The first hundred steps of the Grand Stairs were sixty arm-lengths wide, cut from single blocks of white pale limestone that had been quarried from the mountain roots before the Great Flooding. Each riser was exactly six inches high, wide enough for ten men to march abreast, yet across that broad expanse of ancient stone, only one pair of feet now moved.
Qiao Ming climbed with the slow, economical gait of a land-mapper who had measured thirty leagues of upright cliffs with a knotted cord. His spine was straight, his shoulders relaxed beneath the coil of horsehair line. With every step, his toes spread slightly, testing the grit of the stone, feeling the faint coolness where moisture still clung to the shadow beneath each overhang.
Behind him, the damp footprints he left upon the pale limestone began to dry. In the draft that moved through the lower rows of stone pillars, the dark prints faded within twenty heartbeats, turning into pale grey silhouettes that dissolved into the grain of the rock.
The air grew colder as the stair rose above the low heat cushion of the entry hall floor. A thin mountain draft, leaking inward through fractures in the high window row windows three leagues above, brought the faint scent of crushed snow and dormant pine needles. It was a phantom scent, carried down through lightless upright shafts from an outside world that had ceased to exist ten hundred years ago. But the stone preserved its memory with crystal-clear fidelity.
