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southward across the plain toward the forest, some five miles distant. There would be no cover between the river and the edge of the woods.
    Several times he attempted to break into a run, but the jarring motion was disconcerting — he literally felt as if he was about to fall out of his own skin. As long as he moved slowly and deliberately, the body and spirit remained in sync and he still felt almost human.
    The sun peeked over the zenith of the mountains while the first trees were still several hundred yards off. The glare struck his irises like twin spears. His exposed skin felt like it was on fire. Evidently he was not entirely beyond the realm of pain.
    He once again began to run, realizing that the agony of full sunlight might well incapacitate him completely. He had to reach the tree line before the sun was fully above the horizon. Despite the jarring sensation, he did not pop out of his own corpse; it seemed that he was starting to get the hang of this dual existence. He shivered at the thought. Pulling his cloak tightly against him, he ran desperately to the edge of the woods.
    His ordeal wasn’t over when he reached the trees: the insidious rays, nearly level with the horizon, shot through the foliage, bathing the forest in swaths of glaring red. It was so bright that even through closed lids it felt like the light was drilling right through his eyes and pounding on the back of his skull. Dizzy and nauseous, feeling like his whole being was on fire, Boric stumbled blindly through the woods until he tripped over a log that reached nearly to his knees. He stayed down, pressing himself into the cool, dark cavity behind the rotting wood, waiting for the sun to climb high enough that its rays would be mostly blocked by the canopy of foliage above him.
    So this is what it’s like to be a wraith, he thought. Cowering behind a fallen tree, waiting for the sunrise to pass. He hadn’t been this scared since he had faced the Ogre of Chathain, some twenty years earlier.

FOUR
    After parting ways with Brand, the mysterious stranger, Boric followed the ogre Skoorn’s trail from town to town for several days, eventually ending up in a village on the border of Ytrisk and Skaal. The name of the village was Plik.
    Plik was a typical border town, built on a marginally habitable plateau in the mountains between the two kingdoms. Plik’s existence depended entirely on a willingness on each kingdom’s part to overlook the black market trading on which its citizens subsisted. It was a place where spies, robbers, and merchants mingled freely. Justice was for sale and love could be rented by the hour.
    Boric found himself in a tavern called the Velvet Gosling, nursing a beer and soaking in gossip about the ogre. Word had reached town that two infants had been plucked from their cribs the previous evening in a nearby town, and the men of the village were talking about hunting the ogre down. So far, it amounted only to talk.
    “It’s only a matter of time before the ogre hits Plik,” said one man. “If that lazy bastard Toric isn’t going to do anything about it, we need to take matters into our own hands.” He downed a flagon of beer to punctuate his point. The man was built like a tree stump. Massive, blackened hands hung from arms roped with muscle, and his dirty blond hair was pulled back in a braid behind his head. A blacksmith, no doubt. And an insolent blacksmith at that, thought Boric. A few leagues closer to Brobdingdon no one would dare refer to the king as “that lazy bastard.” But things were different down here, halfway between Brobdingdon and Skaal City. Plik’s allegiances swung back and forth between Skaal and Ytrisk like a sheet blowing in the wind.
    “I hear the Skaal have sent an expedition into the hills to find the ogre,” said another man. This one was fat, bald, and pink-cheeked and wore a finely tailored shirt and pants. A merchant of some sort.
    “Ha!” bellowed the blacksmith. “Men from the