EMMA

  The second set of metal teeth rose with an irregular clacking as the raspy staccato vocalizations floating from above turned to grunts of effort.

  Apparently the gates were hand-cranked.

  The wagon's leisurely pace resumed when Dovin flicked the reins, but not for long. The road had ended.

  Which meant Emma was about four shuddering breaths from needing to stand up and face whatever insanity came next.

  Peering out from under the canopy, she spent three of them tracing the tower that stretched up the mountainside in front of them, pretending she had all the time in the world.

  The monolith was flanked by an unnaturally sheer cliff face on either side, stretching hundreds of meters past the wall that encircle the courtyard, with only token disruptions where the slate had been weathered by wind and rain.

  The tower itself looked like it had been whole once, and maybe even beautiful. Decades, or maybe centuries ago. Or longer.

  Two yellow-dyed banners hung abutting a set of double doors that were thrown wide despite the rain, with a steady trickle of dragonborn busy ferrying supplies through them from parked wagons, their tiny figures providing a sense of scale that had Emma looking up again, just to make sure she hadn't imagined the height.

  The scale of the stonework was almost as mind-boggling as realizing that the main structure glimmered with the same faint traces of green as the bricks of the road and the encircling walls. The color was especially pronounced under the thin sheen of water dripping down its pitted face, making old wounds stand out.

  Large chunks of the original brickwork were patched over with much cruder mortar and stone, seemingly whatever had been at hand, or fit the face. Bare vines clung to one face of the structure, clambering ever upwards until they thinned and stopped less than halfway up.

  Her view was interrupted when time ran out, the ridiculously sized ox turning off the thin stone pathway into the mud of the yard, leaving oiled canvas in Emma's view when she tried to turn her head to count how many layers of thin-slit windows were built into the side of the structure.

  "Welcome to Eastwatch. Don't get too excited about the architecture," Dovin snorted as the wagon lurched to a stop. "You'll have plenty of time to take it all in while you climb the stairs."

  "I've never seen a skyscraper made of brick." Emma admitted, keeping things short when Calen's elbow dug into her ribs.

  Her pulse had spiked when the gold-scaled dragonborn had spoken, but the big one hadn't turned at all. Only the slow rise and fall of Viran's shoulders even gave away that he was breathing.

  The patient, statue-like behavior was almost scarier than seeing his teeth flash when he talked.

  Almost.

  "Interesting word for it. The mountain does half the work, and the world tree's corpse holds a lot of things together better than it should," Dovin shrugged. "Nobody has managed to tear the Long Roads up in the last half dozen millennia either. And not for lack of trying."

  Emma almost leaned forward for another look, but that would have meant invading Dovin's personal space. Or at least getting in reach of his arms.

  And Viran still hadn't moved a single muscle.

  "Can we save the ancient history for a time when I don't have iron under my scales?" Mirri rasped, shivering.

  The gray wall of scales finally shifted, and it was terrifying.

  "You got shot? Where?" Viran's head and shoulders spun in an instant, thankfully away from Emma.

  She still felt a telltale spike of adrenaline creep through her veins while she controlled her breathing.

  "I'm fine." Mirri growled, clambering over the back of the wagon and dropping into the mud to stalk away.

  "Get yourself treated, fill the bath, and find them both some clothing," Dovin called after her, reaching over to grasp Viran by the shoulder. "You, get this big lug settled in the pens before he gores someone who can't take it, and follow us up right away. No stopping to help people, you're going to learn how to give a proper report before Isha gets back."

  Viran nodded silently, and the wagon rocked again as he disappeared, sliding fluidly away. The rawhide strap stopped digging into Emma's palm as her breathing slowed.

  Arm's reach was nothing, to someone like that.

  Not that he had done anything except try to feed her. And pass Calen a dented helmet that used to belong to someone else. One that specifically didn't smell like blood, only sweat.

  Dovin noticed her staring at the slightly smelly bronze dome in her lap.

  "You're going to want to put that on, and pick up that shield. You two have a lot of stairs to climb." The dragonborn had made his way around to the back of the cart.

  Calen was already wearing his helmet. So that his head wouldn't explode, because of the way he had used magic. Emma hadn't said anything about it because being right still felt like a stone in her gut.

  There would be a way to fix him. There had to be.

  "Climb?" Calen asked suspiciously. "How far up?"

  Emma could have sworn her ribs were about to crack again from the way her heart thudded at Dovin's grin. She looked down, resting her elbows on her knees as she slowly lowered the helmet around her head. The world muffled as her hood was pressed tighter around her ears.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  The smell of stale sweat intensified as Emma's fingers traced the thin disruptions in the metal over her forehead, where the dent had been 'fixed'.

  "Almost all the way. The Warden's Perch is just below the plateau," Dovin confirmed. "So pass me those wings, grab the boots for your sister, and try to get her to stop flinching when she sees teeth. We're about to start some rumors just by walking in with you two armed and untied."

  "So now you can touch it? Just not before it got put on me, for some reason?" Emma thought that Calen sounded like someone who wanted to carry more steel up two hundred flights of stairs, but Dovin apparently disagreed.

  "I was preserving an opportunity for you two. Me walking off that field with Seraph Steel in my claws might have gotten a different set of rumors started, and left people disappointed," Dovin was still grinning. "The same way watching you stumble around trying to balance those on the way to the lift would leave them disappointed."

  "So it's not like, cursed or anything? And we can give it to this Warden person and leave peacefully?" Calen avoided an elbow to the ribs by being too far away.

  He was prioritizing entirely the wrong thing.

  Dovin was quiet for a second too long. Emma looked up at the clatter of metal, but he was just lifting the tangle of warped steel out of the bed of the wagon.

  "It's not cursed if you remember that the steel is the tool," Dovin said, throwing the wings over a bulky shoulder. "Everything else is overconfidence, superstition, and attrition. You can talk about plans for the future with Isha, but the next supply run is in a week. So for now, welcome to Eastwatch."

  The grin was gone.

  More metal clanked, spiking Emma's pulse again, but she relaxed soon after. It was just the fortress gate rattling shut behind them.

  She turned to drag the shield out of the bed of the wagon, and set off toward the doors after Dovin's cheery whistle and Calen's hunched and shifty-eyed gait. Her free hand squeezed the uneaten jerky in her pocket, and she tried not to panic every time she saw Viran look up from his 'argument' with the bull.

  It got easier once they were past the wet-hay smell of the animal pens, and he was out of her view entirely.

  ***

  It turned out that neither Calen nor Emma was going to be carrying a bunch of metal up several hundred flights of stairs.

  "Holy OSHA violations," Calen whistled. "That's cargo-only, right?"

  "I don't think that makes it much better." Emma kept her voice low, in the high arched room.

  Her nasally reply echoed softly anyway as she tilted her head back down. She could feel the pressure in her clogged sinuses starting to shift as she had kept her head tilted back, starting to tickle the back of her throat.

  She knew from experience that a sneeze would turn her into a blood-speckled disaster, right now.

  The fortress doors were a tasteful five meters tall, with a hallway to match. If either of them had bothered flanking Dovin on the way in, and Dovin had bothered centering himself, they might have all fit shoulder-to-scaly-elbows across the space.

  Just barely.

  A half dozen meters later, the walls fell away into a squared antechamber, lit by torches, and home to four main features. Five, if you counted the archways to their left and right as different features.

  The wooden stairs were a plain, functional, clockwise 'spiral' that rabbited from landing to landing as they climbed from corner to corner on their way up the tower. On the opposite side of the elevator, there was a single closed door. Maybe the entrance to a basement, or a storage closet.

  And the elevator itself looked...

  Emma had never wanted to climb two hundred flights of stairs up through an endless, squared-off spiral more in her entire life. The wooden platform was completely flat, other than the thickly rolled bronze retaining eyes that secured what must be hundreds of meters of hand-woven rope. There were no walls or railings, not even a gate surrounding where it rested on the floor.

  Worse, the free-swinging edifice was only sort-of framed by wooden bearings. Judging by the way the cluster of uniformed dragonborn currently loading the platform with stacks of wooden crates were moving, the guide rails were for the counterweights responsible for lifting the whole thing, not the elevator itself. No one was standing in between the thick, well-worn beams.

  'Moving' was a strong term too, given that each of the dozen scaly figures had just individually come to a stop after finishing whatever task was in their hands.

  "How much more weight can that take?" Dovin asked, opening the floodgates.

  "I'm not putting prisoners on with heavy cargo, even for you," Crossed arms as thick around as Emma's calves bulged with muscle under deep-blue scales. "Especially not untied prisoners."

  Emma didn't have time to linger on the misunderstanding, as almost half a dozen more questions soared out of the crowd.

  "Why are they loose? Did the Venatrix need that much help with her things?"

  "Sod that, what melted the Seraph Steel? Is she alright?"

  "Which god is O-Shaa, and why do they hate towers? Is that one of those hill gods from all the way east at the gullet?"

  "What'd the little light mage do to get roughed up so bad his tunic's falling off burned? Pick a fight with the Firebrand?"

  Calen opened his mouth like he was about to say something stupid to whoever had made that last comment, so Emma pressed her heel into his foot. Hard.

  That earned her another scowl, but it was better than letting him make the only strangers who hadn't tried to eat them today angry.

  The crowd in front of them could literally tear them apart in seconds. Which was true about any dozen people working together, really, but all the claws and weapons would make it extra easy.

  "The prisoners aren't here yet. These are Arrivals, from a place they called Earth," Dovin explained before the situation could degrade that far. "Calen, Emma, helmets off, let them see your faces so nobody gets confused while you're Isha's guests."

  The cacophony of questions only grew louder with Emma's ears outside the protective metal casing. Dragging her hood back created a distinct tugging sensation at her scalp, and she was almost certain she had just left more hair behind.

  She actively clamped down on the flow of mana through them, trying not to listen. That made it worse, unmasking the chirps, croaks, and raspy growls that mixed with more human-sounding syllables, and totally depriving her of any context.

  Dovin's peaceful rasp was still a sharp-edged saw against her sanity, with no way to understand what he was saying so calmly that put the rest of them on edge. He could have been saying anything, giving any order, and Emma might have cut and run right there if she couldn't see Calen listening with little more than a steadily deepening scowl on his face.

  Tone didn't carry well without magic helping, but some of the body language she was seeing was unquestionably startled by the time she went back to listening, just in time for the shouting to degrade to mutters.

  The big blue dragonborn had stepped forward, and held their left hand, palm-up. He was waiting for something. Something she had missed, trying to shut out the world.

  An elbow dug into her ribs as she tried to step back. Calen stepped in front of her, and passed over the boots he was carrying. Buying her time.

  "Hand him the shield, Em," Calen said. "Unless you need help untying it?"

  Emma nodded silently, her too-short nails already picking at the rawhide she had hastily wrapped around her elbow.

  She had known she would have to give the metal back. They were only transporting it out of the wilderness, not keeping it.

  No matter how safe the heavy weight on her arm had made her feel.

  Two of the dragonborn stayed on the elevator while a third pressed their palm to an embossed copper symbol on one of the walls, and the whole creaking artifice lurched once, twice, then a third time as it slowly began to rise.

  "I want those boxed up outside Isha's office by the time I get there. No dawdling." Dovin ordered after them as they rose, and Emma realized the last instruction was for her too.

  The golden-scaled alien was already halfway to the base of the stairs, and clearly expecting to be followed.

  Calen was waiting for her to move, so Emma leveled her breathing, tucked the borrowed helmet under her arm, and began to climb. Fading mutters followed them up for a while, almost all of them using terms she didn't fully understand, like 'Bestowal', 'Null', and 'Warden'.

  They were eventually buried under the clack of gears from above.

  featuring iron frames, deep foundations, elevators, and electric lighting first appeared in Chicago in 1885 when the Home Insurance Building was finished, though the term 'skyscraper' was not commonly used to describe them until 1888.