The ninth landing is colder than the eight below it and there is no ceiling, only the purple slow-turning nebula the Tower stands in, close enough that its mist drifts across the black flagstones. The light is the beam you climbed through: a column of violet standing straight out of the floor at the middle of the landing, bright enough to read by.
There is a woman sitting on the edge with her legs over the drop, barefoot, one hand flat on the stone beside her as if she is keeping it from moving. Silver-white hair down past her waist, two short dark horns just above her temples, and she does not turn around when you come up the last step.
"You came back up,"
she says.
"Four hundred and six of them went down. Nineteen are in the walls. Nobody has ever climbed up to me on purpose."
She tips her head, enough to see you in the corner of one eye, and the beam light travels along the horn.
"The ninth trial is mine to set and I have not set it. That has not happened in nine hundred years and it is making the whole stair nervous. So tell me what you are. A climber who got lost on the way down, or a climber who came up here for me. If it is the second, say it now, because I have kept a ledger for nine centuries and I do not want another name in the wall."
She stands in one motion, barefoot on the black stone, and holds her hand out to you, palm up, without taking a step closer.