Winston's Tower, 26sc
How long had he been wandering the wilds of Ansalon? Gilthanas no longer knew, nor cared. Instead, he
allowed himself a moment of elation as he craned his neck and studied the lofty expanse of the tall, narrow
structure rising from the coast. The ship pitched and rolled beneath his feet as the captain worked her into the
rough waters along the Karthay shore, but the elf had eyes only for his destination. He was fascinated by the
elaborate image atop the spire, like shining glass facets that formed a sort of rosebud. The ship's captain
informed him that the object had once been a lighthouse beacon, but that it had not worked during the man's
lifetime on the sea.
A dozen clues had brought the elven prince to this tower built as a fortress to ancient Istar, and now, a
monument to gnome technology. His latest information had suggested that Silvara had come here, and he had
doggedly followed her trail, even to the point of booking passage from the mainland. As payment, he had used
the platinum coins he had found on the bodies of the assassins who had slain Keelak and attempted to kill
Gilthanas himself. Unfortunately, his search of the bodies hadn't yielded any information regarding the source
of their mission. That was a mystery that the elf had vowed to address eventually.
A stone wharf extended into the sea from the base of the cliff below the tower. The captain ordered a boat
lowered, and the crew rowed close enough that Gilthanas could leap to the dock. With a few surreptitious
glances, the sailors rowed back to their ship, which hastened to put on canvas and get away from this place.
The elf could only chuckle as he made his way up the stairs carved into the cliff face. He was here, and
perhaps he would find answers within this towering edifice.
His elation passed quickly as he began to consider the problem of entering and searching the tower. The
dark face that he had first assumed was stone now looked to be smooth metal, without even the joints that
might have made scaling a stone wall at least a possibility. A ramp curled around the base of the tower, leading
past several open, beckoning doorways, but the prince decided to make a little more cautious approach.
Halfway around the tower he found another irregularity in the wall: a series of stone steps rising to a small
platform against the base of the structure. They looked like the stairs leading to a typical entryway, except he
could see no door. He climbed to the space and examined the wall closely for any sign of a seam or break. The
only thing he could discover was a small silver button extending perhaps a finger's width from the wall.
Otherwise, he found no sign of any break or any mark in the metal plate that would have indicated a door.
Gilthanas, like most inhabitants of Krynn, knew a little of gnomes. "Tinkers," they were called, and they had
a legendary fascination with invention. The development of a complicated machine was the typical life's goal of
any gnome worth his or her weight in salt. Occasionally these machines worked, usually in some way not
anticipated by the inventor. Quite often, the machine proved deadly to its designer and to anyone else who
happened to come within reach of its claws, gears, levers, wheels, and so forth.
Thus, Gilthanas regarded that silver button in the wall with a certain amount of trepidation. He knocked on
the wall, determining from the sound that it was in fact metal, and it seemed to be quite thick. He pushed and
prodded along the surface as far as he could reach, even drawing his sword and tapping over his head, to no
avail. In the end, his lack of patience led him to the inescapable conclusion: He had to press the button.
He placed his thumb on the silver circle and pushed. The button glided into the wall with smooth ease,
though he felt some sort of mechanism engage on the other side. For two long, long heartbeats, nothing
happened.
And then Gilthanas was pressed flat, crumpling against the surface nder his feet. In a split second he
realized that the platform was rising at tremendous speed—that acceleration pressed him down. He was lifted
dozens of feet up the face of the tower and then, abruptly, the platform snapped to a halt.
The elf, of course, kept rising, catapulted high into the air by the forceful lift. His stomach lurched and his
senses whirled, but he had the presence of mind to look upward. At the top of the tower, he saw a platform
extend, and he immediately deduced that this was a landing that should have caught him on his way down,
after he had been lifted past it. However, it had clearly emerged too early, and the elf smashed into the bottom
of the platform's surface with numbing force.
Only his quick wits saved his life. Anticipating the impact, he had lifted his arms over his head to cushion the
blow to his skull and kicked his legs out to either side. One foot flailed through a gap in the girder supporting
the platform, and then he was hanging upside down, his knee crooked through the opening while the world
spun dizzily more than a hundred feet below.
Immediately some sort of machine cranked into motion, pulling the platform back toward the rim of the
tower. The girders folded, and Gilthanas perceived that, in a few seconds, his leg would be pinched or perhaps
even severed at the knee between massive steel beams. With a desperate lurch, he pulled himself around,
catching the edge of the metal rod with his hands and extricating his foot from the rapidly shrinking gap. As the
girders folded together, he flung himself forward and sprawled onto the top of the tower, watching in
amazement as the platform settled to become merely a part of the flat floor.
"That went well," he murmured to himself, rising to his feet, dusting himself off, and checking for broken
bones. His head hurt, his leg was chafed, and his fingers were cramped from the strain of supporting his
weight, but nothing seemed permanently damaged. The great light loomed above him, and he passed several
deadly looking devices that might have been weapons of bombardment. He didn't touch any of them.
He found a trapdoor leading through the top of the tower and gingerly lifted it, relieved to find that no
machines were involved. A short ladder led him to the metallic floor of a round room, which seemed to occupy
the full circle of the tower's diameter. Bright light emerged from several panels along the walls, fully illuminating
the place.
Immediately he caught the scent of death. Looking around, he saw several doors and a few dead gnomes
sprawled on the floor before one of them. There were various tables and shelves with strange mechanisms
upon them in here. One in particular caught his eye: It was a massive assemblage of gears and pulleys
attached to a spear. It had apparently worked, for impaled on the spear was the body of another dead
gnome—no doubt the intrepid inventor himself.
The elf felt his spirits sinking. How was he going to learn anything here if all the gnomes were dead? Still, he
had only started to explore the tower.
He went to one of the doors unblocked by corpses, and opened it to reveal a long shaft with a chain circling
over a pulley mounted in the roof. As soon as he had pulled the portal wide, the chain started clinking, and a
quick downward look showed him that some sort of compartment was rising toward him. Common sense told
him to slam the door and run, but some perverse curiosity held him in place. The approaching cage slowed,
finally coming to a gentle stop perfectly in line with the floor of the room.
Within that cage, not surprisingly, were several dead gnomes in various stages of decomposition.
Recognizing this as some sort of lift, Gilthanas had seen enough—he would try to find an old-fashioned
stairway. When he closed the door, his intuition was rewarded as he heard the chain whip through the pulley
with unfettered speed. A second later he heard the cage crash into the floor far, far below.