“But that’s not possible. I hear you in English. How …?”

“Yes, and I hear you in Chinese. Who knows how? Anyway, above and below the words in the cave were other writings in strange languages.”

“Yes, exactly! Quon, tell me—why … no, first, where did you come from?”

“Well,” he said nervously, “I came from—”

“Out of the way,” a man shouted, pushing between Quon and me. I wanted to teach him some manners but thought better of it. Another traveler followed him, then two more, then a group of six. Where were these people coming from? We hadn’t passed more than a few dozen stray travelers a day, in groups no larger than four. Why was the traffic increasing? I looked around—the countryside was becoming well-ordered, with tended fields and crops and orchards instead of wild trees and berry bushes.

I looked behind us at the clear stretch of road. I couldn’t see anyone headed our direction. Everybody was going the other way. Why? We were always turning our shoulders, trying not to bump into them. This part of the red road was very narrow. As the travelers increased, so did the jostling. I kept waiting for things to calm down so I could resume talking to Quon.

I picked up Frodo, who was gun-shy now that he’d been kicked and nearly stepped on a half-dozen times. He pressed the side of his face against my hand, groaning and licking, playing for my sympathy and getting it.

“We must be getting close to a city,” David said. “Or at least a large village.”

Within an hour it felt like a shopping mall at Christmas. I wondered if we’d gotten turned around. As a point of reference, I moved to the side of the road and looked to the west for the City of Light. In the midst of the crowd it was very hard to see. We looked at the sun, knew that it rose away from Charis and set toward it, and yet … we still wondered because of all the throngs moving eastward. Did they know something we didn’t?

We sat down by the road, reread the RoadGuide and consulted its maps, discussed our understanding of what it said and the meaning of the long shadow that cut east to west across the land. I studied a great gray column in the sky, composed of rings of spinning clouds, one on top of the other like a stack of tires. It made me feel uneasy.

“There’s no doubt,” Shad said, “we’re headed the right direction.”

“No,” David said, looking at his position locator. “We should go that way.” He pointed to a path going off the red road, winding south then appearing to swing back to the east.