Dragon Wing – Death Gate Cycle 1. Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman

He guessed, too, that the view should be spectacular, and thought he really should see it. Pulling out his spectacles, he hooked them over his ears and gazed around.

The smokestacks and holding tanks, lightning-flinging arms and huge revolving wheels of the Kicksey-Winsey thrust up from the flat plains of Drevlin; many of them towering so far into the sky that their steaming heads were lost in the clouds. Limbeck stared at the Kicksey-Winsey in awe. One tended, when one served only one portion of the gigantic creation, to concentrate on just that one part and lose sight of the whole. The old saying about not seeing the wheel for the cogs came to Limbeck’s mind.

“Why?” he asked (which was, by the way, the very question that had caused him to be thrown out of school). “Why is the Kicksey-Winsey here? Why did the Mangers build it, then leave it? Why do the immortal Welves come and go every month and never fulfill their promise to lift us up into the shining realms above? Why? Why? Why?”

The questions beat in Limbeck’s head until either these resounding whys or the wind rushing past him or the act of staring up at the gleaming structure of the Kicksey-Winsey or all three together began to make him dizzy. Blinking, he took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. Clouds were massing on the horizon, but the Geg judged it would be some time yet before another storm swept over the land. If he went home now, a storm of a different sort would sweep over him. Limbeck decided to explore.

Fearing he might fall and break his precious spectacles, Limbeck tucked them carefully into the pocket of his shirt and began to make his way across the slag heap. Being short and stocky and deft in their movements, Gegs are remarkably surefooted. They clump across narrow catwalks built hundreds of feet above the ground without turning a hair in their beards. Gegs desiring to go from one level to another will often catch hold of the spokes of one of the huge wheels and ride it up, dangling by their hands, from the bottom to the top. Despite the fact that he couldn’t see very clearly, Limbeck soon figured out how to traverse the cracked and broken piles of coralite.

He was just moving really well and making some headway when he stepped on a loose chunk that tilted and threw him sideways. After that, he had to concentrate on watching his footing, and it was undoubtedly due to this that he forgot to watch the approach of the clouds. It was only when a gust of wind nearly blew him off his feet and drops of rain splattered into his eyes that he remembered the storm.

Hastily Limbeck pulled out his spectacles, put them on, and looked around. He had traveled quite a distance without knowing it. The clouds were swooping down on him, the shelter of the Kicksey-Winsey was some distance away, and it would take him a long time to retrace his route among the broken coralite. The storms on Drevlin were fierce and dangerous. Limbeck could see blackened holes blown in the coralite from the deadly lightning strikes. If the lightning didn’t get him, there was no doubt that the giant hailstones would, and the Geg was just beginning to think that he wouldn’t have to worry about facing his father ever again when, turning completely around, he saw a large Something on the fast-darkening horizon.

Just what the Something was, he couldn’t tell from this distance (his spectacles were covered with water), but there was a chance that it might offer shelter from the storm. Keeping his spectacles on, knowing that he would need them to help locate the object, Limbeck tottered and stumbled over the slag heap.

Rain began pouring down, and Limbeck soon discovered he could see better without spectacles than he could with them, and pulled them off. The object was now nothing but a blur in front of him, but it was a blur that was rapidly growing larger, indicating he was getting nearer. Without his spectacles, Limbeck couldn’t see what it was, until he was actually standing right in front of it.