Malefactos was standing on top of a low hill overlooking a small town deep inside the Shadow. He was so deep inside that any living person would have been driven instantly insane, and yet Malefactos felt only a warm glow all over his body as if he were lying in a pool of warm water.

     The town, once a minor Agglemonian community only a few miles away from the much larger city of Trilos, was now a major staging post for the Shadowarmies as they prepared to send another fifty thousand goblins and shologs against the Fu Nangian province of Heshun, and the immaculately clean streets thronged with the evil humanoids bustling about in their bone armour and skull helmets. The bone effect of the armour, he knew, was created by the soaking, heating and pressing of slennhide in granite molds, after which the raised parts, the ‘bones’, were painted white. It would have gleamed as white as real bone in the normal rays of the yellow sun outside the Shadow, but here, where both suns appeared to shine a sickly dull red, they had a ruddy, crimson sheen as though a layer of living flesh had just been stripped from them, leaving them covered with drying blood.

     The town was surrounded by vast areas of farmland in which sickly, straggly stalks of wheat grew in the dim sunlight that was only just bright enough to allow the lowest level of photosynthesis necessary to sustain plant life. The fields were tended by vast numbers of zombies, most of which had been dead for so long that all the flesh had long since rotted away leaving just the bare skeletons and a few tattered scraps of clothing.

     Several of the farmworkers were alive, though. Slaves taken during the current and previous wars who laboured ceaselessly to grow the food that fed the living components of the Shadowarmies. A few were close enough to be seen clearly, and Malefactos noted the mindless, idiotic expressions on their faces, the total absence of any intelligence in their eyes. Dribbles of spittle ran from their mouths and blood flowed freely from the burst blisters on their horny, calloused hands where they held their old, almost worn out farm tools. They were virtually living zombies, their minds having been destroyed by the mind control spells that allowed them to exist this deep inside the Shadow, and even Malefactos felt disgust, revulsion and even pity at the sight of them. He hadn’t been undead all that long, and some small part of him, deep down inside, was still human enough to react with horror at this worst of all of the Shadowwizards’ crimes. That part of him would fade away in time, he knew, allowing him to look at them with the clinical detachment and impassivity that characterised a truly intelligent being.

     He’d already seen enough to terrify Tragius and send him fleeing to the refuge of a far distant dimension, but that wasn’t enough. The rak wanted to give him news so bad that he’d sink into a pit of despair from which he'd never emerge, that being the method he’d chosen to take revenge on the wizard. He knew that, somewhere in the Shadow, there were over a million additional Shadowsoldiers who hadn’t yet been committed to the war. Humans, trogs, shologs, ogres, goblins, hobgoblins and others of a dozen different humanoid races. If he could find them and describe them in all their mind paralysing horror, the effect that would have on Tragius would do a great deal to repay him for daring to blackmail him.

     He wouldn’t accomplish much by just drifting around at random, though. The Shadow covered a vast area, millions of square miles, most of it empty grassland, and it had only been by the sheerest good fortune that he’d found as much as he had. If he really wanted to see the sights he’d need a guide, and down there, in the town, was the place to find one. Casting a spell to make himself invisible, therefore, he activated his Robes of Flying, rose into the air and swooped down towards the streets and houses.

     In its day, it must have been a pleasant enough place to live, he thought as he hovered above the rooftops. The outlying buildings were little more than skeletons of crumbling brick, still scorched black in places where they’d been burned to destroy all traces of bloodeye fever, the plague that had wiped out the last pitiful remnants of the once mighty Agglemonian Empire three hundred years before. Traces of ornamental architecture still survived here and there, though, such as carved blocks of quarried stone that had graced the homes of even the poorest, such had been the wealth of the old Empire.

     Elsewhere, areas of wall were still covered by a layer of cement or concrete that had somehow, miraculously, survived the centuries. Some of them even bore bas-reliefs of landscape scenes and happy family settings, although the layers of paint that had once brought them to vibrant life had long since faded and flaked away. One building, standing a little apart from the others, was still lit up by the fading traces of an illusion spell that made what was left of its walls shine like polished gold and cast an aura of hope and cheerfulness over a wide area, indicating that it had once been occupied either by a wizard or by someone who’d had a wizard as a good friend. The field of tall weeds growing around it indicated that the Shadowsoldiers avoided it, much as normal people would avoid a haunted house.

     That one building, though, was the only one that had remained completely untouched and uncontaminated by the Shadowsoldiers. Every other building had been modified to one extent or another, especially those in the centre of town which was where the Shadowsoldiers spent most of their time. The skeletal remains of the town’s largest buildings had been rebuilt, made sound and habitable again, but with none of their original style and grace. None of the beauty and character that had been the hallmark of Agglemonian architecture all across the continent of Amafryka for over a thousand years.

     The new buildings were ugly. There was no other word for it. Structurally they were as sound as a bell, having been built strongly and to sound architectural principles. Doors and windows fitted well, roofs were well tiled and waterproof and the walls looked as though they could survive an earthquake, but there was simply no comparison with the original Agglemonian style. The Shadowsoldiers clearly put as little effort as possible into it. With the exception of the occasional building that had human bones pressed into the plaster, or which had horns sprouting from the roof, they only wanted protection from the elements, and so long as they fulfilled this basic criterion they were content.

     Malefactos ignored the architecture, though, and concentrated on the Shadowsoldiers themselves, searching for one who’d be likely to know a lot but be easy to control. The vast majority of the town’s inhabitants were humanoids, mainly shologs and goblins, with the smaller green skinned, pointy eared creatures acting subserviently to the massively muscled six foot tall monsters, but here and there the odd human could be seen, their greater intelligence earning them the ranks of officers, as evidenced by the curved horns on their skull helmets and the bands of steel around their arms. A few individuals of the larger humanoid races were also in evidence including giants, ogres and, to the rak’s astonishment, even a troll, towering twenty feet above its smaller battlemates.

     The highest ranking officers, though, the Captains, Lieutenants, Colonels and Generals, were all undead. Malefactos could sense the presence of several of them in the town, although there were none to be seen out in the open at the moment. He focused on his new rak senses and detected a group of half a dozen in the town’s largest building, what had probably once been the town hall. That must be their headquarters, he thought, and he drifted over for a closer look.

     He found a window in the second floor and, activating a couple of the concealment runes sewn into his robes, floated up to look through. The room he found himself looking into was bare of almost any furniture or decoration, with bare brick walls, exposed wooden beams in the ceiling and splintering floorboards covered only by a single threadbare rug. The undead, almost without exception, cared nothing for the present condition of a particular building, since they tended to see it as it had been when they’d been alive. They hardly noticed as the rot and decay spread through the walls, floor and ceiling. The building had been perfectly sound when they’d been alive, and so as far as they were concerned it was still perfectly sound. That was why the incorporeal ones tended to walk through walls that had been built after they’d died but continued to be bound by walls that had been there when they’d been alive even though they had long since crumbled into ruin.

     This applied also to the political state of the world, so that the ghosts of dead Kings still demanded respect and honour from those living within the geographic limits of their kingdoms, even though those kingdoms often no longer existed, and cared nothing for what was currently going on in those lands. There were exceptions, of course. The spirits of the dead occasionally became aware enough of the present to care very much what was going on and strove to change it to make it more acceptable to them, and it was this latent ability to become aware of the present, possessed by all undead to one extent or another, that the Shadowlord was able to exploit, using it to weld a thousand lost souls into the heart of the mightiest, most terrifying army the planet Tharia had ever seen.

     There were six of these lost souls in the room, gathered around a large wooden table on which a number of maps and situation reports were scattered untidily. Only one of them was solid and physical; a kind of shrunken, mummylike creature that bore a certain resemblance to Malefactos’s present physical condition except that it lacked the blazing points of fire that served the rak as eyes as well as the soul freezing aura of cold that surrounded the undead wizard. A cropazombie, he thought, looking at him. Much more difficult to create than an ordinary zombie but well worth the effort since it retained all the knowledge and intelligence of the living person it had once been, as well as being bound to obey its creators. This one appeared to have once been a Fu Nangian General and was now advising its new masters on the best way to conquer its homeland.

     The other five were all spirits, so thin and transparent they they would have been almost invisible to the living but who were perfectly visible to Malefactos’s rak vision. Two of them were wraiths; evil insubstantial beings that seemed to consist almost entirely of ribbons and streamers of cold moonlight that wafted and waved around the room like the tentacles of a jellyfish. There was nothing to suggest that these beings had ever been human except that, every so often, the drifting curls of smoke of which they were composed would temporarily arrange themselves so as to give the suggestion of a face. A fleeting glimpse of their lost humanity that lasted for only a fraction of a second before vanishing again, as if the invisible winds that blew them around didn’t want them to be reminded of what they’d once been. One of them seemed to have once been female as Malefactos caught a fleeting glimpse of a young girl’s face; her bright, innocent eyes shining out from among long, waving strands of silky blonde hair. He wondered what kind of tragic death she’d suffered to transform her into such a powerful servant of evil.

     Standing opposite the wraiths were three other undead spirits, but unlike the wraiths they were fully human in appearance, looking exactly as they had when they’d been alive except for being transparent. One was a true ghost. A spirit of such power and evil that only the most courageous and strongest willed could confront it with mind and soul intact. He was almost bald, with only a thin fringe of grey hair above his ears and around the back of his head, and he wore the expensive clothes of a rich merchant skillfully sewn by the very best tailors and with patterns sewn in gold thread around the cuffs and collar. There was a malevolent gleam in his eye, and he was listening intently to the cropazombie as it hissed its advice and fingered the maps, the only one in the room able to do so.

     The last two undead spirits were both spectres, indistinguishable from the ghost in appearance (except in as far as they’d been different in life), but differing in powers and abilities due to the different ways in which they’d lived and died. Both of them had evidently once been Fu Nangian nobles since they both had the yellow skin, epicanthic eyes and jet black hair that characterised their race, as well as the long flowing robes heavily decorated with colourful flowers and dragons so common to their culture. Malefactos found it amusing that they and the ghost, who had obviously been either Beltharan or from one of its provinces, should be working together in undeath when their respective countries had almost no contact with each other.