A snippet and a question

Sorry to have been quiet for so long. No, nothing is wrong, except that this tenth novel is giving me problems.  It's the next to last and there are so many loose ends to clear up, not to mention issues raised here which should also advance the plot..  My thought is that Jame needs at least another clash with Gerridon if not two before the end, this first involving the Central Lands, not heretofore an issue but solidly there, both on the map and in Rathillien history.

In Demons, Gerridon lost the larder of souls who fed his immorality.  My question:  the Shadow Guild is trying to figure out how to reap Bashtiri souls to feed him.  Bashti believes in ancestor worship and has a lot of souls (and preserved bodies, the two being linked) in line to become either gods or saints, depending on how much worship they can inspire in their descendents.   Gerridon would prefer Kencyr souls, but he will make do wirh these if necessary as a stop-gap measure.  Thoughs about how they might do such reaping?

Then the snippet:  Jame is on her way south to Bashti.  This happens on the way.

For the next two days they rode around the eastern end of the White Hills.  While the company had talked and sung before, here they were quiet in the shadow of that ominous land.  No one would ever forget how Ganth Graylord had descended on the Kings’ Host of assembled Kencyr mercenaries.  It was said that Ganth’s hands were still red with the blood of his slaughtered womenfolk and that his madness had infected those who rode after him.  That the Bashtiri Shadow Guild had slain them, there was no doubt, but who had paid for the contract?  Ganth blamed the Seven Kings.  His own people stood in the way of his vengeance.  He stuck them down until through sheer numbers rather than force of arms they overwhelmed him.  Exile had followed, and thirty years of darkness for the Kencyrath. Before that, the hills had earned a new name, white as they then were with the ashes of the Kencyr dead.
They still had a bleached quality and were often overhung with dust, or mist, or the ghost of smoke.  Birds had skimmed the Oseen Hills, crying.  None flew here unless so high that they were mere silent dots against a stricken sky.
“Torisen cut across those,” Jame said to Wort, peering into the twilight beyond their campfire.  “He was in a hurry, of course, but oh so rash.”
“What did he find there, lady?”
“It seems that the hills have gone soft.  When two parts of Rathillien are somehow alike, they may overlap.  Tori wandered out of the Central Lands altogether and into the eastern Haunted Lands.  Haunts followed him back.”
“What are haunts?”
“The returned dead.  Nothing where I grew up was entirely dead or alive except for us, and sometimes we weren’t sure.  It was all very unpleasant.”
“Do they look anything like that?”
The cadet pointed. 
Jame blinked the firelight out of her eyes.  A tall figure stood motionless between the initial swelling of the dark hills.  Wisps of luminous mist wreathed its unseen feet and swirled up its pale robes.  It appeared to be watching the camp through what might have been a smiling waxen mask.  Then, between one blink and the next, it was gone.
Jame shivered.  “I don’t know what that was,” she said, “but I don’t like it.  Damson?”
“Here.”  The one-hundred commander materialized out of the night so suddenly that she must have been standing nearby – also watching?
“From now on, set extra guards.”