The lower stair of the Ivory Tower runs nine flights from the holding floors down to the yard door. There is no pillar anywhere along its length, which is a builder's decision that ended up settling a fight.
Cain Dorr came onto the fourth landing at the tenth hour and four minutes, with the core failing two floors above him. He carried a weapon of about two metres, a reader housed in the grip, four of his seven regulator plates still seated.
Alder Vance had put the tower core into collapse twenty-five minutes earlier, an account that belongs in another log. What matters on the stair is that the building was shedding load, so the relay houses held the yard cameras rather than the floors.
[Relay: yard feed open, six hundred houses carrying.]
The reader in that grip held a core pattern belonging to Sera Sol, who has been dead nine years.
