Then she guessed why. Jahandar had arrived first. But he hadn’t entered the building. Instead he had posted himself on the road, on or near the dam, to prevent Zula from crossing over to the left bank. Jahandar might be a fish out of water in British Columbia, but he had more than enough of the Afghan equivalent of street smarts to understand that, if Zula couldn’t cross over to the left bank, she couldn’t go down the road to Elphinstone. Ershut, probably, had made it to the scene a few minutes later; he’d be the one banging around, trying to root her out of the Schloss so that Jahandar could plug her with a rifle shot. The out-of-shape Zakir and shoeless Sayed would not be here for a little while longer.
The stoves were of the type that screwed directly onto a fuel bottle; they didn’t have tanks of their own. Zula threw a stove, a box of waterproof matches, and a handful of candles into a side pocket of the pack. A little cooking kit—a small pot, a frying pan, and a plate, all cleverly nested and locked together—went into the main compartment. Hard to make use of the stove without that.
Fuel bottles—pods of spun aluminum with narrow necks plugged by screwin plastic stoppers—were strewn around the cabinet like bowling pins after a strike. She opened one, dropped to the floor, pinned it upright between her knees, then grabbed a brick-shaped gallon can of stove fuel from the lower shelf, spun its cap off, and learned just how difficult it was to decant white gas from one narrow-necked receptacle into another with violently shaking hands. Half of it spilled onto her knees and soaked into her long johns, a detail she would have to keep in mind if she found herself in the vicinity of fire any time soon.
Which she had every intention of doing. Only about a quarter of the big can’s contents sufficed to fill the bottle. The rest was available for other purposes.
First she was careful to get the lid screwed firmly back onto the bottle and stow that in her pack. Then she fished out a couple of the matches she’d packed earlier and stuck them into her mouth. She stood up and hoisted the pack around onto her back. During all of these exertions, she had come upon an old flashlight with nearly dead batteries, so she set it on the floor, aimed toward the stairs, and left it turned on. That enabled her to turn off her own flashlight. Gas can in one hand, she ascended the stairs as quickly as she could without making a lot of noise. Being chased around the Schloss by Ershut would be bad, and being cornered in the basement would be worse, but being caught by him in midstairway was the worst she could think of.
She stopped at the top of the stairs, appalled for a moment by the unpleasant thought that Ershut might be right on the other side of the door, waiting for her. That was enough to make her reach up above her shoulder in an exploratory way and verify that the handle of the big butcher knife was in a place where she could grab it.
She waited there in the dark until she was certain she heard a boom from farther away in the Schloss: probably Ershut kicking open a door in one of the guest wings.
She pushed the door open and waited for some kind of disaster, or at least nearby movement; but the place was quiet except for the crunching boom of another door being kicked in.
She felt her way around two corners and entered the tavern. By the faint red glow of her flashlight shining through the flesh of her hand, she found her way through the dining area to the end of the room that was dominated by the bar and the TV and the plush sofas and chairs arranged before it. A nest of empty chip wrappers and soda cans told her where her uncle had been vegging out at the moment Jones had come to pay a call on him.
She hated to do it, for she knew how Uncle Richard loved this place. But the foam in this furniture would burn better than anything else, once it got going. She spilled a long trail of stove gas down the length of the sofa and across the laps of the adjoining chairs, then dumped what was left in a puddle on the floor.
Before lighting the match, she stepped over to a window that afforded a view to the north side of the property and verified her suspicion that Jahandar—or at least someone with a flashlight—was posted there, right in the middle of the road, at the place where it ramped down to the top of the dam.
Ershut was continuing to make his location obvious. He was nowhere near her.
She pulled a match from her mouth, lit it, and threw it. Too fast, for it missed the target and went out on the carpet. The second one caught and the flames spread with shocking effect, blinding her night-adjusted eyes. To Jahandar or anyone out on the road, it would be as bright as sunrise, even with the blinds drawn. It seemed inadvisable to emerge from a door anywhere near that, so she made her way round to the guest wing where Ershut did not seem to be. This was just a long straight hallway, aimed generally southward, lined with doors to guest rooms on both sides. Moving at the best jogging gait she could manage with the heavy pack on her back, she went straight to its end, punched out through the emergency exit there (fighting a ridiculous feeling of good-girl shame that it should never be used except in an actual emergency) and moved as directly as she could in the direction of the nearest cover: the edge of the forest along the banks of the Blue Fork, about a hundred feet away.
She was finding it surprisingly easy to see where she was going without benefit of flashlight and thought for a second that this was because of the fire light shining out from the tavern’s windows. Then she understood that the eastern sky was beginning to brighten. Whoever had written “the darkest hour is before the dawn” apparently had not spent much time in the Northwest, where, for hours before it actually breached the horizon, the sun scattered vague blue light off the underside of the cloud cover.