“If he wins, we die,” said Jim. “But if we hold together, we can drive him back to his own place, where his power here will be ended. But you’re going to have to ask something more of yourselves than you’ve ever asked before. Each one of you, once you join hands, must hold until it is over. You must never let go, for the sake of something in you that you would die for-something more important than life itself to you.”

He waited a second to see if they all understood, then went on.

“If we, holding to what we would die for and together, all have that, we form a human chain Ahriman can never break through. All together, we can drive him back to his own place.”

“Who can join hands under that condition?” he asked.

Angie smiled and put her hand into Jim’s one free hand. With her free hand, she took one of Brian’s.

“I want to be brave, like you,” he said to Hob of Malencontri.

“You will,” Hob told him.

Sir Geoffrey had earlier reached for Geronde’s free hand, but she had pulled it away from him. Now, ignoring him, she looked past him at Sir Renel.

“Sir Renel?” she said in a clear, hard voice. “Have you something to die for?”

“Yes,” said Sir Rend. “My honor, which I lost and found again.”

He stepped forward and took the free hand of Hob of Malvern, then turned and offered his other to Sir Geoffrey, who took it; and they both smiled, gripping each other like old friends meeting after a long time. The human chain was complete, from Jim to Sir Geoffrey.

“I would be free,” he said, looking across at Jim.

“We can use your strength,” Jim said-and at that, Hasan ad-Dimri came and took ibn-Tariq’s other hand.

“I would be as I was in the years before this,” he said.

“All hold together then,” said Jim. “For if any lets go, the chain loses its strength. Now-make a semicircle and we’ll herd him back.”

A hiss answered; a continuing, wordless, malevolent hiss in their heads that was dizzying in its effect. But ahead of them-and it was impossible to tell whether it was at the horizon or close to them-had appeared something like a black sun.

Like the sun, it was impossible to look at directly. It glared, and seemed to shimmer and move, if the eyes tried to hold it in focus; as if it was one black disk swiftly overlaying and melting into another one a little out of place from where the original was. Now, from it, came something like a powerful but pressureless icy wind that numbed their wills, rather than their bodies.

It was not a wind that could push them backward, or even take them off their feet. But it was like a great hand laid against each of them. It tried to drive them back, without any real feeling of touch; but only with the tremendous, reiterated threat not to approach the black and burning sun-shape.

“Hold to each other. Keep going!” said Jim.

He took the first steps forward; and the rest moved with him. They felt the pressure hard against them, not only on their faces, bodies and limbs, but within them-to the very marrow of their bones.

But they went forward; and each step of theirs was like a five-league stride across the space-and-time surface far below them. Even with their first few steps, the black sun grew larger and closer. The pressure against them increased. It reached into them and tried to suck the life from them. Their steps slowed.

“Keep moving!” said Jim. “Never stop!”

The strain was on their linked hands, numbing their wills to hold together. It became harder and harder to do so. But now the knowledge was clear in each of them, unspoken but in all their minds-there was no way but forward. To stop, to go back now, meant that the blackness ahead would follow and destroy them.

Jim, at his end of the chain, a little in advance of all the rest and with the staff held before him, risked a glance at the faces of the others. So far, they were holding.

Brian was single-mindedly engaged in the struggle, as always. His hand held Geronde’s and Angle’s hands firmly but with the gentleness of strength and confidence. Angie’s face was calm, and Geronde’s was aught with fierceness. The two Hobs had fixed, steady expressions on their small, dark faces that gave no clue to how they were feeling.

Beyond these two. Sir Renel and Sir Geoffrey showed something of Sir Brian’s joy in the battle, but with it something more-almost a hunger for the ultimate meeting. As if they had just been freed from chains they were so used to that they had hardly realized they had been carrying them about. The face of ibn-Tariq, beyond the two of them, was knifelike and expressionless, but with no sign of yielding.

Only at the end, the whole face and body of Hasan ad-Dimri gave an impression of crumbling inside. His body seemed to have grown smaller, as if he was falling in on himself; and his face was pale and fixed, like a man in whom doubt was like a rising tide, lapping on the pilings of his courage until it threatened to overflow and drown him.

Of them all, Hasan seemed to be the only one showing signs of weakening so far. Jim looked back, marveling at the two hobgoblins. Of all of them, he would have expected the most frailty in those two small wisps of life, used to running and hiding from all things. But this was a battle of wills, not of muscle and bone.

Angie, Brian and Geronde, he knew, would go to the end. Sir Geoffrey and Sir Renel might do the same. Possibly, too, ibn-Tariq had an equal courage in him. It would not have been easy to make himself a sorcerer of the power he controlled.

True, he would be pricked on now by the spurs of the thought of his own mistake in raising Ahriman-his ignorance of the fact that the Demon would be free and independent once he had obeyed his raiser’s original command-a piece of simple knowledge he would have had if his studies had been in magic, rather than sorcery.

In its own way that knowledge would now cast shadows of doubt on all he would have studied for most of his life.

But also, there was a strength in him. Hasan, only, looked like he might fail. Yet, he must have also had a strength of his own, when he was a Sufi, before he let himself be seduced by ibn-Tariq’s offers of power and wealth.

They were few enough together to try to drive back a being as powerful as Ahriman. Fighting on their side was only their individual faiths; and the knowledge that the here and now was their place, not Ahriman’s. Time was the crucial thing. The longer it took, the greater the chance that the weaker ones in the chain must break. Time was all.

“Faster!”

The word had come to Jim’s lips without his intending it. But the others heard-and they tried. Their leagues-long steps above the landscape far below could not be hastened, but they were making longer ones. Ahead, Ahriman had seemed to grow tremendously, as they got closer to him. Now he blocked out a quarter of the sky ahead; and seemed not merely to face them, but to tower and loom over them.

But something like a collective fury had taken them, like the frenzy of battle. Consciousness, all logical thought, was set aside. Their awareness was only of Ahriman ahead, of the hands they gripped at either side, and the consciousness of being part of a team, a single-minded fighting unit; and their own intent to do what was before them. They had lost all thought of themselves as individuals, caught up in the unity of their effort.

They were very close to Ahriman now. Whether they had not been that far from him to begin with, or whether the enormous distances they seemed to be covering in their steps above the landscape below were actual, the fact remained that there was little farther to go. But now, at the end of the line, Hasan ad-Dimri stumbled and almost fell.

“It is the will of God,” ibn-Tariq said, looking straight into his eyes.

Hasan straightened upright, bearing his own weight again.

“Yes!” he said, and a light had come into his face. “God wills it!” And he went on strongly.

“He’s going back, m’lord!” cried Hob of Malencontri suddenly, in a high, thin, triumphant voice.

“Yes!” Jim called out to the rest. “Listen! Those in the middle hold back. We at the ends go forward, to deepen the pocket; so we can enclose him completely when he backs all the way to the borders of the Kingdom where he belongs. Give him no chance to escape to either side. He must have no choice but to go backward into the Kingdom where he belongs!”

Jim himself lengthened his stride; and Hasan struggled forward at the other end, with ibn-Tariq close beside him now, and all but physically helping him forward. The two Hobs, Geronde and Brian sagged backward. In a deep cup formation they moved on Ahriman. Finally they were so close to him that he seemed no more than two steps away-and his black brilliance was blinding.

Now they saw that he had no real shape. He had seemed a sphere from a distance; but now he appeared as many shapes, constantly melting into each other.

But he was alive, and he was still strong and vicious. They could feel his rage hammering at them; and Geronde, herself, stumbled-but for just a second. She caught herself back up without any help from Brian or anyone else, and pushed forward enough to make a small bulge in the pocket of the semicircle.

Ahriman’s rage was now something they were close enough to hear, as well. It came through to them like a high-pitched keening in their ears; and a feeling that was not-but greatly resembled-the searing sensation of the heat from the open door of a furnace, with a fire raging inside it. Ahriman had slowed in his backing now.

“He’s close to the edge,” said Jim, for the awareness of that frontier came to him through his staff in a way he could not have explained, but of which he was certain. “Hold fast, move forward,” he went on. “I’m going to let go of you, Angie, and move to the center of the semicircle. I’ll try to push him over with the staff.”

He let go, and Angie gave his hand a small squeeze as she released it-a small squeeze and a quick smile. He grinned back briefly and moved, with effort because it seemed as if the air had become almost solid, until he stood in the center of the cup their bodies made. Then he held the staff out in front of himself.

“Back, Ahriman!” he said. “By the power in this staff-by all the laws of all the Kingdoms-back, back, back to your proper place!”

The keening, or whatever it was that was so close to keening, rose and rose until it was like a shrill scream of terrible pain. Then, all at once, it ceased.

There was silence. They looked at each other.

“You can all let go,” said Jim wearily. “We’ve put him back; and there he’ll stay, unless he’s called up by someone else. May it never happen!”

They were too exhausted to voice agreement. Hands fell apart, and they flexed aching, bloodless fingers. They looked at each other, amazed to find themselves only the humans they had always been, mere mortals and victorious.

“I’m free!” said Sir Geoffrey suddenly, in a wondering voice. “It’s gone-the curse is gone. I can feel it’s not with me any more.”

“All that the demon did,” said Jim, “for ibn-Tariq, and on his own, will now be wiped out of History. Look below us.”

They looked.

Off in time and distance, Baybars had almost won his battle against the Mongols. But nearly everything else below them had otherwise changed. The village that was being buried and destroyed by the sandstorm was untouched. There was no storm and no sand. The streets were free and the villagers moved back and forth along them.

“Look north,” said Jim.

They turned their eyes that way; and there was no force of Mongols coming south toward the mountains and the White Palace.

“The attack from the Golden Horde was something instigated by the Demon, after he found himself no longer under the orders of ibn-Tariq, and out of his own desire to see humans killing and destroying each other,” Jim said.

He looked at the sorcerer; but ibn-Tariq only smiled with his lips tight closed.

“The Mamelukes will not be there either-look. All these things, like the curse, have gone back into what now never will be. Ahriman has failed. If he had been able to accomplish any of what he wished, a death, a change in History, then those things would have been permanent. But because we stopped him before they could be accomplished, all he tried for is lost and gone.”

Jim looked across at ibn-Tariq.

“From here,” he said to the sorcerer, “I think my people and I-and you, with Hasan ad-Dimri-go different ways.”

Almost with his words, he and Hasan were no longer with them.

Jim turned to face the rest. Weary faces brightened.

He had been looking as he spoke, not at Jim, but at Sir Geoffrey.

“Yes,” said Geronde harshly. “Best it be Malvern. I must stay there until I am properly wed.”

She looked across at her father.

“But I will occupy a different part of the castle,” she said. “You can have your own old quarters.”

Hastily, Jim visualized them all in the great hall at Malvern, on the dais that held the high table-and they were there.