“Is something wrong, sir?” the old man demanded. “Would you like to pass by me?”
Crecca charged again, this time swinging. He brought the pipe around at waist height, slashing from right to left, figuring the bastard couldn’t possibly escape the blow.
The end of the pipe threw a shower of sparks as it hit the concrete wall.
The wall was all it hit.
The old man stepped back into the doorway, out of range, and as he did, with an ease that a man of his apparent age shouldn’t have been able to muster, he squatted low and thrust upward with his sword.
The point plunged into Crecca’s right thigh, a quick in-and-out stab that wrung a scream from his throat. He staggered back, flailing with the pipe to keep his opponent from following up with a second thrust.
“You look surprised, Baron,” the old man yelled.
The Magnificent Crecca clapped a hand over his most recent injury and scowled at him.
“Why should it surprise you,” Doc hollered, “that a man carrying a weapon like this—” he paused to flourish it “—could actually use it?”
Time was running out.
With his good leg, Crecca kicked the fallen light fixture into the old man’s chest and lunged with the pipe. His opponent blocked the hunk of metal and glass with his sword, sweeping it aside, but before old man could bring the blade’s point back, Crecca was on top of him.
The former carny master never saw the blow that felled him.
He was within a few inches of getting his big hand wrapped around the old man’s scrawny throat when he caught a flash of silver from below, as the sword’s heavy carved metal handle snapped up in a crisp, accurate, backhanded strike that he couldn’t deflect.
He heard the crunch of his own cheekbone shattering and felt hot blood spraying down his suddenly numbed face. Falling forward as his knees buckled under him, he took another blow from the sword’s pommel, this time on the crown of his head. For a second it made him see black. He crashed to the floor on his knees, knowing there would be more, and much worse to come, and unable to raise his arms to defend himself.
The third blow nailed him square in the back of the head. Everything went black.
Crecca toppled to the floor on his face.
DOC CRADLED the palm of his right hand, which bled from a long, shallow cut that he’d given himself by gripping the swordstick barehanded. There had been no time to get the blade’s point around, so he’d had to make use of the pommel.
Effective use.
And once he’d gotten started, he’d had to follow up with successive, similar blows before the baron could recover.
Doc took a soiled linen handkerchief from the pocket of his frock coat and tightly bound his wound, then knelt beside the fallen man. There was blood everywhere. Crecca’s blood. His blood. He tried to locate a pulse in the man’s neck and couldn’t find it.
As he leaned over the baron, the ceiling tiles on the floor around him started to move. They were floating, bobbing. The water in the corridor was no longer standing in puddle; it was flowing in a current. It was already an inch deep. Doc looked toward the hallway’s entrance and saw the steps had been turned into a series of low, feeble waterfalls. The river he had created was starting to flood the blockhouse. He dashed into the room behind him and spun the red wheel, reopening the emergency drain valve as far as it would go.
When he returned to the hallway, the water had risen over the prostrate baron’s mouth and nose.
The Magnificent Crecca wasn’t blowing any bubbles.
Doc splashed down the corridor and up the stairs. As he climbed out of the entry well, he glimpsed the destruction he had wrought. A deep, dark torrent had gouged away the ville and the square and was undermining the near edge of the blockhouse. He could see no one moving, and a terrible thought struck him: had he drowned the very people he had been trying to save?