Then it began to snow.
There was a moment where the summer sky above Lee was mostly blue, and yet snowflakes were spiralling down—and she was such a city girl that alarm bells were still failing to ring. Then Mal shouted. Lee turned towards her and got a face full of blizzard.
Abruptly the wind was tearing around her, out of nowhere. It brought great skirls of snow, like the waves of the sea, raking her skin and flurrying at her clothes with a thousand sharp fingers. She staggered forwards, leaning into the wind to make progress. Mal was in the midst of the storm, hunched between two of the stones. She had her phone out, trying to take a picture of the weather. Why not? It was a prime Fortean phenomenon: unseasonal snow from an almost clear sky. Perhaps it would start raining frogs and fish next.
Lee collapsed at Mal’s feet and tried to wrangle coats out of their packs—flimsy cagoules because they’d packed for rain, not for Scott of the Antarctic. The temperature had gone through the floor and her fingers were already numb. She managed to hook the hood of one coat over Mal’s head and fell over into the nearest stone trying to get her own on.
The stones… That was what no amount of keep-calm-and-carry-on could handle. Before, there had been three wide-spaced stones in a field. Now there were suddenly six. Six Brothers, like the locals said. The stones were having a family reunion.
The one Lee was leaning against, a new one, had something painted on the inner face. The snow was doing a good job of washing off the redness it had been daubed with, but the artist had been following lines ground deep. She saw a curved sign—then she reinterpreted it as a figure, leaping high with tail and beak pointed downwards and one leg extended, all depicted in a few elegant lines.
“Lee,” said Mal.
“Mal, have you seen this?”
“Lee.” Mal’s voice was simultaneously tight and quiet, and very insistent.
Lee looked up and there were the Birdmen.
They were in the centre of the stones. No. They were where Lee’s internal compass told her the centre of the stones ought to be, but things were… wrong—it felt somehow like a paper cut to the eye when she looked in their direction. There were at least three of them, although the whirling snow, their snow, made it hard to be sure. They were a little smaller than people, and quite a bit lower because of how they were built. She saw long legs, but a body canted forwards, counterbalanced by that sweep of tail. And that wasn’t a bird’s spray of plumage, now she saw it close-up, but an actual tail, stiff bones and all. Their heads were round, surprisingly large behind their beaks. Lee stared into almost perfectly black eyes, huge and set forwards, a predator’s.
They were impossible, like a monk’s marginalia or bestiarist’s fantasy come to life. They were closest to giant ravens or, no, jackdaws, because their plumage was a scatter of black and white spots and bands. But her mind refused to take in more detail. Because they weren’t animals at all.
They had capes: animal hides secured at the throat and under the belly, shapeless as ponchos. One had a pack, something bundled in skins and lashed down. Another had something, a rod, maybe a spear, balanced in the crook of its bird-arm. It wasn’t a wing but had a sodden sleeve of feathers to it anyway. The hand was a crook of claws, like a taxidermist’s joke.
The central one, the largest, stepped towards Mal. Lee remembered the video, and the same alien language of muscle and movement was on display here. She had forgotten the snow, the cold—had mind-space only for the play of those lean muscles, the scales where the feathers tapered above the knee, the three-toed foot with its inner digit held daintily off the ground. It evoked the pinky finger of a matron aunt taking tea. Save that aunts didn’t have hooked claws like that, not in this era. Not in this world.
She’d initially thought the central Birdman had a big hooked beak like a—well, “like a raptor’s” wouldn’t edify anyone, really. Like an eagle’s, say. But it wasn’t a beak. It was a blade, crooked like an elbow, metal. Bronze, crudely hammered. And Lee saw immediately, with a zoologist’s eye, how those clutches of claws would be good at holding on but terrible for manipulation. But plenty of birds can be clever with their beaks if they need to be.
It was five feet from Mal, who was trying to back away very, very slowly. No blood was visible on the bronze blade, but both of them reckoned they knew what had happened—first to Roberts’ sheep and then to Roberts. And that was when reality shouldered aside all the wonder and the dreams of Fortean fame, because they realized it was going to happen to them too.
“Look out!” Lee shouted. “Mal, run!”
They ran. Mal had had the foresight to dump her pack, and that meant she was taking the lead, then slowing for Lee’s shorter legs to catch up. The snow seemed to rush towards them no matter which way they fled, and they lost the Range Rover and the track almost immediately. Mal was heading uphill and Lee laboured after, seeing fleet shadows left and right, their pursuers pacing them effortlessly. She heard them, too, calling each to each. Not the keening of hawks nor the brittle croaks of ravens, but a panoply of whistles and clicks, clucks and chuckles, as versatile as parrots. It sounded like laughing.
Mal stopped suddenly and Lee almost ran into her, which would have sent both of them plummeting ten feet down a rock-studded slope. It wasn’t the drop that stopped her, though. It was the view.
It was recognizably the moors, even though snow lay in the hollows. Down below, where a vigorous stream cut its course, a herd of animals had gathered to drink. They were big as shire horses, with something of the same ponderousness, but shaggy to their ankles with drab coats of feathers. Their necks were long and their crested heads small. Two or three stretched up to keep watch over the surrounding countryside while the rest drank. They did not see the two girls, or rather, the humans meant nothing to them. But when the Birdmen materialized on either side of Lee and Mal, the beasts gave out anxious knocking sounds and the herd began to move off.
Mal hadn’t seen the Birdmen yet. She was pointing at something in the middle distance. The snow had ebbed, so they could make out drifting lines of smoke. Lee saw structures: something like yurts, perhaps; a cluster of animals corralled nearby and industrious movement.
Then, from almost at Lee’s elbow, one of the Birdmen spoke. Hak, it went. It took a few steps along the ridge of the rise. It had a scalloped flint in its mouth, and now it wiped it on the ground as though sharpening it, its gaze never leaving Lee.
Hak.
Run.
Lee backed away, plucking at Mal’s cagoule. Two Birdmen now crouched amidst the rocks, watching them keenly, the third behind them somewhere, and abruptly Lee could not stand before that thoughtful stare a moment longer. That evaluating, calculating regard, eyes deep as wells—glittering with cruelty and murder, perhaps. But also with undeniable intelligence.
One of them settled, rocking on its haunches, and Lee suddenly remembered a friend’s cat. It would wriggle almost exactly like that before a pounce.
She ran, and Mal was a step behind her, just a step. She would swear to it.
*
They treated Lee for hypothermia and exposure, later. She didn’t remember much of it, didn’t remember getting out, if out was the right word. Out and in implied a relationship to regular directions that couldn’t possibly apply. As soon as she was able to string two words together she asked about Mal, and they asked her the same. The locals were sharp enough to spot when two girls went onto the moors and only one came back.