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.
A bell started ringing. She wondered if she’d caused this to happen by using the emergency exit. But the power was off, so it couldn’t be that. The bell was not an electrical device. It sounded like an actual, physical piece of metal being struck by a flailing hammer. The sound was thready and faltering, as though whatever contraption drove it was already on its last legs. For all that, it carried clearly through the still air of the valley.
A stocky man—Ershut—was silhouetted against the glowing windows of the tavern as he ran in front of them. He had gone outdoors when he’d realized that the building was on fire. He was headed for the front, zeroing in, she guessed, on the source of the noise. She lost him in the darkness. Then she returned her gaze to the windows, noting a dramatic fall-off in the intensity of the light.
The sprinklers must have come on inside the tavern. They were rigged up to some kind of device on the front of the building: water rushing through the sprinkler pipes turned a little wheel that smacked the bell, sounding the alarm even when electrical power was shut off.
The big windows of the tavern began to explode: someone attacking them with a sledgehammer or a rifle butt, venting smoke. Dim flares of orange light shone through in places that weren’t covered by the spray patterns of the sprinkler system. A few minutes later Zula heard the roaring hiss of a fire extinguisher being operated in short bursts and saw those little fires being snuffed out one by one. The bell continued to sound even after the fire had been put out, and it would keep doing so until the system ran out of water or was shut off by operating a valve somewhere.
She had made these observations while moving furtively through the woods, favoring north-facing slopes so that she could get a view down over the Schloss. The sky was getting appreciably brighter. When she had arrived, she’d been able to see nothing except dim gleams of moonlight on roofs, and the pools of illumination cast by flashlights, but now she could see the entire compound, albeit in faint gray on gray, and she could see Ershut and Jahandar moving around even when they weren’t using their lights.
All of which worked to her advantage but told her that she had better move deeper into the woods before it became light enough to making tracking her easy.
She moved another hundred yards back, troubled by the amount of noise she made as she forced herself and the bulky pack through undergrowth. Then she turned back and looked again, since she had picked up bright lights in her peripheral vision.
A car was coming down the road, approaching the dam. She was thrilled to see it and then horrified by the certainty that whoever was inside it was about to be gunned down.
Instead, though, Jahandar approached, waving arms, bringing it to a stop at the far end of the dam. His rifle was slung on his shoulder. He bent down to engage the driver in conversation.
This must be the scrubs—the backup team. The day before yesterday, they must have driven the RV back to Elphinstone and parked it in a campground somewhere. When Zula had made her break, Jahandar or Ershut must have reached these people by phone or walkie-talkie or something, told them to come quick. The car’s rear doors opened up, and a man got out from each side, pulling a bag out behind him, slinging it over his back.
After a few minutes’ more conversation, the car went into movement again, pulling around in a U-turn, and headed back down the road toward Elphinstone.
She heard a pop behind her: the snap of a twig.
She turned around to see Sayed stealing up on her, about thirty feet away.
He was looking right at her. On his feet he was wearing the pink Crocs she had left behind at the campsite. He was movingly awkwardly because of the Crocs and because his hands were occupied by a black pump-action shotgun.
Her movements were no less awkward. But she knew she had to stay out of the range of that weapon, and so she backed away from him. Realizing he’d been sighted, he picked up his pace and began to stumble forward, flailing the gun around dangerously, dropping to his knees as the Crocs slipped on the steep loose ground, spitting and making little exclamations as branches caught him in the face.
The straps of her pack suddenly jerked violently at her shoulders. She thought she’d backed into a tree, that its branches had snagged the pack, spun her around.
Then she went down facefirst. She threw out her hands in an attempt to break the fall, but the palms of her hands skidded outward and she ended up spread-eagled on her belly. The weight of the pack was on her back. A moment later, this was joined by a weight much heavier. A weight that was moving.
“Got her!” said Zakir. His voice was coming from high above her; he was kneeling on her backpack or something. But then there was a sudden violent reshuffling and his entire weight bore down on her with force that might have cracked her ribs. It was certainly squeezing all the air out of her lungs.
“Bitch, how does it feel to be dead?” he asked her.
She only had one move, which made choosing much easier.
Bending her elbow sharply, she brought her right hand back to her left shoulder, groped upward a couple of inches, found the handles of the knives, picked the big one. It was almost wedged in place by Zakir’s weight, but she jerked it free with a convulsive movement. Then, without pause, she reversed the movement and stabbed straight backward, aiming for the sound of his voice.
He gagged on his own scream and rolled off her. As he moved she felt the knife handle twist in her hand. She maintained her grip on it, jerked it out, felt blood spray. She planted both hands and pushed herself up on hands and knees, then rolled away from him, ending up seated on her haunches.
Zakir was kneeling on the ground with both hands clapped over his mouth. His forearms were turning red. Blood began to stream off one elbow, then the other.
She heard an exclamation. Not from Zakir, who had been robbed of the power of speech. She looked up to see Sayed standing there in his Crocs, no more than ten feet away, holding the shotgun slack in his hands, staring in horr
or at Zakir.
She was definitely within that gun’s killing range now. She had half her own weight strapped to her back, and she was sitting down, immobilized by the pack.
For the first time in quite a while she didn’t have any particular idea as to what she should do. She was tired of coming up with ideas.
She and Sayed stared at each other for a few moments. He glanced down at her hand and saw the bloody knife.
He probably wanted to go to the aid of Zakir, who was slumping back against a tree, deflating as blood and breath ran out of him. But he didn’t want to come in range of the knife. He ought to just blow her away with that shotgun. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.
So it was a standoff.
Something flashed through the air behind him. Sort of like a bird, except that it weighed about as much as Zula. But the quality of its movement—a strange, almost supernatural combination of speed and silence—was akin to that of a bird.
Sayed went down on his face as if he had been struck by a car. The shotgun flew out of his hands and went bouncing and rolling across the ground toward Zula.
She was so preoccupied with that one detail that she saw nothing else until she had jerked her arms free from the pack straps and flung herself forward to scrabble the weapon up out of the thick layer of old brown pine needles and leaves in which it had come to rest.
Then she stared up into the golden face of a huge feline, regarding her from perhaps six feet away. The animal had blood on its fangs. It had planted both of its feet on Sayed’s back; each of its claws was embedded in a spreading disk of blood. But most of the blood came from the back of Sayed’s neck, which had been destroyed; the animal had struck him with a flying leap, and bitten all the way through his cervical spine, in the same instant.
She remembered that she had a shotgun in her hands. She aimed it at the cougar. For her mind, belatedly switching into animal taxonomy mode, had identified this as one. The same one, no doubt, that had been skulking around the camp last night and going after the raccoons earlier. She wondered if Sayed had had the presence of mind to chamber a shell and flick the safety off. She pulled back with her right hand, saw the yellow gleam of a shotgun shell in the breech, pushed it closed. Glanced back up at the cougar. Found the safety with her thumb, glanced down to see it had been left on, flicked it up until a red dot showed. Red, you’re dead. Looked back up at the cougar. It was making no effort to come after her, but it was definitely paying close attention, snarling, making it clear she wasn’t wanted.
It was guarding its kill.
Keeping the shotgun in her right hand, aimed at the cougar, she squatted down, thrust her left arm through a pack strap, and heaved the burden up onto her back. This irritated the cougar, sending it into a little fit of squawling and posturing. But Zula was definitely backing away now, increasing the distance.
Something caught her knee. She saw with horror that it was Zakir’s bloody paw, not so much trying to hold her back as imploring her for aid. She kicked loose from him and moved away. Not until she was perhaps a hundred feet distant did she shoulder the pack properly and fasten its hip belt.
Her hearing had gone all funny during this, but when it went back to normal, she noted that Ershut or someone seemed to have gotten to the bell and stifled it. It was still making a dim pocking noise, but the bell wasn’t clanging anymore and probably couldn’t be heard from more than a few hundred yards’ distance.
This made it possible to hear two sounds that had previously been obscured by the ringing of the bell. One, behind Zula now, was Zakir screaming. Apparently he had got his voice working again. His cries had an inchoate gargling sound. The other was a motor coming down the road from the direction of Elphinstone.
Zula was pretty sure it was a Harley-Davidson.
Chet was coming. He had heard the fire bell and was coming to see what was the matter.
Zula had drawn him here by setting the fire, and now they were going to kill him.
She heard Jahandar’s voice, shouting into a walkie-talkie or a phone. As he spoke, Zula caught sight of him retreating from the dam, taking up a position behind a corner of the main Schloss buildings.
Chet wasn’t in view yet, but the headlight of his chopper was illuminating the trees along the road perhaps half a mile away, and she could hear the engine throttling up and down as he took the familiar curves.
FROM THE DAY that Chet had made the decision to settle down and bind his fortune to that of Dodge and his crazy Schloss project, not an hour had gone by without his thinking, and usually worrying, about some aspect of the building and its grounds. This was his life now. It was not a bad life. But part of the job was getting up in the middle of the night and running into the place to put out fires.
Not literally. There had never been a serious fire in the place and he doubted that there ever would be, given the capabilities of the sprinkler system that they had, at shocking expense, installed in every room of the complex. But it was useless against metaphorical fires: petty burglaries, leaky roofs, starlings in the eaves, bears and raccoons getting into the Dumpsters. Once the staff had grown to a size where he could delegate a lot of that, he had acquired the property a few miles up the road and built his own cabin on it, so that he could live close enough to the Schloss for convenience, but far enough away to get his mind off its myriad chores and troubles.
The one exception was Mud Month, when all the staff went on vacation. Nothing could be delegated then; either Chet or Dodge had to be on call 24/7 until they all came back.
Dodge was there now. Had been for a few days. This had given Chet an opportunity to relax, catch up on his reading, go on a few motorcycle rides with the surviving members of the Septentrion Paladins. He had just returned from one such ride, up the west shore of Kootenay Lake, a few hours before sunset. After grilling a steak and killing half a bottle of cabernet, he had collapsed into bed early and slept well. But in the hour before dawn he had found himself lying awake, convinced he was hearing something from up the valley: a jangling bell.
That fucking sprinkler system had sprung another leak.
It couldn’t be an actual fire. Had there been an actual fire, the alarm system would have detected it, summoned the fire department, and sent a text message to his phone. Sirens would be screaming by his cabin already. And Dodge would be calling him.
No, something must have whacked a sprinkler head and set the thing going. Right now water was spraying in torrents around one of the Schloss’s rooms. It had happened before. It was always a huge mess. It was probably Dodge, up early in the morning, chasing a stray bat around with a badminton racket, flailing in the dark, not thinking about the delicate sprinkler heads. Now he was alone in the Schloss in the wee hours, dark and wet and furious and humiliated, too proud to call for help.
Chet dragged himself out of bed, peed, and pulled his motorcycle leathers on over his pajamas. Not very dignified, but only Dodge would see him, and he had no secrets from Dodge. He strode out into the patch of gravel between his cabin and the road. The chopper was there. It was dirty and tired, needed to have its oil changed. Riding it through the dark, he would be uncomfortable and cold. A sane man would take the SUV that was parked right next to it. But Chet on a whim had decided to ride the bike. What the hell, he was up anyway and about to spend the whole day dealing with Dodge’s mess. It couldn’t get a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than that.
He bestrode the Harley, kicked it into life, fishtailed it around in the gravel, and headed out onto the little access road that led down to the highway from his property. This was a former mining road, bladed once a year after the spring thaw had finished turning it into a rutted gully. So it would never get any worse than it was today. Feeling his way into the hyperbola of light cast by the chopper’s headlamp, he put all his attention, for the first couple of minutes, into staying out of the deepest channels that had been carved into it during the weeks since the snow had begun to thaw. His slow progress was a blessing in
disguise; if he went any faster, clots of semifrozen mud would hurtle up from the tires and glue themselves onto the insides of the bike’s fenders.
As he neared the bank of the river, the trees thinned out and afforded him a clear view of the eastern sky, which had gone all pink and pearly. He was tempted to shut off the headlamp and run dark, the way he had used to, back in the old days. Back before the accident. But the accident had put sense into him, if having cornstalks shoved into your brain could be so called. And living in these parts he had learned that this was the very time of day when critters were about: it was light enough that they could see what the hell they were doing, but not so light as to make it easy for predators to spot them, and so this was the hour when a lone biker was most likely to kill himself by T-boning a moose in the middle of the road. Predators would be out too, looking for crepuscular prey with their big glowing eyes and listening with their twitching radar-horn ears. The Selkirks were oversupplied with apex predators: bears of two types, wolves, coyotes, cougars and various smaller cats, just to name the four-legged ones—to the point where their station on the food pyramid no longer seemed like an apex so much as a plateau or mesa. If striking a deer on your chopper was bad, what adjective could be applied to striking a grizzly who was stalking a deer?
So he kept his light on as he turned south onto the road and built his speed only slowly, giving the tires a quarter mile of free running on the clean blacktop so that they could shed their furry husks of cold mud. Then he opened up the throttle and began to carve the turns toward the Schloss, picking up speed when there was a long clear stretch of road ahead of him, throttling it back a little when he approached blind curves where deer might be grazing in the low rich undergrowth that came to life, at this time of year, in the sunlit ditches and verges that lined the road cut.
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