Kerr heard the sounds of rocks shifting and the scraping of boot soles. Someone was coming up behind him.
“You’ve got a pretty sweet operation going for yourself here,” said a voice to his back.
The baron turned and faced Red Coat, who was smiling in an unfriendly way.
“Mebbe it’s too much for you to handle,” the red-haired man suggested as he moved closer. He reached up and scratched at his scraggly red goatee. “Mebbe you need a partner.”
“I don’t need a partner,” Kerr said, letting Red Coat get within arm’s reach. The pool forced him to shift to the right; Red Coat countered. And when he did that, the baron had no place left to retreat to. His heels were a foot from the edge of the pothole.
“How about a hostile takeover, then?” the red-haired man suggested, leaning closer still.
It was then, and only then, that Kerr smiled back. The broadest, most infuriating smile he could muster.
Red Coat’s arms came up, and the heels of his hands slammed into the baron’s chest. As he went off balance, the pool made him flap his arms to try to regain it.
But the push was too hard.
James Kerr went over backward, somersaulting into the blackness.
His victory cry lasted exactly seven seconds.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Crecca stood on the rim of the pothole and listened as the echoes of Baron Kerr’s final cry and splashdown faded away. Then he did a celebration dance, loosely adapted from the choreography in the Tiffany video, complete with head jukes. Nothing stood between him and the baronship.
Nothing.
“I am Baron Magnificent Crecca,” he shouted into the cavern below, the words booming.
He liked the sound of it so much that he shouted it again.
It was an announcement to the world, a taunt to his newly dead predecessor and a self coronation.
The triumphant Baron Magnificent Crecca no longer had a human—or partly human—overlord he had to answer to. No more Magus. No one to be afraid of. No one he had to hand over the lion’s share of the spoils to. The pool had shown him his heart’s true desire, his true mission; his entire life he had been waiting for, and working toward this very end. All he had ever wanted was to rule over his own private kingdom. Not some fly-by-night gypsy tent carny, but a real kingdom, with real territory and real influence that he could build on and expand. He had never had the means to get what he wanted before. He had always had to compromise his desire, to give up dominion in order to seize a small part of his dream. Now he had all the power he needed to make it happen.
All the power and then some.
He peered into the darkness of the pothole and couldn’t see the bottom, or Kerr’s body. It angered him that the former baron’s corpse was lost to harvest because the pool was still very hungry. Even with his eyes averted, Crecca could sense its lingering agitation. He felt it as a prickling sensation on the back of his neck and a faint fluttering in the pit of his stomach. Without looking he knew that from the surface of the water, a mist was starting to rise, and mixed in were twinkling bits of silver confetti.
Another spore fall wouldn’t be long in coming.
Crecca knew instinctively, and with absolute certainty, that the pool’s unappeased appetite had to do with its having been semistarved for weeks. He also knew that the previous baron had allowed the ville’s human population to slowly dwindle. Of late, Kerr hadn’t done a good job of recruiting new residents, and he had phased out the sacrificing of the people that were here. It was almost as if he had wanted the pool to suffer.
That was all going to change now.
Under Crecca’s stewardship, the burning pool would never be hungry again. If it needed more bodies to satisfy the hunger it had built up under the Kerr regime, it would have them. At once.
When the new baron looked back to the trail, he saw the crowd had gone on without him and was already almost at the bottom of the hillside. The evening light that surrounded him was turning purple and beginning to fade to night. He traversed the blocks and circled the yawning pitfalls of the slope, regaining the crude road and descending it at a trot. He caught up with the others shortly after they reached the square.