.”
“Well there is that,” Merritt said. “Maybe there is a way we can attack this magic.” He rolled his hand for her to continue.
“The army intends to start using them at the front line as they advance in battle. Arrows and spears are of little use against the dead. Stabbing them over and over is futile. They can’t really be killed because they are already dead. The soldiers on your side will waste their energy trying to kill them, trying to hack them apart, trying to stop their advance. The dead will keep coming, wearing them out.
“Sulachan intends his forces to sweep in after the waves of the dead have exhausted your soldiers and cut them down. Their corpses will be recovered and end up serving Sulachan’s side in his lifeless army.
“When the dead are no longer needed, no longer have a use at the time, Sulachan’s forces simply sever the links of magic and leave them as they would any of the dead. They are thus re
turned to what they were: corpses. They are of little value, individually. They are just a supply to be used. If he needs more, his gifted can provide them.”
Deep in thought as he listened, Merritt pinched the bridge of his nose. “How can they be stopped?”
“I am not really all that familiar with their use in warfare. I didn’t deal with the army officers, command structure, or strategists. I dealt with the gifted who created things, not the people who used those things.
“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.
“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.
“He wants to create a race of half people, with him as their ruler. He would no longer have to fear being old, fear being sickly, fear dying. His soul would be safe in the spirit world, leaving his temporal form to carry out his wishes in this world, thereby uniting the world of life and death in purpose.
“He and his race of half people would live indefinitely, largely unaffected by the afflictions of the living because they aren’t living people. They are, to an extent, animated in the way the dead have been animated, with magic having quickening their corporeal form.
“And, of course, the world of the dead is eternal, so there is no such thing as death for spirits. Spirits are by definition dead. Some of the spirits he has stripped from both the living and the dead still haunt this world. Having lost their connection they are unable to pass through the veil.
“The half people wouldn’t live forever, but through the process of sending their souls to the underworld and investing this vitalizing magic in their bodies, they also alter the way the body that is left behind would age. Changing the Grace changes the way time passes for them. Time doesn’t touch them in the same way it does us. Without the soul and with what they do to the husk of the living person, that person ages very slowly. I don’t know much of the details. I’m not sure anyone does, yet.
“Emperor Sulachan wants to convert as many people as possible into this new race of humans, these half people, living in this altered timeline. He plans to eliminate any opposition to his grand scheme by first eliminating the gifted who would oppose him—that would be you here in the New World—so that there will be no one with the ability to stop his plans.”
“That’s what the war is about,” Magda said out loud as the full realization came to her. “He wants to unite everyone under the rule of the People’s Alliance, but his main goal in attacking the New World is to first eliminate magic so that he and his followers are the only ones with the power of the gift.”
“That’s right,” Naja said. “He never says that, though. He promotes his goal as ‘eliminate the tyranny of magic from mankind.’ He makes people think that magic is their oppressor, and he is fighting for them by fighting to eliminate magic from the world of life.”
“But in reality,” Merritt said, “by eliminating the magic we have, he is eliminating the potential for opposition.”
Naja nodded. “Then he plans on eliminating life itself.”
Merritt’s arms came unfolded and dropped to his sides. “What?”
“He seeks to destr
oy the world of life as we know it, purging it of those people with souls. That would leave only the dead which he can control and the half people, who, as I said, aren’t really alive in the conventional sense. Then, the lifeless half people would rule a lifeless world.
“With his soul safely in the underworld, Emperor Sulachan would be the ruler of the world of life, but the world of life would no longer contain life as we know it now. There would be plants and birds and beasts, but the people here would no longer be the race of man as we are now. The people would be nothing more than animals, really.
“The world of life, as we know it, would no longer exist. There would no longer be any purpose in life, no ambition, no initiative, no accomplishment. No joy. No love.”
Magda and Merritt shared a look. She could see in his eyes what he was thinking: the boxes of Orden. In wordless confirmation, a private message to Magda, he lifted the Sword of Truth a few inches and let it drop back into its scabbard.
“That’s insanity,” Merritt finally said. “There is no other word for it. It’s hard to even grasp the very idea of it.”
“Whether you can grasp it or not, whether you believe it will work or not, whether you think he has a chance to succeed or not, what matters is that he intends to try to carry out his plan, insane as it is. He intends to try to destroy the world of life in order to create this vision of a perfect world where people do not think for themselves.
“That is why I defected. That is why I want to join your cause of stopping him. I, too, think it is insanity. I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to live in his idealistic version of an ideal world. I don’t want to be a slave to his purpose, to his deluded vision. It’s my life to live, not his to take for his ends.”
Merritt smiled for the first time in a while. “Then you have come to the right side. That is our feeling as well. That is what we believe in and what we are fighting for. The right to the joy of life. The right to our own life. The right to love.”