Four hundred feet above the Ashen Basin, the steel framing of Tower North creaked against the sulfur wind.
Giles Croft stood on the mid-level overhead frame at the two-hundred-foot platform. His boots were locked onto the steel mesh decking.
Below him, the four-sided stepped truss narrowed down into a massive sixty-foot pyramid anchored into solid mountain stone by two-inch chrome-steel foundation bolts.
Around the base of the four towers, eighty steam winches rattled continuously.
For thirty-six unbroken hours, four thousand steelworkers and dwarven riggers had worked through the stinging yellow mist.
They had hoisted prefabricated truss sections, riveted gusset plates with three-pound air-powered hammers, and strung eighteen-inch seamless steel slurry pipes up the inside spines of all four towers.
At three hundred and fifty feet above the ground, the wind screamed through the open lattice of Tower North like a wild beast.
Duncan Stone-Splitter stood on a six-inch steel beam, his safety lanyard snapped onto a heavy gusset plate.
