Now that he is safe to move, he is being led by a thick chain around his neck, held by a guard.  The guard has no lines in this play, other than to lead him to the next room and radiate contempt at the temerity of his crimes.

In the next room there is another guard, standing, and another criminal, sitting in chains.  The criminal will recite the next geas.  It is the geas that he will be bound by for the rest of time.

He has heard the geases as they were applied to the dead before him.  They were lengthy, exacting, legalistic, impenetrable.  This is the fashionable way to apply a geas: an enchanter to write the rune, but a criminal sentenced to sacrifice their Breath for the geas itself.  The corresponding way to write a geas is to write it exhaustingly enough, with little enough ambiguity, that it only requires Breath and not Self to enforce.

Most of the dead make pilgrimages, or rather make one specific pilgrimage.  This country's dead are employed: they go instead to the bonewall and defend the kingdom.  But if the geas was laid like so, "I give a measure of my Breath to enforce this geas: go to the bonewall and defend the kingdom," that would allow the dead far too much latitude.  Go to the bonewall by what route?  Do what along the way?  Defend the kingdom against what, by what means?

There are two ways to rectify this problem with geases.

One is to revise the first part, the sacrifice: "I give a measure of my Self and a measure of my Breath to define and enforce this geas: go the the bonewall and defend the kingdom."  Then, instead of the geas's victim interpreting the terms, it is the speaker who interprets them.  But really this just passes the buck - who's to say the speaker's answer to those questions will be any better for the kingdom than the victim's?

The second way to fix the problem is much better.  It is to lengthen the geas.  If you write pages and pages of dense legalese defining exactly what your victim must do in exactly what circumstances, exactly whose orders to follow in the future, and if you are thorough and exhausting enough, then there will be no need of Self to interpret the geas at all, because there will be no room for interpretation.  The victim will act by rote, mechanically.

The criminal, seated, is clutching a sheaf of parchment.  The terms of his second geas.

"Recite it now," says the guard.

One more wrinkle.

The rune on his forehead will accept two geases.  When the first one is placed, he will be bound by it, but the rune will stay active.  When the second one is placed, the first one will be overwritten, he will be bound by the second one, and the rune will seal; no new geas can override the one placed on him.

This is not quite best practice, according to some thinkers.  The rune should stay active until it is sealed manually, by another enchanter, so that if there is some kind of mistake in the second geas, it can be corrected.  But this would be a much more complex rune, and double the work of the enchanters, and generally gum up the works and slow the throughput of dead through the barrack-mausoleums, and errors in the recitations of geases don't happen that often, and if they do the erroneously geased dead can just be incinerated.

He hears the criminal speak, almost too fast to understand:

"I give myself and my breath to define and enforce this geas SAVE EVERYONE - "

In a few moments, by one hand or another, everyone in this room is dead.

He retrieves a ring of keys from one dead guard's belt.  He can unlock his gauntlets from each other, and then unlock the collar attached to his chain.  (His fingers can move freely, if a bit clumsily, in his gauntlets; the handles of his swords are fused with the gauntlets' palms.)

He ducks through the next room, where the twice-geased dead are being branded with serial numbers, and out the door to the road, where the fully prepared dead are being loaded onto a wagon.

From the looks on their faces, the three living officers recognize him, and understand that he is free.  Good.

"One of you will convey my orders to these dead."  He points one sword at the bodies stacked on the wagon.  "The rest of you will die.  Volunteer."

(He is gratified to learn that the geas allows him to say this.  - ah, but of course, these men are participating in a crime against humanity.)

One of the officers barks an order to one of the dead, and now that dead is hamstrung and that officer is skewered.

"Volunteer," he repeats, as he stomps on the offending corpse's elbows.  Crunch, crunch.

"I volunteer," squeaks one of the remaining two officers.

(Now the third officer is also skewered.)

"We will have them massacre the camp," he says.  "I will direct you as regards tactics - "

He rolls his neck involuntarily, bares his teeth, not in an effort not to say what he says next but in sheer simple loathing at being going to say it.  He's going to hate this -

" - we will prefer freeing the prisoners and the dead where we can, possibly commission their aid, and you will convey me and as many survivors as we can to the bonewall."