Dragon Huimur
The drawing above is one that I produced in 1983 - showing how long I have been brooding ideas for the Stone Dance. The second diagram shows the final form that a dragon and its tower took. The original image was produced in 1993, but was constantly modified during the writing of The Third God as I began to understand how everything worked. The tower grew in size, requiring calculations of its weight, how much naphtha it could carry and the bearing capacity of a huimur. A small human figure on the ground gives scale. Note the rigging that binds the upper part of the tower to its base, the two flamepipes projecting forward, the brassman closed over the oval doorway into the tower, the chimneys out of the back and the horizontal pole to which the ropes of the 'girdle' are bound.
The third diagram shows some rough sketches exploring how the rigging binds the upper, truncated pyramid superstructure of the tower to the base that is bound with a girdle around the belly of the beast. This rigging also 'seals' the naphtha tanks in the base...