Dunk reached down and grabbed the doorknocker of a nose ring that hung from the ogre’s nose, right where it pierced his slab of a septum. “Let him go,” he snarled at the wizard within.
M’Grash stopped whining at the treeman and turned his attention to Dunk. He reached for him with a massive mitt, but Edgar slapped down his arm with a branch.
“That’ll bloody well be enough of that,” Edgar said.
Dunk wrenched M’Grash’s nose ring, and the ogre screamed in pain. Dunk had never heard such a horrible and pathetic sound escape his friend’s mouth.
“Get out,” Dunk said, “now! Or I rip your nose apart.”
The ogre froze. “You wouldn’t hurt your best friend.”
“It wouldn’t bother my friend. Too stupid, right?” Dunk twisted the ring slowly until it seemed like it might pull right through the ogre’s skin. “You, though, I’ll bet you’re smart enough to feel every bit of it.”
M’Grash growled in frustration, loud enough to hurt Dunk’s ears. Then his face went slack.
As the red light vanished from M’Grash’s eyes, the ogre looked up at Dunk. “Dunkel?” he said, his childlike innocence restored.
“Yes?” Dunk asked, relieved to have his friend back, in many, many ways.
The ogre crossed his eyes at Dunk’s hands, still on the nose ring. “Let go now?”
“Right!” Dunk let the ring loose and leapt back, waving Edgar off.
“About time,” Edgar said as he rolled off the ogre’s back.
“Touchdown, Hackers!” Jim said. The crowd burst into screams of excitement.
“Wow!” Bob said. “I haven’t seen moves like that since last night’s dinner. Those snotlings really didn’t want to end up in your belly.”
“For all the good it did them.” Jim gave a cruel laugh.
Dunk pumped his fist at the crowd. It had been a rough start to the game, but they’d still come out of it well. If the Cowboys had already tried their worst tricks, they had the game in the bag.
“Pardon me,” Edgar said from where he’d rolled off M’Grash and on to the Astrogranite. “Do you think the ogre I just bloody well saved might be persuaded to give me a hand up?”
2
“We won!” Dunk ducked as his brother Dirk poured a tankard of ale over his head. The cold, frothy liquid ran down Dunk’s neck and back, making him roar in mock rage. Then he gathered the younger Hoffnung up in a bear hug and growled in his face.
“Championship game, here we come,” Dirk grinned.
Much as he wanted to, Dunk couldn’t be angry with his brother. He was too happy about the victory to begrudge the man such enthusiastic joy.
Before he could say a word, though, M’Grash gathered the two men up into an even larger, lung crushing embrace. “Hackers win!” The ogre topped off his cheer with a howl that caused everyone else in the locker room to cover their ears.
Spinne leapt up on a bench and gently pried Dunk loose from the ogre’s grasp. “Be gentle with him,” she said with a smile.
“I sorry,” M’Grash said, his toothy grin fading.
“I was talking to Dunk and Dirk,” Spinne said as she reached up to give the ogre’s tender nose a pat. “Are you feeling better yet?”
The ogre’s grin returned, wide enough to swallow Spinne’s head. He nodded happily at her. “Doc help.”
“Took half a gallon of my best materials, and three yards of sutures, but he’ll be fine,” said a white haired, sour faced elf with a monocle over the eye not covered with a blood-stained patch.
“Thank you, Dr. Pill,” Dunk said.
The elf growled the gratitude away, just as he always did.
“How about the others?” a dazzling, dark haired woman asked, as she squirmed forward between two players. As she spoke, a glittering gold ball with a hole in one end hovered before her and off to one side. Then it spun its black eye from her towards the ill-mannered apothecary.
“I don’t speak on camra,” Dr. Pill said, regarding the hovering ball with suspicion.
“But I’m Lästiges Weibchen, with ESPNN, and Hackers fans everywhere are dying to know the fate of Standplatz Innen, Sicheres Gegangen and Geborenes Verurteilt.”
“If they’re dying, they’ll be in good company. Innen, Gegangen, and Verurteilt were all DOA. You can thank the Cowboy’s ‘hidden’ blades for that.”
Dunk’s grin fell from his face, and a silence hung over the rest of the room. “Couldn’t you do anything for them?” he asked. As soon as the words left his lips, he winced, ready for one of the apothecary’s biting retorts.
Instead, Dr. Pill shook his head sadly. “They left DNZ orders, ‘Do Not Zombify’, so I, ah, rendered them useless to the vultures from the undead teams.”
“Doctor,” a low voice said from behind Dunk, “that should very well be enough.”
Dunk turned to see Captain Pegleg Haken standing in the doorway of the coach’s office. He held his yellow tri-corn hat in his hands, exposing the top of his head, where Dunk saw that his long, curly, and inky locks had started to thin. A tall, stunning woman with bronzed skin and sun bleached hair stood next to him.
“We’re celebrating a victory here,” the ex-pirate turned coach said, raising his hooked hand in the air as he stepped into the room on his wooden leg, “which is why I prefer to leave the news of our fallen friends until the morning after.” He glared at Dr. Pill as he spoke.
“Never weep for a Blood Bowl player,” Cavre said. Stepping between the captain and any issue took brass, and Cavre had plenty. He had been the team captain and the coach’s right-hand man since long before Dunk had joined the team. If anyone could skirt Haken’s wrath, it would be him.
“Aye,” the captain said, acknowledging Cavre’s wisdom by jutting out his chin. “They died doing what they loved. We should all be so lucky as to carve those words on our headstones.”
“Hear, hear,” the players murmured. The loudest of them was Rotes Hernd, the backup thrower. She sat on the bench much of the time, waiting for Dunk to get tired or hurt, but she’d been close to at least two of the dead players.
Rotes stood as tall as Spinne, but was built broader across her shoulders. She had the arms of a thrower, while Spinne had the hands of a catcher. The two made for an excellent combination during practices, although Dunk and Spinne connected better on almost every level.
“Who’s your friend?” Schlechtes Getrunken, one of the backup linemen asked. With Gegangen dead, he had moved up to a starting position, something he’d been celebrating hard since the final whistle had blown to end the game.
Dunk suspected Getrunken had actually started in with his celebration well before that. Many coaches ignored a player taking an occasional nip from a bottle during a game. The alcohol helped kill the pain most players felt on the field, and the fear too.
Sometimes players went a little overboard though. Dunk recalled one game early in the previous year’s Chaos Cup tournament in which the Greenfield Grasshuggers, a halfling team, had been so drunk that they’d just laid there on the field as the Laurelorn Paladins trampled over them. Being sticklers for the rules, the Paladins had insisted on playing the game as long as Grasshuggers were still on the field, whether they were conscious or not.
Getrunken clearly had celebrated a bit too hard. He leered at the statuesque blonde, who stared the tall, burly man level in the eye and sneered at him.
“I am called Enojada,” the woman said, her spicy accent tinged with disgust at Getrunken’s state. “I have business here with your Captain Haken, and possibly with your team as a whole.”
“I’m part of the team, baby,” Getrunken said, slurring his words. “I can help you with any hole you need—”
Before the man could finish his sentence, the woman had knocked him to the floor with a sweep of her leg. Getrunken went down hard, his head cracking on the stone floor, knocking him even more senseless than he’d been. As he fell into a deep snore, she put a booted foot on his chest and leaned forward to loo
k at the others. Her eyes dared them to retaliate, to come to their team-mate’s defence.
No one moved. Getrunken had only been with the team for just over a week, and none of them had formed much of an attachment to him yet. That rarely happened, Dunk knew, until a player survived a tournament. Then he’d bond with the others on their way back to Bad Bay, aboard the team’s cutter, the Sea Chariot. He’d then become a brother, part of the family.
Right now, they only saw a lethal woman standing over a drunken fool.
Haken cleared his throat. “My Hackers? Allow me to introduce Miss Ay-No-Ha-Da.” He pronounced every syllable separately, as if the foreign word felt strange on his tongue. “She hails from Lustria, across the sea.”
Lästiges gasped, and the camra over her shoulder turned on the strange woman. “I’ve heard of you,” she said. “You’re an Amazon, one of the best Blood Bowl players Lustria ever produced.”
The tanned woman smiled, showing all of her glaring white teeth. “That was a long time ago. I’m retired these days. I work for the AFL, the Amazon Football League, now.”
“What brings you all the way across the ocean?” Lästiges asked. “The Spike! Magazine Tournament?”
“Partially,” Enojada said. “I watch the games on Cabalvision, of course, but there is nothing like being in the stadium.”
“Why are you really here?” Spinne asked. As she spoke, she held Dunk’s hand and gripped it tightly.
The Amazon smiled at Spinne, sizing her up. Dunk wondered if she was appraising his love for a uniform or a grave.
“In Lustria, we have our own tournament. It is not so famous as your Blood Bowl championship, of course, but everyone in Lustria watches it. This year, the AFL has decided that we should reach out to our companions across the sea, the ones that brought the holy sport of Blood Bowl to us, and invite them to join our league.”
Alarm bells went off in Dunk’s head, starting with the words “holy sport”. Fanatics of any kind, religious, Blood Bowl, or otherwise, put him on edge. He remembered the priest back in Dörfchen who’d tried to sell him out to the chimera menacing that little town. That experience had capped off his opinion of organised religion. Well, that and having to save the whole of Altdorf, the seat of the Empire, from the plots of the Blood God Khorne.
Everyone in the room started to talk at once.
“We can’t go,” Erhaltenes Spiel, one of the starting linemen, said. “We have a championship to defend.”
Dirk smirked. “A land full of gorgeous Amazons to wrestle with doesn’t sound too bad to me.” He elbowed Jammernder Anfäger, a starting lineman, and the younger player laughed.
Lästiges shot daggers at Dirk with her eyes. The two of them had been dating on and off for years, but their jobs kept them apart for weeks at a time. The strain on their relationship often showed, but she was too much of a professional to attack a Blood Bowl player on camra, or so Dunk hoped.
Others chipped in with their opinions, but it all came to a halt with a horrible screech. Dunk turned to see Pegleg scratching a long furrow in the team blackboard on the far side of the locker room. He kept it up until he had everyone’s attention and then scraped a little bit farther just to be cruel.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Pegleg said into the merciful silence. “The money is here in the Old World, not halfway across the planet in the bush leagues.”
Enojada scowled, her plastic demeanour cracking for just a moment before she restored her perfect smile. “Of course,” she said, “we expected as much. It is a pity though. The Lustrian Lusties, the team I used to play for, was very much looking forward to the honour of playing against you. Now I must face the pain of telling my team captain that you have decided she is not worth facing.”
“I’m sorry,” Spinne said, “but I don’t see how that’s our problem.”
Enojada licked her lips at Spinne as if she were a fly that had just wandered into her web. “Not you, of course, my darling.” Her gaze locked on Dunk and then Dirk. “But she will miss seeing the men she loves so much.”
Dunk felt like he’d been disembowelled. Spinne raised an eyebrow at him, and Lästiges looked as if she might pick up a spiky bit of armour and drive it straight into Dirk’s heart.
“Just who is your captain?” Dunk asked, dreading the answer. He didn’t know what game this Amazon was playing, but he suspected he wouldn’t like it.
“I thought you knew,” Enojada said, raising her hand to her mouth in mock shock. “She is called Kirta Hoffnung, of course. She is your sister, no?”
Dunk didn’t need to look at his younger brother to know they’d both come to the same decision. “We’re going,” Dunk and Dirk said in unison.
“Mr. Hoffnung and Mr. Heldmann,” Pegleg said, his whisper more menacing than any shout, “in my office.”
The ex-pirate walked back through the door in which he’d been standing, and Dirk and Dunk stormed through it. As they strode through the shocked silence of the locker room, every eye locked on them. Dunk spared a sidelong glance for Enojada, and had to fight the urge to wipe the smirk off her face. The woman might be the only link he had to his sister, but she didn’t have to be so smug about it.
Pegleg hobbled around behind his desk and said, “Close the door.” Before Dunk could slam it shut, Enojada slipped in.
“Out,” Pegleg said. “This is team business.”
“I believe I might be able to help.”
“I think you’ve done enough, miss.”
“Mizz.”
“How’s that?”
“We Amazons prefer to be called ‘mizz’, not ‘miss’.”
Pegleg tossed his hat on the desk before him. His eyes bulged like they wanted to pop from his face. “Get. Out. Of. My. Office.”
“She stays,” said Dirk. Enojada winked at him, and the man blushed. He recovered and backhanded Dunk on the arm. “If she knows where Kirta is, I don’t want to let her out of my sight.”
Dunk nodded. Then he looked at Pegleg, and braced himself for the man’s reaction. “She stays.”
Pegleg spat on the floor. “Fine. She should hear this too: We’re not going.”
“We are,” said Dunk.
“Now, boys,” a voice said from behind Dunk. He glanced back to see a rotund halfling, his agent, Slogo Fullbelly, peeking in through the still open door. “Listen to reason.”
“Forget it, Slick,” Dunk said. “If Kirta’s in Lustria, that’s where we’re heading.”
Pegleg scowled. “You can’t leave the team. We’re in the finals in two days.”
“Rotes can take my place,” said Dunk. “She’s been gunning for my spot for over a year.”
“She’s not the thrower you are.” He glared at Dirk. “And we don’t have anyone to replace you either. You’re both staying.”
“We don’t need to leave until after the game,” Enojada said. “That still gives us plenty of time to make it to the Tobazco Bowl.”
Dunk raised an eyebrow at the woman. “Why do they call it that?”
“Our stadium is formed in the natural crater in the top of Mount Tobazco.”
“Crater? What caused that?”
“Well, it is a volcano.”
Dunk slapped his forehead.
“So,” Slick said, “you boys want to run off to find your sister and play ball in the middle of an active volcano.”
“Oh,” said Enojada, “it sleeps now.”
“You mean it’s dormant?” asked Dirk. Dunk could see he was pleased with himself for having come up with the word.
“Yes, that is the word.” The Amazon smiled at Dirk.
“See,” said Dunk, “safe as can be. It can’t be any worse than playing in the Dungeonbowl.”
Pegleg slammed his hook into the top of his desk, and there it stuck. “We have an obligation to play in the Dungeonbowl again this year. We have a contract with the Grey Wizards to represent them. We cannot back out of that.”
“The Hackers can play. You just won’t have
Dirk or me.”
Pegleg’s nostrils flared as he spoke. “As your little agent there can no doubt inform you, Mr. Hoffnung, you have a contract with me. I plan to hold you to it.”
“I’ll buy myself out of it.”
“The contract is not for sale,” Pegleg said between gritted teeth.
“Dunk and I have plenty of money,” said Dirk, “now that we’ve inherited our family estate.”
“This isn’t about gold,” Pegleg said.
Dunk, Dirk, and Slick gaped at him.
“That’s the problem with players and their agents,” Pegleg said, “short-term thinking. Of course it’s about the gold, but not the gold I can hold in my hand.”
Dunk squinted at the ex-pirate. “What did you do with Coach Haken?”
Pegleg waved him off. “You don’t get it, do you? Last year, we did just what we set out to do, what I’ve set out to do every year of my career: win the Blood Bowl championship.”
“So? You should be happy.” He stared at his coach. “You’re not happy.”
“He’s never happy,” said Dirk. “Maybe the night after a win. The next day, he’s back to being cranky as ever. Coach Bombardi’s the same way.”
“I get it,” said Slick, rubbing his chubby chin, “he’s after a dynasty now.”
Dunk scratched his head. “What?”
Pegleg sat back in his chair and regarded the others. “A dynasty: a legacy, a chance to build not just a winning team, but a legend.”
“You’re getting old,” Dirk said.
Pegleg catapulted up out of his chair and lunged at Dirk. Unfortunately, his hook was still stuck in his desk from when he’d slammed it down earlier. He’d been trying to free himself the entire time without letting anyone know, but now he’d forgotten himself and almost broken his wrist for his trouble.
Dunk stepped between Pegleg and his brother before the ex-pirate went for his cutlass. He held his hands up in front of him to try to calm the enraged man down.
“What Dirk means, I think,” Dunk said, taking an instant to glare at his brother, “is that you’re starting to think not about what you’re doing, but about how you’ll be remembered.”
[Blood Bowl 04] - Rumble in the Jungle Page 2
