THIRTY-THREE

October 11, 1888, Brezna, Serbia

Gordon and I sprang to our feet. I heard two people pounding down the back stairs. Jovo and Mirjana appeared at the doorway in nightclothes, Jovo’s face dark with anger.

“By God, if you have betrayed us . . .”

“Do you see a gun anywhere pointed at you?” I demanded. “You have all our leaders under one roof, deep in the heart of your town, with one gun between us, and it’s not drawn and pointing at the voivoda. If this is a betrayal, it must be the most stupid one in history.”

He glanced at each of our faces and saw nothing but surprise and alarm. His frown remained in place, but he nodded. He spoke a word to Mirjana, who turned and hurried back upstairs, and then, still in his nightshirt, he stalked between us and out the door.

“Come along,” he said curtly.

I turned to Thomson and Gabrielle.

“You two stay here. I’ll be back. I won’t leave you.”

“Yes, go,” Thomson said. Gabrielle simply nodded.

Jovo, Gordon, Melzer, and I ran to the edge of town through a growing crowd of angry and frightened villagers. The sound of firing grew louder and more distinct as we got to the small gate.

The wild-eyed sentry babbled out a sentence in Serbian, and Jovo put his hand on his shoulder to calm him. The voivoda replied, the sentry looked around in confusion, then relaxed and nodded. Jovo patted him on the back and turned to us.

“He says the English are attacking us,” he explained in German. “I tell him I don’t think so, but if they are, the English must be terrible shots since none of the bullets come this way. Tell your captain someone is attacking his camp.”

I started to translate, but Gordon nodded impatiently and cut me off.

“Right. The camp is under attack. We have to get back there and sort it out.”

“You go. I won’t leave Thomson and Gabrielle.”

“Don’t be a bloody fool! They’re safe here, and I need you to translate,” he said.

“You’ll do okay without me. I’m staying.”

He hesitated for a moment, torn between duty and the desire to throttle me. Then he unbuckled his pistol belt and handed it to me.

“You may need this.”

“What will you fight with?” I asked, but I took it gratefully.

“A mixed platoon of Royal Marines and Bavarian rifles, I should imagine. I shall be back shortly.”

Gordon and Melzer ran off into the darkness toward the distant flashes of small arms fire twinkling through the branches of the woods to the southeast. I wondered what General Buller would think if he could see Gordon now, running into the pitch-black night, toward a fight with unknown enemies, unarmed.

“Is he brave or foolish?” Jovo asked, as if he had read my thoughts.

“He’s English,” I answered, and Jovo nodded.

The breeze, blowing softly from the northwest, picked up for a moment and carried a soft, faint droning sound which momentarily was louder than the distant crackle of rifles. Jovo heard it as well, and we looked at each other. Bees?

“A zeppelin’s engine,” Jovo said.

“Get your men armed. The land attack is a diversion!”

I ran toward his house, to Thomson and Gabrielle. Jovo shouted a warning in Serbian behind me. Somewhere a bell rang the alarm. I rounded the street corner before Jovo’s house and saw broad black shapes glide over the rooftops ahead of me, making soft whispering sounds. A batlike creature, its wings fully a dozen feet across, settled into the shadows of the courtyard ahead. Its wings drooped to the ground and fluttered awkwardly, and without thinking I had Gordon’s revolver out.

Crack, crack, crack.

Three shots and the thing staggered back and then collapsed. I waited a moment for more movement and then trotted toward it.

The thing rested on the ground, an indistinct lump outlined faintly in the pale starlight and the yellow glow of the voivoda’s nearby open front door. I prodded the thing with my foot. It groaned. It was not a creature at all, simply a black-clad man in a sort of silk-winged paraglider harness.

He started to move again. I shot him once in the head and ran toward Thomson, Gabrielle, and Mirjana, all crowding in the open door.

“Back inside!” I barked.

They hurried back in, and I followed them and closed the door to a slit.

“Douse that light. Tesla must be either very anxious to have you, Professor, or very angry at Jovo, or both.”

I buckled on Gordon’s pistol belt, dug four cartridges out of the leather ammo pouch, and replaced the spent rounds. As I clicked the revolver closed, Jovo ran up the street. I held the door open for him.

There was fear in his face. He and Mirjana exchanged hurried words in Serbian, and she disappeared into the kitchen.

“You have seen them?” Jovo asked. “They come like shadows, mostly in the north side of town, I think, while we were south.”

The distinctive, metallic rattle of a Gatling gun reached us from outside.

“Ah! Now the damned airship joins the attack,” he added.

“It will pin your men down in the south half of the village, suppress their fire, while the air assault consolidates in the north,” I said. “Once they are organized, they will push south and clear the village house by house. They’ll get here fairly soon.”

Jovo looked around the room, fighting against the rising tide of panic. Everything was happening too fast for him. I turned to Thomson.

“I hate to say this, since we just found you, but we’ve got to leave you behind. Your leg . . .”

“Yes,” he answered, and put his hand on my arm as if to hurry me toward the door. “I’d never keep up, and I doubt he means me any harm. You have to go now.”

“My leg is injured as well,” Gabrielle said. “Perhaps I—”

“You I can carry. We’re going down the ridge into the valley. Jovo, we need a back way out, a window—”

Jovo’s face cleared, and he nodded decisively.

“Yes, follow me.”

He led us into the kitchen, where Mirjana finished tying together the two ends of a rolled wool blanket. She thrust it at me.

“Take,” she ordered in German.

“Danke.” I slipped it over my head and left arm. “What about you?” I asked Jovo.

“All we can do is give up or die, and dying is stupid, so we’ll give up. The Old Man does not butcher Serbs, although he may take his anger out on me. We will see. When the soldiers come, I will say the Scotsman is Mirjana’s crazy uncle Sasha from Zagreb, who only speaks German. Perhaps we will have some luck there if the released airship crewmen do not see him.”

“And when they ask where Thomson is?”

“The five gold coins will explain his absence, unless Captain Gordon’s party is taken as well. Now go!”

Mirjana opened shutters on a window on the back wall.

“It is about three meters down, then twenty meters to the edge of the slope.”

I lowered myself out feet first but stopped to shake Jovo’s hand.

“Thank you. I don’t think I’ll be able to repay you.”

“Singe the Old Man’s whiskers and that’s payment enough.”

I lowered myself until I hung from my hands and then dropped the two feet to the ground. Out here the rattling chatter of the zeppelin’s Gatling gun was louder, along with shouts and screams and the sound of scattered small arms fire in the town. Above me Jovo and Mirjana helped Gabrielle out and lowered her by her hands. I reached up and held her by her waist.

“Got her. Take the weight on your good leg, Gabi.”

I eased her to the ground.

“This is foolish. I cannot keep up. You must leave me.”

“No chance.”

Above me the bright square of the window darkened, filled with Thomson’s head and upper body. From behind him I heard loud rapid knocking on the house’s front door.

“Laddie, you’ve got to stop Tesla. He has enough liftwood to have built an engine of enormous power. If the earth’s orbital velocity slows even slightly, we move closer to the sun. Temperatures will rise, and it will take very little to produce disastrous results. It—”

“Yeah, melting icecaps, rising oceans, killer storms, mass extinctions—got it. Now close the window, Uncle Sasha. I’ll take it from here. And watch out for yourself.”

“God be with you.”

The shutters closed, and the world turned black.

Stop Tesla. Did I even want to do that? I supposed I did, but I also needed Tesla for . . . everything else. Putting those two things together was going to be a really good trick, and I could hardly wait to find out how I was going to pull it all off.

For that matter, Tesla was a smart guy and so far as I knew not suicidal. Wouldn’t he have figured out all this end-of-the-world stuff? That was something to ask him, when the time came, but first we just needed to get away. When I faced Tesla, it wouldn’t be as a prisoner. Not if I could help it.

We had to get to the edge of the slope, then start down, but my night vision was shot. I put my arm under Gabrielle’s shoulders to support her, and we started slowly toward the valley.

“Leave me,” Gabrielle said, her voice almost pleading. “I will be all right. You have a better chance by yourself. I do not believe Tesla will harm me.”

“Based on what, his record of restraint?”

“He does not harm women.”

Huh. Was that true? I thought about it for a couple seconds while we walked.

“He kills people he sees as obstacles, Gabi. In your world most women aren’t empowered enough to constitute an obstacle. You are, so no more argument. Pay attention to the trail.”

I had enough night vision by then to see faint gray highlights on the ground beneath us against the deeper black of the open sky ahead, where the ground fell away. There was no abrupt drop-off, simply a gradual descent which grew more pronounced at a certain point, and continued to grow steeper with every step until we had to struggle to keep our footing.

We stopped, and despite Gabrielle’s protests I picked her up in a fireman’s carry, settled her weight so she was balanced, and began backing down the slope using my free left hand as a support against the ground. The hillside was rocky, with woody scrub and vines. It tangled my feet but also gave me good handholds when my feet slipped. I lost my footing several times and slid a foot or two down the slope, I skinned my knees up and felt a couple thorns and splinters in the palm of my left hand.

My gloves were in the pocket of my overcoat, back at Jovo’s house. Gabrielle’s overcoat and the jacket for her riding habit were back there, too. Being out here in worsening weather without adequate clothing worried me. Hunger and thirst don’t kill many people in the wilderness—exposure does. Fortunately Mirjana had had the presence of mind to grab a blanket for us. I liked Mirjana, even though the feeling didn’t seem to be mutual. I liked Jovo, too. I hoped Tesla wasn’t going to be too hard on them, but sticking around wouldn’t have made it any easier.

My feet slipped again in loose shale, and I slid three meters down the slope before I got a good handhold. I stopped for a moment, panting for breath and smarting. The knees were gone from my pants by now, and I could feel my legs bleeding. The fireman’s carry is a good way to handle weight if you are upright, but leaning forward like this put a lot more stress on my neck and left arm, and my lower back ached from trying to compensate.

“Okay, we need to change position.”

“You should rest a few minutes.”

“Can’t. Look up there.”

She looked up and caught the tail end of a flare rising over the village. Somebody had fired a Very pistol up in the air.

“What does it mean?” she asked, and even as she said it the stutter of the Gatling gun died away.

“Tesla’s men have firm control of the upper village. That must have been their signal for the zep to cease fire, so they can move south and clear the other half. We need to get some distance between us and the town. Then we can rest.”

I had her put both arms around my shoulders and ride piggy-back as we resumed our descent. That let me use both hands, which was an improvement. After another fifteen minutes all sound of fighting died away, although the drone of the zeppelin’s engines remained, growing louder and softer as it circled the town. I wondered if Gordon and the others had fought their way clear. I wondered if Jovo’s ruse had kept Thomson safe. Mostly I wondered how much longer I could keep this up.

Another ten minutes gave me my answer. My legs and arms trembled uncontrollably, and when I lost my footing again, I slid on bare rock and scraped my knees so badly it brought tears to my eyes. I couldn’t get back up. It was as if my legs no longer received the electrical signals from my brain. I lay there panting for a while, Gabrielle still on my back.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

I slapped the ground beside us with my right hand.

“Camp here.”

We rested for a while. Gabrielle started to shiver. With nothing on above her waist but a silk blouse, it was no wonder. I unrolled the blanket to wrap it around her shoulders, and my appreciation for Mirjana grew. She had not simply rolled up a blanket for us. In it she had included a small bag of dried meat, one of dried fruit and nuts, a thin loaf of hard bread, a jar of ointment for Gabrielle’s wound, clean linen bandages, and a dozen wood matches tightly wrapped in a small square of rubberized canvas.

“What?” I said, examining our treasure. “No Serbian-English phrase book?”

“I think this was very thoughtful of Mirjana,” Gabrielle said in her defense.

“Me, too, Gabi. I was joking.”

“Ah,” she said, as if she understood.

We ate a little bit, and Gabrielle rubbed some of the ointment on my bloody knees. She wanted to bandage them as well, but I wouldn’t let her use all the linen for that. I tore a small square for each leg, just a patch, and pressed them over the ointment. Then I used my pocket knife to cut about a four-inch strip off one end of the blanket, cut that in half, and used each half to wrap around my knees to hold the linen patch in place, and for padding.

I checked her leg as well, but there was no sign of bleeding on the bandages, so the stitches were holding.

“Well, as we sophisticated classical scholars like to say, tempus is fugit-ing. Let’s get some distance between us and the town by dawn.”

We rolled our supplies back up, got Gabrielle positioned on my back, and started down again. She dangled her good right leg down and took up some of the weight when the ground allowed it. My night vision was good now, and I’d gotten used to the repetitive motion of the climb. The brush was much thicker here and tore at our limbs and clothes, but gave me better handholds as well, and I could use the resistance of the brush to ease our passage down. We made better time, and my strength lasted longer. We took another ten-minute break after an hour, then started again. We descended for perhaps twenty minutes more before I heard the first shrill hunting cries of the azhdaja.