The steps were too steep for Alice to ascend comfortably, and her legs were soon burning with the effort. She tugged on Spike’s thread for extra strength, and adopted a kind of bounding gait, leaping off each step in turn and bouncing to the next. Dex, following behind, laughed delightedly at the sight, but Soranna was unable to keep up. She looked so miserable that Alice slowed her pace again.

After three floors, passing three more piles of books, they reached a level with a doorway opposite the one they’d come in by. Garret, glancing through, reported that it led to another staircase that wound around the outside of the tower and ended in a walkway. He led the way through, and if climbing with a sheer drop on one side bothered him, he gave no sign of it. Alice herself kept one hand flat against the stone wall of the tower, for all the good that would do, and determinedly did not look down.

Now that she had some sense of the scale of the towers, Alice wondered how long it would take them to get to the dome at the center. It might be miles, even if we could go in a straight line! She hoped some of the others had brought more in the way of provisions than she had.

At the top of the staircase, just as Garret had said, the path leveled out into a long bridge stretching across to another tower. From this angle, climbing up from underneath, Alice could see there was nothing supporting the thin stone as it crossed the gap, no pillars or buttresses underneath. She supposed it must be held up by magic, but that didn’t make her feel much better, especially once she remembered that Esau’s spells would be coming undone now that he was dead. It doesn’t seem like a very sensible method of construction to me.

Garret apparently didn’t share her misgivings. He started out across the bridge without waiting for the others. Isaac followed, and Alice was hurrying to catch up when someone behind her started screaming.

She turned. Dex and Soranna were a few steps down. Beyond them, coming around the curve of the tower, was something very unpleasant indeed. It reminded Alice of an ant, except this creature was as big as a horse. Four glittering, multifaceted eyes topped a black round head, above a pair of pinching mandibles as long as Alice’s arm.

Eight multijointed legs moved it along with a constant click-click of chitinous armor. It was too broad to use the stairway, but it didn’t need to. The thing clung to the side of the tower like an ordinary ant scrambling up a kitchen cabinet, as though the law of gravity simply didn’t apply. The rearmost of its three body segments ended in a long tail that curled back over its head, tipped with another pair of pincers.