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him wince, but it was only the lingering effect of the bloodflower. It always made him a bit morbid.
    Rathwol laid the girl’s body gently on the ruined carpet and rolled it up.
    “Get her clothes too,” said Fangodrel, motioning toward the bed.
    Fangodrel checked himself in the big mirror. He combed his narrow mustache and groomed his short black beard into a single point in the style of Shar Dni. He wore his dark hair short, and he brushed it back from his forehead, running a handful of lambgrease through it and wiping his fingers clean on the towel. He hung an amulet of opal and emerald about his neck, and placed a thin circlet of platinum set with a single onyx on his forehead. This was the crown of the Eldest Prince, the Heir-Apparent to the throne of New Udurum. A cloak of green and silver completed his raiment.
    His pale skin did not matter, he told himself. It did not matter that his lean, V-shaped face in no way resembled the broad, rough-hewn visage of his father, nor that his physical strength was a mere fraction of Tadarus or Vireon. None of these things mattered, for he was the Eldest Prince.
Let men continue to call me Fangodrel the Pale
, he told himself,
for my skin will never be the umber shade of my brothers. But none can deny that I am the heir to Vod, King of Men and Giants
.
    Rathwol carried his burden to the door. There was no sign of the girl now inside the thick roll of carpet. Fangodrel, grimacing at the faint touch of dirty nails, slipped a jewel into the man’s sweaty hand just before he exited.
    The Prince waited a moment after his body servant left, lingering just long enough to drink a gulp of red wine from a crystal goblet. Lightning flared outside the opaque windows, bolts of fire dripping from the Sky God’s fingertips.
    Thunder boomed above the soaring towers as he left the chamber and descended a spiral staircase. As he walked he thought one last time of pretty Yazmilla. The girl had been a simpleton but she was not entirely without charms. Tonight he must find a replacement for her.
    But first an audience with his noble father.
    What could the old fool possibly want of him?

Words of the Giant-King
     
    T he Giants of New Udurum welcomed the storm as they would welcome an old friend. They stood in the streets while the driving rain caressed their faces and shoulders, and the thunder greeted them in its booming voice. Every human soul fled toward hearth and home to put a roof between himself and the storm, but the Uduru came forth from their tall houses in great numbers. They loved the storm in all its fierceness, and they celebrated the rule of their King, Vod of the Storms, whose shifting moods often brought these tempests upon the city.
    Within the black palace Queen Shaira sat waiting for her husband. The fires of twelve hanging braziers dispensed steady heat and dancing light. The walls thrummed and pulsed to the rhythm of the squall outside, and she knew the six Giant sentinels lining the hall would rather be out in the rain and wind.
    Vod’s man-sized chair sat beside the Queen’s own, both of these before the single Giant throne that glittered with the light of precious stones. Vod would only take the Great Throne when some matter of weighty import was to be discussed with the Uduru; then his magic swelled him to the proportions of his Giant kin. Mostly he sat beside Shaira in his accustomed man-form. All threethrones sat upon a dais of black-veined marble. On the highest step of the dais sat Sharadza at her mother’s knee.
    “Where are my brothers?” asked the Princess, taking her mother’s hand. Shaira stared into her green eyes. It was like staring into a mirror, looking at her daughter. A mirror that showed herself as she was twenty years ago, back in the days when Vod’s love for her had been an all-consuming fire. Before the weight of time and wisdom had settled on her husband’s shoulders, the heavy chains of kingship.
    “Summoned from the wood’s edge,” she