THIRTY-FOUR

October 11, 1888, near Brezna, Serbia

My first instinct screamed at me to keep moving down the ridge, deeper into the valley, but that was flight panic talking. Instead, I stopped. Gabrielle’s arms tightened around my shoulders, and I felt her breathing come faster, in shorter pants. She had more reason than I did to panic, having already been laid open once by one of them.

“Azhdaja,” she gasped. “What should we do?”

I dropped to my hands and knees and eased her off to the right side, on her uninjured leg. Then I took her upper arms in my hands and squeezed, and put as much calm in my voice as I could.

“We’re going to take a minute and think.”

I looked up the slope. The lights of Brezna glowed in the darkness, marking the top of the ridge. Being able to see it made it seem that much closer, even after all this time, as if we were running in a dream but not getting any farther away. If the valley twisted, if there had been a spur of ground between us and the town, it would have felt more distant. More importantly, if I used Gordon’s revolver on the hunting azhdaja, nothing would block the muzzle flash from observers up there, or muffle the report.

“These things are nocturnal hunters,” I said, talking to myself as much as to Gabrielle. “They probably have better night vision than we do, so being out in the open does us no good. We want to be where the ground is close and there’s a lot of undergrowth. That way we can hear them if they get near.”

I looked at Gabrielle, but I couldn’t make out her expression in the starlit darkness.

“How does that sound?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered, voice trembling but under control. She bit her lower lip in thought and scanned the countryside below us, then raised her arm and pointed.

“Is that a wood down there?”

“Yeah. A little far away if they decide to close on us.”

She nodded and looked again. An azhdaja shrieked, closer this time and from a different direction, but not in attack distance yet, as far as I could tell. Gabrielle looked toward the sound of the shriek, then looked in the opposite direction.

“There,” she said and pointed to a streak of dark shadows, closer than the woods and slightly to our right. I’d already spotted it. I wasn’t sure if it was really what we needed or just a freak shadow from a fold in the ground, but we had to try something.

“Okay, mount up, Gabi.”

Between the short rest and the adrenaline, I got us over to the dark ground in no time. It was better than I’d hoped for, a very broken arroyo with crumbling shale banks about five feet high right here and lots of tangled thorny brush as tall as our heads, maybe taller. I put Gabrielle down and was about to slide down the bank when I saw her back in the starlight.

“Damn, Gabi! Why didn’t you say something?”

I looked closer. I’d been backing us down the ridge for over an hour, through tangled scrub and thorn bushes, with Gabriele on my back and nothing on her back when we started but a silk blouse. There wasn’t much of that left now.

“It is all right. We have to hurry.”

Heaven deliver me from stoic women. I slipped the blanket roll over my head and then stripped off my jacket.

“Put this on. No talk, just do it.”

While she did I lifted the blanket roll back over my head and listened to two azhdaja call to each other—one far away and lower down the valley, one pretty close. I wet my finger in my mouth and held it up, felt one side cool in the light breeze. At least the closer one was upwind. It hadn’t caught our scent yet.

I slid down the shale embankment as quietly as I could, but the shale was what climbers call rotten, crumbling and coming apart under my feet. It sounded like an avalanche to me, but I couldn’t tell how much of that was proximity and fear-heightened senses. I helped Gabrielle down the bank, and then we listened for half a minute, maybe longer. At first there was no sound. Then the closer hunting bird shrieked, a different, more insistent call, and was answered by three or four others from below us and to either side.

“They’re hip to us,” I said and pulled her toward the brush. The thorns formed a nearly impenetrable tangle, especially in the darkness. I tried pushing into what felt like a weak spot, maybe a gap between two bushes, but after the foliage gave a little, it locked up. I heard azhdaja make their hunting shriek again, all of them closer and the one now nearly on us.

“Down,” Gabrielle said urgently. “We must crawl under the branches.”

I dropped to my knees, and she had already nearly disappeared into the tangle. It was easier down here. The root clusters were easier to see, and there were several inches of clearance before the branches met and formed that impenetrable web. It wasn’t hands-and-knees crawling, though; it was right down on your belly stuff, dragging yourself from one root cluster to the next by your hands. After a few yards in, the shale gave way to wet sand and then black mud, still sticky from the heavy rains a few days earlier.

I heard more hunting shrieks, this time seemingly right on top of us, and I felt panic seize at my throat, choke off my breath. A root broke off in my hand. I grabbed at another and felt Gabrielle’s muddy boot. She cried out in terror and kicked wildly.

“It’s okay! It’s just me. Keep going.”

Behind me I heard the bushes rustle, and an azhdaja squawked in hunger and frustration—at least that’s how it sounded to me. The bushes rustled again, and I knew it was coming through.

I reached for another root cluster but felt nothing but mud, groped right and left—we had reached a small clearing. I crawled in next to Gabrielle, who lay prone in the stream bed, panting in fear and exhaustion. Around us I heard at least two, perhaps three of the hunters crashing through the brambles.

I sat up, pulled the blanket roll over my head, and laid it on Gabrielle.

“If one of them gets in, use this as a shield.”

I pulled Gordon’s revolver from the covered holster, took a breath to calm myself, and waited.

The clearing was actually the center of the streambed. The stream ran sluggish and muddy now, but two or three days ago it had probably been a couple feet deep. Most of the undergrowth had hung on, but the very center of the stream—no more than a meter wide—was clear of brush. The azhdaja squawking and struggling in the bushes where we had crawled in made the most noise, but didn’t sound like it was making much progress. I figured the main danger was from downstream. That’s where most of the screeches had come from, and once the hunting birds got in the middle of the stream, they would have a straight shot at us. I sat facing downstream.

Tactical breathing, in and out. Settle down.

I waited for a clear target, but as I started thinking about it, I wondered why. I didn’t really care if I killed any of them. If a shot or two frightened them away, that was fine by me. I decided to take a shot at the bird to my right, the one making all the noise, when I heard scrabbling to my left and higher up.

Gabrielle sat up and clutched the blanket roll.

“What is that?” she whispered.

The answer came in an eruption of flapping and squawking, followed by an explosive crash of brush to my left. One of the azhdaja had jumped from the high bank, trying to clear the brush and get to us. Pretty smart, but he’d fallen short.

“Close your eyes!” I shouted to Gabrielle. I turned, closed my own eyes, and fired twice into the noise. A high-pitched screech of pain followed the second shot. Not bad for firing blind, and we’d kept our night vision.

Then a second azhdaja leaped from the bank, and this one cleared the brush.

Gabrielle saw him, screamed, and raised the blanket roll, held it up and away from her. The rear talons of the bird ripped into it, and Gabrielle collapsed back under the sudden weight. The bird pitched forward, screeching and flailing, and somersaulted into me—eighty pounds of angry teeth, talons, and feathers.

The impact stunned me, knocked me back into the mud. The bird and I rolled, slashing and striking at each other. A part of my mind told me its legs were the most danger, and when I saw one kicking inches from my face I grabbed it, and then somehow had the other leg—thick, leathery, and muscular—in my other hand. The calm and distant part of my brain reminded me that meant I no longer had my revolver.

The bird twisted in my grip and snapped at me with its teeth, nipped my thigh. I could hold its knifelike leg spurs at bay this way but couldn’t do much else.

“More come up the stream!” Gabrielle shouted. “Shoot them!”

“I dropped the pistol!” I shouted back.

She groped the streambed near me, and for a moment Gabrielle, the bird, and I all rolled and struggled together—the bird to kill us, Gabrielle to find my pistol in the shallow water, and me to just break even.

I tried kicking the bird in its face but had to draw my knee up so far to get my foot even with it that I had no strength in the kick. Finally I drew both knees up and got my feet on either side of its head. It wriggled free, but I got its head between my feet again, this time with one foot under its jaw, and pushed down, straightening my legs, pulling its hind legs with my arms as hard as I could. It stretched out, and then I felt a snap. The azhdaja, its neck broken, continued to struggle, but deliberate attack changed to random twitching and flopping.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Click, click, click.

Gabrielle had found the revolver. I pushed the still-twitching carcass off of me.

“Give it to me. I’ll reload.”

She handed it over. I tried to break it open, but it seized up. I tried again and it made scraping, grinding noises but still wouldn’t open more than a half inch. I felt at the hinge—it was Gordon’s revolver, with that complicated-looking lever arm below the barrel, and the lever was caked with gritty mud.

“Goddamned worthless Enfield piece of shit!” I shouted in frustration. “Where’s my Webley?”

I frantically swished it in the shallow water of the stream and worked it back and forth until it popped open. With trembling hand I pulled cartridges from the leather pouch on my belt, dropped two or three of them, but managed to get the revolver loaded and snapped shut.

I looked up but couldn’t see much, Gabrielle’s firing having blown out my night vision.

“Can you see them?” I asked.

“Non. I hear the one.”

Our original friend, the one that had followed us into the brush, still struggled and flailed, but its efforts seemed desperate now. As I listened I heard more of them downstream, but receding rather than advancing. I didn’t know whether Gabrielle had hit anything, but if not, the noise and flash had been enough to drive them away. They weren’t stupid or suicidal.

I raised the revolver and fired at the azhdaja still struggling in the brush, the one that first found us. It made a high-pitched chirping sound, a mix of fear and pain, but it kept struggling. I fired three more times, and it shrieked twice more but still struggled.

“Die, you stupid son of a bitch, DIE!”

I fired twice more and then clicked on an empty cylinder. The bird broke free of the brush, and I heard it scramble up the shale embankment in retreat, then . . . silence.

Gabrielle and I sat side by side, panting, limbs trembling, soaked in muddy water. We looked at each other. I picked a light-colored azhdaja feather from her hair and let it drop into the stream.

“Well,” I said. “That was easier than I expected.”

Then we laughed.

And laughed and laughed.

I had worried earlier that pistol shots might attract attention from Brezna. There was a chance the brush and twisting banks of the streambed had muffled the sound and blocked the flash, but we couldn’t take the chance. As soon as we caught our breath, I scooped up the blanket roll, got Gabrielle on my back, and started up the streambed.

“We went down before. Why do we go up now?”

“You tell me,” I answered.

She thought about it for a moment.

“If they look from the air, they’ll find the dead azhdaja. We can do nothing about that. Since we were moving away from Brezna before, they will look for us farther away, not closer, n’est-cepas?”

“Bingo.”

Then I had to tell her what bingo meant.

We made it about two hundred yards up the stream bank when I heard the engines of the zeppelin heading down the valley toward us from Brezna. We found a place in the brush where the branches were high enough we could wriggle under them. Since the blanket was a dark earth tone, I unrolled it. We crawled under the overhanging brush next to each other, Gabielle’s head on my arm, and I pulled the blanket over us to break up our shape from the air. Once we got in position there wasn’t much to do but listen to the sound of the zeppelin and wait.

“I was very frightened when the dragons attacked,” Gabrielle said, “but the fight, it was quite exhilarating.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You do, don’t you? You have been through this before. The fear—but then the excitement, and I do not know where the one stopped and the other began. Do you know?”

She was chattering, pretty standard stress-release motor mouth, but that was okay.

“I could never tell, either,” I said. “They’re too mixed up together.”

“Yes, those feelings, and others as well, all together.”

She turned under the blanket and looked me in the eye.

“Do you know what I wanted to do immediately afterwards?”

I looked back at her and smiled.

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

I’d never heard her giggle before, but she giggled then, lying under a blanket in a thorn thicket as Tesla’s black zeppelin droned overhead, its searchlight sweeping back and forth across the streambed and the surrounding meadows. The zeppelin passed us by, its attention downstream, and under our blanket I gave in to the moment and did so knowing what would come at the end of the road. As I did, I also knew that whatever came, I would share it with Gabi at the end. If I had to choose one world or the other to save, I would save my daughter but share whatever fate came to this place. That didn’t make it right, but it was all I had left to give.

Nature took its course, although not without a few false starts. The ground was hard on the back, had a lot of broken shale and gravel, so, gentleman that I am, we started with Gabrielle on top. That put too much pressure on her injured thigh, threatened to tear the stitches. We tried it with me on top but my knees were so torn up I couldn’t manage it. Beat up as we were, we kept at it until our efforts were rewarded, which says a lot for our commitment and perseverance. But they say where there’s a will, there’s a way, and right then our wills burned so brightly, so intensely, it’s a wonder Tesla’s balloon boys didn’t see them scorching away the darkness.

Later, after our celebration of glorious survival, we rested, all tangled up in each others’ arms and clothes and the blanket.

“Do you know what my friend Renfrew said about you?” Gabrielle said sleepily. “He said I would find you interesting. He said, ‘Three remarkable men are going on a desperate mission.’ He often speaks like that. He described the three of you as, ‘The most intelligent and practical-minded scientist of our time, one of the most courageous young officers in our service, and this strange fellow from another time. You will fit right in, Gabi,’ he told me. I think he meant because I am odd.”

“No. He meant because you are exceptional.”

She made a contented sound and gently caressed my chest with her hand.

“I believe he was mistaken about Capitaine Gordon,” she said after a moment. “That is odd. Renfrew is seldom wrong about these things.”

Yeah, why would Renfrew describe Gordon as courageous? Was he just hyping the team to get Gabrielle to agree to help? Maybe. Gordon had never been in combat before. How would Renfrew know anything, one way or another, about his courage? In fact, Gordon had gone out of his way to exchange duty assignments with other officers to avoid overseas service and stay assigned to the intelligence branch in England.

The zeppelin’s engine had faded to a distant murmur earlier but in the last few minutes had grown louder and now grew louder still. I leaned out from under our bushes and looked downstream. I could see the location of the airship by its spotlight, which was very close, no more than two hundred yards east. The light was stationary, pointing down into the streambed, and as I watched it settled lower, landing.

“Trouble. They found the azhdaja we killed.”

“You thought they would,” Gabrielle said. “Now they look downstream, oui?”

“I think they already did. We need to move while they are still occupied down there.”

We rolled up the blanket and started upstream. I put my arm around Gabrielle and supported part of her weight until we found a break in the brush to our right. I climbed the stream bank and pulled her up behind me, but by then could hear voices, some coming up the stream, some in the meadow to either side, calling to each other to keep station.

We had to move fast. Gabrielle didn’t protest when I picked her up in a fireman’s carry and started trotting up the gentle slope. There had to be woods up here somewhere.

But the long flight down the valley and the fight with the azhdaja had taken more of my reserves than I’d realized. Carrying Gabrielle up the ridge, trying to stay silent, covering as much ground as I could, left my knees trembling and buckling within a minute. We needed to get to cover. The voices grew closer, but I slowed to a staggering walk. My legs just wouldn’t move any faster.

“Leave me,” she whispered.

No, I thought, without the breath to say it.

I slipped on a loose rock and fell to my knees, pain lancing up my thighs. A voice sounded an alarm behind us. I tried to get up but couldn’t at first. I waited for ten or twelve heartbeats, gathered my strength, and rose. I staggered on toward trees I couldn’t see but which had to be there. Had to be.

A shot rang out behind us, close, but I heard no bullet passage. Just someone sounding an alarm. Not much time left. Had to get to the trees.

Feet running in the grass behind us.

The slope grew suddenly steep. I went down on my knees again and my one free hand. I groped for a handhold, something to pull us up the slope, and felt the root of a tree.

A tree.

We’d made it. I gathered all my remaining strength and pulled us up the slope. I grasped the trunk of the young tree and pulled us farther, pulled us through the sharp scent of pine needles and into the dark shadowed safety of the woods.

That’s where Tesla’s men found us a few minutes later, exhausted, lying against the trunk of a pine tree.