Abruptly they were, all of them, down in the room Jim had been looking into, standing before the four who were there, but at a little distance from them.

Jim was acutely, immediately conscious of matters of measure-shape and shadow. Without any need to calculate, he knew that he, standing in front of the rest, was exactly three lengths of his own body from ibn-Tariq, who was the closest of the three. He was aware that ibn-Tariq, the dog and Hasan ad-Dimri marked the points of a triangle, enclosing Baiju at its center, that had exactly three equal sides; and that a globe enclosing all four of them would have a diameter that was exactly twice Jim’s own height

It was as if the nonexistent globe could be the heavy, if invisible, head of some massive hammer, the handle of which reached half the length of the distance from them to him. He found himself imagining, as he might have imagined a sudden strike out of darkness, the hammer rising on the base of the handle, pivoting up to fall down again upon him and those with him, crushing them all. A hammer controlled by any one, or possibly all three, of those who sat at the points of the triangle.

This was power of a magnitude he had not encountered before. Power only to be found otherwise in a senior magician-perhaps not as great as that he had faced in his original battle at the Loathly Tower to free Angie-but then Carolinus had been there to deal with it. Here, he was the only one who used magic. The vortex of this power was still with ibn-Tariq; but it could be that the other two, Hasan and the dog Kelb, had not yet shown their hand. He had an uneasy feeling that there might be more here than had yet appeared.

But, he realized, it could not be Hasan. Hasan could not be a magician if he was heading up a group like the Assassins. The activities of the Assassins were flatly against the rules of Magicdom. Also, if Hasan had been anyone else with magical powers, abu al-Qusayr would not merely have reasoned with him, then backed off. That left only the two who could be direct opponents of his in this moment. Ibn-Tariq alone was at the vortex. But he also could not be a magician and act as he was acting now-aggressively. That left only one thing he could be.

Jim abruptly became aware of something he should have noticed earlier. In the dome above them, the windows showed a sky in which late afternoon was moving toward twilight. It was not natural that evening could have come so soon-but then time was now an area beyond the actual. The dimming sky now made almost visible the shadows he had first felt, rather than seen from the room above, and which now had gathered and thickened in the hall. Also, they were moving in on him and his small group.

They, too, he realized now, were creatures of angles and distances. Each had its own particular size and pattern; and the total of those patterns was closing in on Jim and those with him, slowly, but always more and more tightly.

There was no time left to waste. Now a full understanding came to him of why Carolinus had warned him to hoard his magical energy against some great possible need.

Theoretically, his drawing power there was “unlimited.” In practice, there had to be a limitation. Otherwise, he could break the bank-call for all the free magical energy there was, and leave no reserve supply for any other of the world’s magicians. But now he needed everything he could get, for he could feel that what he faced was stronger than he was. Gratefulness washed through him that he had not wasted any more of what had been available to him.

He reached for that available amount, now-and found himself climbing a steep, stony mountainside, toward a peak, gray against a bloody-colored sunset. Far and high the top of the mountain stood dark against the light; and he knew without needing to be told that the staff he had come to get was only to be found at that top.

His will almost failed him. It was too far to go in the small period he dared be absent from the domed room in the White Palace. But suddenly, there was Carolinus, standing on a great boulder above him along the path upward he must go, and looking down at him.

“There will be time,” said Carolinus, “but save your strength to reach the very top; or you may fail with what you face.”

He stood for a moment more, looking at him.

Then Carolinus was gone. A little wind whispered and whistled among the boulders and smaller rocks to either side of the narrow path on the rocky mountainside Jim saw before him. There was nothing growing anywhere. All was rock.

The small wind whistled and sighed among the stones. It stroked his face and chilled his body inside his clothes as he drew the air deep into his lungs. Deep, for the air was thin as well as cold. Leaning forward to balance himself against the steep slope, he started up the path that wound between the bigger rocks.

Now there was sound in addition to the talking of the wind. He had not realized how complete otherwise the silence had been. But now he heard the grating of pebbles and the rasp of immovable stone below his boot soles; and he felt a moment of gratitude for that night back in the caravan encampment when the Assassins had kidnaped him, when he had left his boots on as he went to sleep, to keep his feet warm in the air that grew mountain-cold at night there, too. The foot-sound, and the sound of his breathing, seemed loud in the otherwise perfect soundlessness around him. No far-off rocks fell, no solitary hawk called, high overhead.

He climbed. If it was not a path he followed, he told himself, it was another old, dry streambed that had once snaked down this mountainside; and it was well it was there, because as he looked to right and left he saw nothing but a wilderness of stones, large and small, through which he would otherwise have had to climb and squeeze his way. But the path was becoming even steeper now, and the going was not easy. The cold began to reach deeper into him. He pushed it back with the inner heat of his determination to get to the top.

He walked so for some time, leaning farther forward as the way grew steeper. The muscles of his thighs began to ache lightly as he went on upward, and the path or watercourse narrowed, winding up and up until he could have reached out and touched the taller stones on either side at once, as he went.

The wilderness of boulder-tumbled mountainside came to an end, abruptly, as a forest stops almost neatly at the edge of a meadow.

The pathway narrowed and ended. He turned sideways to pass through the last large rocks, and came out in an open space, at the edge of a sheet of ice-gray, smooth ice with no sign of snow on it, stretching like a river itself up the mountainside.

There was a darkness at the far end of it. More rocks, he assumed; but he was breathing so hard now and his eyes were misting, perhaps because of the dryness of the air, so that he could not make out exactly what the dark shape was. In any case he would have to climb the ice, and it was as smooth and clean as a fresh-shaved skating rink. It was like the out-reaching limb of a glacier, except for its glasslike clarity; like a river of ice; and, thinking of it as a river, for the first time, he looked over at the far side of it.

The brief stop while he looked had allowed him to catch his breath, and his vision had cleared and sharpened On the other side, he saw what looked like spaces between the rocks there that went up also toward his goal and might give him an ice-free place to climb. But he would have to cross the river to get to it.

His hand had reached for the hold-out knife that Brian had taught him to carry, and which he had produced when they had all begun to follow Sir Renel between the walls of Murad’s palace. Leaning out over the edge of the ice, he began to chip hand- and footholds in it

Slowly, building his way as he went, he crossed the ice-and he had been correct. On the far side it had not flowed completely in among the rocks and there were spaces of flat, dry stone that required only an intermediate hand- or foothold chipped in the ice to get him from one to the next stony space. With the help of his knife, he worked his way up the far side of the ice river until the line of rocks began to run out and the river itself narrowed.

He had forgotten to look ahead in his absorption with making his way. Instead, the knife in his hand had reminded him of Brian, of Geronde and most of all of Angie-and then even of the hobgoblins, Sir Geoffrey and Sir Renel. There was a living warmth in thinking of them that counteracted the cold that seemed to be stiffening all his movements now; and with this in mind he had been feeling as if he was almost to the staff. So it was a shock when he came to the end of the ice floe, and the end of the rocks alongside it where he had been moving, almost running into it before he stopped and saw what was there.

It was a long slope of scree-pebbles and broken stones-that must have come down as a landslide over the ice river. It offered a dry route toward the top; and for the first time he could see how close the top was. It loomed only a hundred feet above him.

He went faster now, seeing himself so close. It was moments, only, before he got to the scree and started up. He took his first two steps with confidence, but his feet supped and he fell, for the surface under his feet might as well have been made by an avalanche of glass marbles. It rolled and slid, one pebble and fragment over another, as his weight came upon it. He could go upward only by climbing with both hands and feet.

But the scree did not stretch far. He struggled up it, not looking ahead, until he was stopped by a wall of rock.

He lay, the loose stones hard against him, his lungs pumping, pumping the thin air in and out to get enough oxygen to slow his racing heart. This was the darkness he had not been able to make out from farther down. It was a cuff, like a wall built to keep him back at the last.

Gradually the pounding of his heart slowed, breath and calmness came back together upon him. He looked up at the cliff. The red of the sunset was gone from the sky overhead now. The twilight was moving in, and darkening. But still, sharply outlined against what was left of the illuminated western sky, was the top of the mountain not far away. The cliff did not rise straight upward. It leaned back, but at a near-vertical angle. There were handholds and bosses of rock sticking out. It could be climbed.

He breathed for a moment more, and then began to try to make his way up it.

He had believed he could do it when he started; but by the time he was halfway up, that confidence was dying in him. The muscles of his arms were trembling and weak; and his body seemed to weigh many times what it should.

He hung where he was, doubting that he could go on, sure that he would fall if he tried to go back.

Then a hatred of his body took him. His body was only an animal, after all, he told himself. It had to do what his mind told it. Slowly he began to climb again, not thinking any more about a time when he would stop climbing but ready to climb forever. And, after some time beyond measure, his right hand, reaching up, went over the top edge. He had reached the end of the climb.

With what seemed the last of his strength he pulled himself out on to a little space of flat rock, tilted upward, but by comparison with the cliff almost level. He lay there, once more working to get oxygen back into his body. It was a strange thing-that the stopping should seem to be so much harder than the going on; and for the first time he began to notice the cost of his struggles.

His feet hurt and his hands hurt. His knees hurt. He looked at his knees and they were naked, the clothing over them worn away. His boots were hardly more than collars around his ankles and the top of his feet Like his hands, his feet were icy from their contact with cold ice and the cold rock; but now he felt pain in them as well, and looking more closely at his hands, he saw the cuts and tears in them. He did not try to see the soles of his feet.

But he was very close to the top now. He looked to see above him the spire of rock that it was; and for the first time his courage died within him. Between him and it was a last, short stretch that was a jungle of large and small boulders. There was no path. There were only the tops of rocks, some rounded, some jagged, but all with spaces between them, into which he could slip as into the jaws of a trap. Now, so close, but barred like this, tears came to his eyes.

He made himself think again of Angie and the others; but now it was as if they were at a distance, and he did not rouse at the thought of them. Something inside him was sure that if he tried to cross those rocks he would fall between two of them and be caught forever-or slip and fall on some sharp spine or spire of frost-broken boulder, and spear himself on it.

He was aware of Carolinus once more beside him. He rolled a little on to his left side to look up at the red robe, the white beard, the old face and the faded blue eyes, looking down at him.

“Why?” he asked.

What he had meant to say was Why does it have to be so hard?

“Because,” Carolinus answered, as if Jim had spoken the words aloud, “the staff is made by your effort in reaching it. If you give up right now, you will still reach out and gain a staff. But it might not hold the strength you need. You could have stopped anywhere before now and gained whatever that much had earned you. But the stoutness of the staff is measured against your will, the strength of your spirit, which will be tested against the strength of what you’ll need to use it against”

It seemed to Jim suddenly that he had known this from the beginning, only he had never put the knowledge into words. Known it, not merely from the beginning of his climb, but from the beginning of the moment that he and Angie had found themselves back here in this fourteenth-century world where they did not belong-where they were foreign matter introduced into something that had no room for them, like grit into the crankcase of a running engine.

From the beginning he and Angie had known they had to make a place for themselves in this different world; and it had been their choice to stay-they could have left. It was too late to change that choice now. Even without thinking, he found his body move, beginning to climb the first of the rocks in the jungle between him and the top of the mountain.

That last cold and impossible distance he did not really see or feel as he made it, nor after was he able to remember. But after a time he could not measure-going beyond all things in him, beyond his strength, beyond his courage, beyond his desire, beyond his love for those still back in the reception room of Hasan now with the shadows moving in on them-he came to the end of the rocks; and half fell into an open space; and the staff was there, standing straight and upright against the last of the red glow in the western sky, which disappeared even as he looked.

He reached out and took hold of it-and he was back in the domed room with the others.

He had returned almost to the moment he had left; people were still all in their same positions. “-my strength overcomes yours.” Ibn-Tariq’s words still echoed in his ears.

But during the small moment between, the shadows had moved closer. He lifted the staff and they drew back... not far, but they drew back. He glanced for a moment down at himself. His clothes were untorn, his shoes complete again, his hands unlacerated. Angie was looking at him penetratingly, but outside of that, none of the others showed any sign of being conscious he had been away.

“Your rod is no threat,” said ibn-Tariq.

Jim risked a glance at his staff. It was neither as tall as nor as thick as Carolinus’s had been in those first days when they had come and with Carolinus’s help they had made the assault on the Loathly Tower to rescue Angie. Then Carolinus’s rod had held back the Dark Powers while he, Brian and Dafydd ap Hywel fought its creatures and won.

This that he grasped would not hold as much power as Carolinus’s had; but it was straight and weathered. It fitted like a talisman in his right hand. Its lower end now rested on the floor of the room; and the floor, through various underpinnings, reached down finally to touch the earth itself, drawing strength upward from the planet into the staff and him.

“I say,” came the voice of ibn-Tariq again, “the staff is no threat. We are Muslim. Your Christian magic cannot attack us, as you yourself know. Lay it down. You will suffer less from us.”

“Not all of you are Muslim,” said Jim. For the first time he noticed that Baiju, seated with knees drawn up to his chest, had his wrists bound tight to his ankles.

“Baiju,” he said, “if it is what you wish-come stand with us.”

As he spoke, he visualized it. A small lightning flickered from the top of his staff, burning through the cords that bound Baiju-and the little Mongol appeared behind Jim, standing on his feet. Baiju gave a grunt, but that was all.

“So much for magic,” said Jim. “I went a long way and a hard way for what I hold; and you’re right-I’m not allowed to attack with it. But I’m not here to attack, but to defend those who need defense. Even you- I will defend you, too, if you’ll come to me. But you’ll have to leave your own unlicensed sorcery behind.”

“Am I only an apprentice in my art,” he said, “to think I might need the aid of one like you?”

Jim did not answer.

His mind was fully open and understanding, sharp and clear now that he had the staff in his hand.

Ibn-Tariq only smiled.

“But then when we escaped, using no important magic, but learning of the secret way in and out-knowing which could allow the Golden Horde Mongols to get in and conquer the White Palace easily-we became a real danger. But why should we, or even Baiju, who met us as we left the secret way, tell those of the Golden Horde about this?”

“Is that true?” Jim asked. Baiju met his gaze unyieldingly.

“No,” he said. “I am of the Il’Khanate, those of the first horde who hold Persia, as I told you in the caravan. I thought you, with your magic, would understand.”

“I didn’t then,” said Jim, “but I do now. By letting them think you were of the Horde, you hoped to learn what the Mamelukes of Egypt planned for the Horde.”

Baiju did not nod or speak-but he smiled tightly.

“So,” said Jim, “you never were their spy. But your learning the exit point of the secret way out of here was still a threat to ibn-Tariq, who wanted the White Palace to survive.”

He turned back to face ibn-Tariq, who spread his hands before him, calm once more.

“I?” he said. “I have something of a friendship for Hasan ad-Dimri, but why should I be concerned with the White Palace or the attack on it by any Mongols? And what could one sorcerer do, in any case, against an army?”

“One sorcerer alone might not be able to do much,” said Jim. “But a sorcerer connected with an army of Mamelukes coming to oppose Mongols is something else again.”

“I have no connections with Mamelukes,” said ibn-Tariq. “Though I have friends among them, of course.”

“I think you have,” said Jim. “You’re what, where I originally come from, is called a ‘politician.’ I wondered, when I first saw you here just now, why you talked to Murad in front of us about a new leader being needed to make Egypt into an empire. A leader like Saladin, who was a Kurd-as was Murad. Why say this to Murad, when you and he knew he wasn’t really Murad, but Sir Geoffrey? Of course, it was all for my benefit. For our benefit. Sir Brian’s and mine, to reinforce the image of Murad, so we’d not even suspect he could be Sir Geoffrey. It was your idea, wasn’t it? To arrange for us to catch a glimpse of Sir Renel?”

“And when did you come to these wild imaginings?” asked ibn-Tariq.

“As I say-when I first looked down on you here through a crack in the wall of that room above us that connects with the palace of Murad,” said Jim. “If you knew Murad was Sir Geoffrey, why talk to him like that when the only ones listening were Brian, myself and Baiju?”

“So,” said ibn-Tariq, “then you think I see myself as a second Sala-ad-Din, taking the fire and sword of Egypt over half the world, like Alexander; and then weeping because there are no more worlds to conquer?”

“No, I don’t,” said Jim bluntly. “I think you’re interested in something much more manageable and practical. Reviving the nests of Assassins and increasing their power, by combining it with sorcery. Your plan must be to recruit younger, less trained sorcerers to work with the other Assassin nests you’d create; and you would be the master of those apprentices, the shadow Grandmaster of the sorcerers behind the power of all the Grandmasters of the Assassins.”

“You dream,” said ibn-Tariq.

“I don’t think so,” said Jim. “You dreamed-of an empire. But you’d only just started to build it with the White Palace here. You built your power over this particular nest of Assassins by offering Hasan power and wealth when he was a Sufi. If he would become leader here, you’d help him to gain power. It was something easy for you to do for him, using sorcery to impress the Assassins already here.”

“You guess, only.”

“I’m sure enough,” said Jim. “Hasan was a good man in his own way and you turned him to evil. The White Palace has survived and grown since then; but the beginning of your private empire isn’t ready yet to stand up to a Mongol attack. That’s why neither Baiju, Brian nor I could be let survive; and Hasan still had to be held by the curse.”

“You weave lies into a cloth of falsity,” said ibn-Tariq coldly. “Hasan ad-Dimri is under no curse, as you know. It is your Sir Geoffrey who bears the curse.”

“Yes,” said Jim. “But there were things about curses that, being a sorcerer, you didn’t know; or else you wouldn’t have had anything to do with them. Curses are like some vile disease. They eat away at the person they’ve touched. You saw the signs in Hasan too late to cure what had already been done to him. You’d undermined his faith by tempting him away to lead Assassins. That started the decay in him; and it was gradually eating away all his strengths. Strengthless, he’d be no good to you. So, you arranged to have his curse transferred to Sir Geoffrey; and all the wealth and luxury you promised him became only a step from the White Palace, moved sorcerously into the home of Murad of the Heavy Purse in Palmyra.”

“Sir Geoffrey is a Christian,” said ibn-Tariq. “How could I, a Muslim sorcerer, take a curse from someone else and place it on him?”

“You,” said Jim, “couldn’t. A sorcerer can’t, any more than he can lay curses on persons in the first place-any more than a Muslim sorcerer can work magic against a Christian, a Christian against a Muslim, or either against a Holy person of their own faith. And it couldn’t be done by Kelb. Or is Kelb really Kelb?”

“No!” A voice boomed out that echoed off the walls and rang down again from the cup of the domed ceiling-and where Kelb had been there was a puff of smoke and then nothing, only the voice-

“I am Sakhr al-Jinni! Kelb was always the least of my slaves and still is. I put on his shape to watch you on Cyprus. Solomon, David’s son, locked me in a bottle and threw me into the sea. But now I am free. It is no weak demon or sorcerer you face here, but Sakhr al-Jinni, Djinni of Djinn!”

The smoke thinned; and standing on the platform was the hideously ugly turbaned figure with the mismatched eyes and misplaced mouth that Jim and Hob had seen on Cyprus when Jim had asked to see Kelb in his Djinni form.

“Thou hast always been overproud and boastful!” said ibn-Tariq to him with sudden startling savagery, “and it seems thy time in the bottle taught thee nothing! Of all here, thou art the weakest, not the strongest. Now, a dog thou chose to be-be therefore that dog and not otherwise for ninety-nine lifetimes!”

Suddenly, where the Djinni-figure had been, was a small, ugly brown dog that yelped and vanished.

“Enough talking, James,” said Sir Brian. “We have our swords. Let us move on this hell-begotten infidel and his-his Djinni! A Muslim or a Natural can feel the edge of a Christian sword, or else the Crusades never were!”

“And likewise turnabout!” said Geronde sharply. “Hush, Brian!”

“What you suggest, too, is a lie,” said Jim, still speaking to ibn-Tariq. “No Djinni-not even Sakhr al-Jinni-can lay a curse on anyone, Muslim or Christian. Below the one you Muslims call Shaitain, only the beings of a few kingdoms can. And the only ones of those available to a sorcerer are those who inhabit the Kingdom of Devils and Demons.”

“So you think,” said ibn-Tariq.

“So I know,” answered Jim. “Only the Devils and Demons are creatures of pure hate, set in this world to test the children of humans. But Devils and Demons are penned in their own kingdom. They are released into human affairs only to plague humankind, or upset the balance between History and Chance-which is what reviving the Assassins and blending them with sorcery would do. But Djinn can’t call them up. Sorcerers can!”

He looked over at the puff of smoke, to where it was now shredding into nothingness, then back at ibn-Tariq.

“We magicians, too, could raise Devils and Demons,” he went on, “but our rules forbid us. Sorcerers have no rules. You, ibn-Tariq, called up a Demon to lay that curse on Hasan. Now he is free and you cannot lay him again. Now you must tell me, in the name of all the Kingdoms, what Demon was it that you called?”

Ibn-Tariq’s face changed. It did not pale, so much as go fixed-like a stilled picture in three dimensions of his features.

Awareness like a jolt of cold electricity all through him made Jim look up. The talking had gone on too long. It had distracted just enough of his attention from the shadows; and they had gained on him. Now understanding failed him. The shadows were not controlled by ibn-Tariq, but by the Demon.

They were close now, hardly an arm’s length away from one or other of the humans clustered behind him. In the aftermath of the shock of seeing this, a rage that someone like ibn-Tariq could free a being with these powers rose and burned his mind clear.

He struck out at the shadows, with all the power in the staff, so that its top burned with small lightnings, scorching them back and back-not as far as they had been before; but enough so that he could again take some small part of his attention from them, for just the moment necessary to delve into his memory of all that was written in the Encyclopedic Necromantick, inside him and magically a part of him.

Somewhere was the permission he needed. Still holding the shadows at bay, he found in his memory the section marked Devyls & Deamons and read swiftly from the huge type of the prohibition against any magicians having to do with them, down and down to the smaller and smaller type, until he found what he was searching for.

Yes, there was an exception. One special situation in which it was permitted.

He snapped back to full attention on the shadows. They had crept forward once more; but again he drove them back, until they were a safe distance from him and those with him.

Only then, with breathing space, he raised his voice.

“Demon who has been summoned and is loose in this period between History and Chance, by the power and right of the Kingdom to which I belong, I call on you to name and show yourself. Now!”

The air around them was partly sucked away for a moment. As if some giant, almost as large as the earth itself, had inhaled. Next, a great whisper, but a whisper only, spoke soundlessly in Jim’s head-and he knew it would be speaking also in the heads of everyone else there as well.

“I am here,” it said. “I, Ahriman, Demon of Demons.”

Around them, the walls, the domed roof overhead, melted toward invisibility; becoming as insubstantial as mist.

Jim, all those with him, ibn-Tariq, Hasan ad-Dimri and the space where Sakhr al-Jinni had revealed himself, were left standing together on nothingness, far above the earth.

It was as if they were now so high in the atmosphere that they could see beyond all ordinary horizons. Their gaze went out and out until the sky around them and the landscape below merged in the far distance to a sort of dark mist. Below them was a landscape that was a pattern, a crazy quilt of not only space, but time.

In one area, far below and beyond ordinary vision, in bright sunlight a battle was being fought. It was ‘Ayn Jalut, two centuries past, and the Egyptian Mameluke leader was winning over a force of Mongols-Bay-bars, who was first to deal a defeat to the Mongols and went on to drive out the Christian forces from Lebanon. Closer, and more directly below them, at this moment a sandstorm was destroying crops and burying the homes of villagers. Things now, and things in the past, were all taking place at the same time, somewhere in that vast landscape.

“Answer me,” said Jim aloud. “Ahriman, is ibn-Tariq now your master?”

The Whisperer who was Ahriman laughed voicelessly in all their heads.

“Who calls a Demon and is its master?” it whispered. “When a Demon is summoned, the Demon becomes master. I rule all; and ibn-Tariq is my creature. Look at him.”

Jim looked across the airy space that now existed between him and ibn-Tariq, and the man was still unchanged-as if he had become a wax figure of himself-the look on his face still the same.

“Now look down at what else I have done.”

Jim looked; and perhaps a week’s march away to the north, he saw a force of Mongols coming toward the mountains in which the White Palace was hidden.

“Look now south and east.”

Jim looked, and the Mamelukes were there less than three days’ march from the mountains holding the White Palace-much closer than the Mongols.

“The Mongols believe they have only to reduce one more nest of Assassins, as they have reduced so many before,” said the Whisperer in their heads, “but this time they will find a fortress armed, prepared and ready to resist them; and with an army of Mamelukes much larger than theirs, already in position, encircling them, but out of sight until they have come in, before the White Palace. The Mongols will die to a man; for Baiju will not have been able to tell them what he knows. And you will have told them nothing. In the end there will be nothing but a whole world, aflame with war between Mamelukes and Mongols.”

There was whispering laughter.

“And Murad of the Heavy Purse will take up his work again. Hasan ad-Dimri will sit as ruler of all, but puppet of ibn-Tariq, who is puppet of mine. You and these with you will be gone.”

As Ahriman talked, a part of Jim’s mind was reviewing what they all would have to do.

He turned to those behind him.