I paused by a stream to refill my water bottle. Then I followed Shad, surprised again at how his goat feet negotiated the mountain. If I hadn’t put my feet in the same places he put his, I would have fallen a dozen times. I pushed myself to keep up with him, carrying Frodo in my sling when his little legs began straining.

“Why do you call this place Thuros?” I asked as we climbed.

“Why is senaba called senaba? That is its name.”

“Joshua called it Skia.”

“Did he? Yes, I suppose he would. When I was young, an old man told me stories by the fire, stories of how this world was first called Thuros, the window land. Then when it was ravaged and spoiled, when the flying reptiles and the scorpions and the great web came, it was changed to Skiathuros, window of darkness. Now some just call it Skia, the darkness. I prefer Thuros, for it is still a window, and the TravelGuide says its darkness will be overcome and light will yet prevail.”

We climbed for perhaps eight hours with little rest. We munched on jerky and stale rye bread and a couple of cucumbers. When Shad wasn’t looking, I gave Frodo a strip of my jerky, which he didn’t chew but swallowed whole, eyes bright and tail thumping alternately against his side and my leg. The highlight of the climb was a lone senaba tree, though the fruit was a faded blue, much smaller and not as sweet as usual. Still, Frodo ate his share, puckering at its tanginess. Even Shad managed to laugh at that.

As we climbed, I kept looking back over my shoulders. “What about Quon and Mason? And Victoria and Salama?”

“I … don’t know about them,” Shad said. I heard the concern in his voice. Shad kept the lead and reached the top well ahead of me.

“This is the red road,” he called down to me, still twenty feet below. “From here we go back down the other side until we reach …” He stretched out his hand and gestured downward.

I stepped up high enough to see over the point. What I saw beneath me took my breath away. It was a canyon so large that it stretched out against the horizon as far as I could see. Way in the distance, on the other side, was the City of Light. It appeared much farther away than before. I looked down at all the roads on both sides. Every road circled around, meandering, until it ended in the chasm. Though they engaged the chasm at different places, each of them wound up there.