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.