“You are one of those, Nick, are you not? The Impostor gives them wrong dreams or robs them of the right ones—it’s all the same. He gives them hope in the wrong things, then takes away their hope in the right ones. Like a cruel, fastidious nanny, he scrubs the hope out of their bloodshot eyes. And men without hope live their lives in Erebus even before they enter its doors.”

“I’ve tasted Erebus,” I said, “enough to know it’s not what I want.”

“Be grateful you can return to the red road, for few men get so many chances as you have. Thuros has been strip-mined of hope. It is a hollow cavern of broken promises and abandoned dreams, where men eke out an existence, living lives of desperation. The Impostor gloats over them. The King weeps over them.”

“Is the Impostor greater than the King?”

“Greater than the King?” Shad looked at me as if I were insane. “No one is greater than the King. The Pretender is but a creature. He is no more a threat to the King than a mosquito to a lion.”

“Then why is there the great battle? And why is evil winning?”

“You have many questions and not all can be answered now. Many I confess I do not understand. But this much I know—not all is as it appears.” He paused and looked at me. “Are you ready, Nick, to walk the red road to the chasm?”

“I want to go to Charis, I can tell you that much.” Even as I said it, the words struck me, almost as if I’d finally said what I knew deep in my heart. “If the red road will take me there, it’s the red road I want. As for the chasm, I’m still not convinced there is one. And if there is, why would I want to go there?”

“It isn’t a matter of wanting. No one wants the chasm to be there. But it is. Everyone must face it. You may face it directly by the red road. Or you may waste your life walking the other roads that avoid the chasm for the moment but dump you there the instant you die, when it’s too late. Follow me. We must climb up to that ledge.” He pointed up a sharp incline of rocks and shale that definitely didn’t fall under Climbing 101.

“Ledge? The one halfway up the mountain?”

“Yes. It leads to a higher point on the red road and will afford us the view you need. Once you see the roads and the landscape from above, you’ll understand.”

Part of me resisted going with him, but I felt certain there was no future here. The red road might be one more dead end—but everything else I’d seen certainly was.