The staircase ended in another tiny landing. The curved wall had peeled back to create a door. Beyond it stretched a delicate bridge that seemed spun out of shining metal lacework. No more than an arm’s-span wide, the walkway was bounded by a railing along either side. It led to the central platform. From the spire’s door, it really did look as if the platform was a huge and very thin silver-wire disk floating on the air ten stories above the ground with only the three bridges giving it any support.

“How does it stay up?” Kem whispered, clutching the side of the opening as he stared. “Is it safe?”

“I’m pretty sure Three Spires is a lot older than the empire. This place hasn’t fallen down yet. Do you want to come?”

He rubbed his face nervously. But when she stepped onto the bridge, he followed, matching her steps as if he feared one step out of rhythm would send him plunging over the edge to a messy death. For such a fragile-looking span, the bridge felt absolutely solid beneath her boots. Magic, she thought, whether it was the mover or the moved. Everything in its pattern, connections like the netlike filament layers of fungus and rot that permeated the soil, unseen by those who only looked at the surface of things.

Spore, too, she thought, her fingers cold where they gripped the ropelike railing. A rose-oil scent almost always presaged a Spore irruption. Its warning burned in her arm.

Don’t get distracted.

Every person’s stride was a different length, but like all couriers she had trained herself to the imperial stride as a measure of distance. Thirty-six steps to the central platform, which was itself thirty-six steps across. An insubstantial dome rose over the platform, a lattice woven of mist rather than actual metal. As she stepped off the bridge, tendrils brushed at her face like a spider’s web briefly felt and then lost. The disk rang softly beneath her feet as she stepped onto it. It felt solid, but she could see right through, down to the ground below, as if it existed in two places at once: here, in this world and yet, somehow, in another.

Not surprisingly, Kem hesitated. It was a big step to take. So she grasped his wrist as she had so many times grasped his mother’s when Aoving couldn’t bear to take one more step but to stop would have meant death or worse.