Somewhere behind him in the fairing light, his handful of subjects were running for their lives. If they were screaming in terror, he couldn’t hear it over the water’s roar.
Crecca dashed down the stairway and into the corridor. Inside the hallway, the effect of the ground shaking was much worse. Plaster and concrete dust rained on him from the remains of the collapsed ceiling. As he ran down the corridor, splashing through the puddles, the back-and-forth tilting of the floor made him careen into and bounce off the walls.
The baron had known from the get-go that this catastrophe couldn’t have been an accident. Hallucinations or not, massive floodgates didn’t just open by themselves. Not suddenly, after a hundred years. Someone had to have done it on purpose. Since he hadn’t seen anyone come out of the blockhouse, he was fairly sure that the someone was still inside. He had to find him or her and reverse whatever had been done.
Pipe in hand, and ready to clobber, he ducked his head inside the first few rooms along the hall. The dim light was made even dimmer by the airborne dirt and dust, but he saw no one.
In the last room, ninety-five percent of the ceiling had fallen onto the floor. It lay in a jumbled heap, from wall to wall. In a far corner something caught his eye.
Something bright and reflective along the back wall.
He climbed over the piles of rubble to reach it. The silver lion’s head was on the end of a wooden walking stick that had been thrust through the spokes of a red metal wheel. The kind of a wheel that opened or closed a valve. Crecca read the warning sign.
Or a floodgate.
He pulled out the stick and flung it aside. Then he started to crank the wheel over clockwise, shutting the valve.
“Not the best of ideas,” said a loud voice to his right.
Crecca whirled to face a glaring scarecrow of a man. He recognized him at once as one of Cawdor’s party. It was the old, babbling bastard who had to be led around on a rope. The baron’s laughter was muffled by the dull roar coming through the walls.
“So, old man,” he shouted back, “looks like you’ve got your brain on straight…just in time for me to beat it in.” To demonstrate he bashed the end of the pipe into the concrete wall.
His adversary scampered over the rubble and out into the hall. He had picked up the stick Crecca had tossed aside.
“You aren’t going to get away from me!” the baron called to him as he followed.
The old man was waiting for him in the corridor. “If you think I am trying to escape, you are sorely mistaken, sir,” he yelled. “I just require some room to work.” With that the old bastard did something to the silver handle, and the wood sheath of the stick came away in his left hand, revealing a long, tapering, double-edged blade of steel.
“I don’t have time for games,” Crecca shouted. And then he charged, holding the pipe out in front of him like a lance.
The tremors that still rippled the floor made his course erratic at best. As he veered toward his target, a fluorescent light fixture hanging by a thread gave up the ghost and crashed down in front of him, spoiling his aim.
The old man was more agile than he had any right to be. He sidestepped the charge and pivoted, and as Crecca rushed past him, the baron felt something molten-hot lance through the back of his tall boot and into his left calf.
“First blood!” the old man cried. With a back-and-forth slash of the sword, he cut down the light fixtures that blocked his view.
He now stood between Crecca and the room with the wheel. To reach it and stop the draining of the pool, the baron was going to have to go through him. The former carny master realized he had been outmaneuvered and outfoxed. Infuriated, Crecca made a blind thrust with the end of the pipe, aiming for the old man’s face.
The sword parried the blow, metal scraping metal, then before the carny master could withdraw, he felt the sharp bite of razor honed steel deep in his right shoulder. “Fucker!” he howled as blood flowed down his arm. He banged the pipe on the floor in frustration.