[Blood Bowl 04] - Rumble in the Jungle

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  “I am your coach and captain! You will follow my orders.”

  Slick came down towards the deck once more. He tried climbing his way up the ogre’s massive arm, but it was too wide around for him to get a proper grip on it with his tiny arms.

  “Belay that!” Dunk said, coming up behind the captain. “Don’t let coach harm a hair on Slick’s head.”

  “Mr. M’Grash, I am your employer, and I am giving you a direct order.”

  “I am your best friend, and your employer, and I say, leave him where he is.”

  M’Grash’s massive eyeballs shuddered back and forth between Dunk and Pegleg for half a minute. Then his monstrous lower lip pouted out and started to tremble. A moment later, the ogre collapsed to the deck and began to sob, cradling the halfling protectively in his arms, keeping anyone from touching him for good or bad.

  Dunk stepped up to M’Grash and put his arm around one of the monster’s shoulders. “Come on,” he said soothingly, “it’s not that bad.”

  “The hell it’s not!” said Pegleg. “Let loose that miserable butterball of a turkey, or I’ll lay you open with my hook.”

  M’Grash’s sobs only grew stronger.

  “Stop it!” Dunk said to Pegleg. “Can’t you see what you’re doing to him?”

  “Why is he sobbing like that?” Lästiges said. “He’s big enough to toss them both overboard any time he likes.”

  “I’ve seen this before,” Dirk said. “Dunk used to do this once upon a time too.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Look at him,” Dirk said, pointing at the weeping ogre. “He hates it when Mum and Dad fight.”

  “Shut up!” Dunk and Pegleg said to Dirk in unison.

  The two men looked at each other and had to laugh. They started out slow, but ended up bent over cackling, tears streaming down their cheeks.

  M’Grash reached out with a massive, tentative hand and patted both of the men on the back at the same time. “It’s okay,” he said. “M’Grash be better ogre now.”

  They turned to look at him, and then burst into deep-hearted laughter once more. Seeing the concern on the ogre’s face, Dunk soon straightened up and clapped his friend on the shoulder. “It’s all right,” he said. “You did great. We’ll be fine.”

  M’Grash offered a tentative smile.

  “Buck up, you big baby,” Pegleg said. “We can’t afford the nappies for a child your size.”

  M’Grash froze and gaped at the ex-pirate. Dunk wondered if the ogre might finally snap and hurl their coach overboard. The creature reached out towards the ex-pirate with a massive mitt, and tousled Pegleg’s hair.

  Pegleg patted the ogre’s hand affectionately. “It’s all right, big boy. Dunk and I need to finish our discussion, but we’ll be all right. Don’t you worry about it.”

  M’Grash grinned, opening his mouth wide enough to swallow Slick whole. Instead, the halfling scampered out of his arms and scurried behind the ogre’s protective bulk. He peeked back around M’Grash’s shoulder at Pegleg, but the coach had already turned to escort Dunk back to the bridge.

  “We need to make this work,” Pegleg said, “for the ogre’s sake.”

  “You’re really afraid of hurting his feelings?”

  Pegleg shook his head. “Of being hurt by him. In many ways, Mr. K’Thragsh is still an extremely large child. If we make him mad, he may forget who his friends are.” He looked at Dunk meaningfully. “All of his friends.”

  Dunk nodded. “So we need to work this out.”

  “At least until we can get off this ship.” As they reached the bridge, Pegleg unlashed the wheel and started to turn it about. Dunk slapped a hand on it and pulled it back to where it had been.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked the ex-pirate.

  “This foolishness is over, Mr. Hoffnung. Team owner or not, you’re still one of my players, and we’re going home.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Dunk. He glanced over his shoulder and saw M’Grash watching them. “We’re fitted for the trip to Lustria, and we’re already on our way. That’s our destination, and I can tell you right now that Cavre agrees with me. You’re outvoted.”

  As pleasantly as possible, Pegleg said to Dunk, “You can’t vote against me if you’re dead.”

  “You know the rules against that,” Dunk said. “If an owner is convicted of killing another owner, he automatically loses his part of the franchise.”

  “Yes,” Pegleg said. “The Game Wizards put that into place after the six owners of the Chaos All-Stars spent most of a Chaos Cup tournament trying to kill each other off. That’s a fairly obscure piece of knowledge for a player to have, Mr. Hoffnung. Might I guess that Mr. Fullbelly educated you about that particular protection?”

  “Slick has been a great help. As my agent, my official representative to the team, he’s protected by that ruling as well. Otherwise, I’m told Dodger Badall will teleport in here and turn anyone flaunting the rules to a crisp.”

  “Badall? The lead Game Wizard? He’s part of that new crew trying to revive NAF, isn’t he? That league’s been dead for decades.”

  “So has Badall. He just hasn’t noticed yet, but he can still fry your heart in your chest should you try anything.”

  “This isn’t over,” Pegleg said between his teeth, keeping up his lousy smile for the ogre’s sake. “We’ll turn this boat around if I have anything to say about it.”

  “If you try, I’ll hogtie you, and let Dr. Pill feed you whatever he wants.”

  Pegleg sneered, and then put his hook on Dunk’s shoulder. “I should kill you right here and now.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  As the words left his mouth, Dunk knew how untrue they were. All he could think of was getting to Lustria. Before he could respond, though, Rotes’s voice sounded down from the crow’s nest high above.

  “Ahoy!” Rotes said. “Ship ahoy! Off the starboard bow. Ahoy! She’s flying the black flag, the Jolly Roger.”

  9

  Dunk raced to the front of the ship, Pegleg limping after him. He shielded his eyes with his hand and stared out at the horizon, while the ex-pirate pulled a collapsible spyglass from his coat and trained it in the same direction.

  “I don’t see a thing,” said Dunk. Rotes had pointed almost directly west, but all he spied was the sun glittering on the water and a few clouds gathering near the horizon.

  “That’s because you’re looking for a ship,” Pegleg said. His spyglass locked onto something at the edge of the world.

  “As opposed to what?” Dunk hated it when Pegleg talked to him like a child. After three years working with him, he should have been used to it, but now that they were business partners, he found it grated more than ever.

  Of course, Pegleg probably didn’t think of them as partners yet. Perhaps that would come later, or never.

  “A mast.” Pegleg handed the spyglass to Dunk, keeping his eyes fixed on whatever it was he’d spotted. “From up there, Miss Hernd can see farther over the horizon than we can. When she spots a whole boat, we can only find its tip.”

  Dunk brought the spyglass up to his eye and trained it on the horizon. There, right where Pegleg had been looking, he spied two slivers of black barely stabbing up out of the dark blue waters. A black rectangle spattered with bits of white fluttered from the top of one of them.

  “Can we outrun her?” Dunk asked. He handed the spyglass back to Pegleg, who pocketed it once more.

  The pirate craned his neck back and hollered up at Rotes. “What sort of ship is she?”

  The woman lowered her spyglass and peered down over the side of the crow’s nest. “It’s a ship, a big one.”

  “What kind?”

  “I’m a Blood Bowl player, not a sailor. How should I know?”

  Pegleg glanced around to shout an order, but stopped when he spotted Cavre already halfway up the mast. Rotes clambered out of the tiny crow’s nest and slipped down to the deck as the first mate replaced her, grumbling
as she went. “There’s nothing in my job description about spotting pirates,” she said.

  Pegleg ignored her. He gave Cavre a moment to survey the situation through the spyglass that Rotes had left behind. “Report, Mr. Cavre.”

  “She’s a galleon, captain, four masts.”

  Dunk watched Pegleg for his reaction. The man went white.

  “Can we outrun her?” Dunk asked.

  The captain didn’t answer. He turned and stared out at the slivers on the horizon, as if the gates of hell might burst open from that direction.

  “If they’re gunning for us, not a chance,” Pegleg said, “but we’re damned well going to try.”

  The captain turned back to his ship and bellowed out his orders. “To your stations! Mr. Reyes, take the wheel and bring her full about.”

  The Estalian lineman gave the captain a sharp nod and dashed off to fulfil his orders. Dunk had rarely seen the man move so fast, even on the Blood Bowl field.

  “Mr. Cavre, report on any changes.”

  “Aye-aye, captain.”

  People scrambled around the ship to prepare for the change in heading. While Dunk had no desire to head back to the Old World, he knew he’d rather delay his reunion with Kirta a bit longer than face a pirate raid.

  Last year, Dunk had nearly drowned in an oceanic encounter with the daemon-crewed Seas of Hate, the ship on which Pegleg had once been enslaved. He didn’t care to repeat the experience.

  “Any chance you have some more of those enchanted cannonballs in the hold?” Dunk asked. M’Grash had hurled them by hand at the Seas of Hate, sinking the ship of damned souls.

  “Perhaps a few,” Pegleg said. “I intended to restock in Magritta after the tournament. I don’t suppose you or Mr. Cavre, or Mr. Fullbelly thought about that when you took over for me, did you?”

  Dunk’s stomach flipped. He’d suspected that he’d got in over his head with all these business manoeuvres. Now he knew for sure.

  Pegleg stood tall and surveyed his crew, as the players worked the sails and managed to bring the ship about, putting their backs to the wind. He’d trained every one of those people as both Blood Bowl players and sailors, and in either environment they worked like a well-oiled machine. His chest puffed out with pride as he watched.

  “So, Mr. Hoffnung,” Pegleg said, “just how much did you pay for part of my team?”

  Dunk blushed. “Um, just about everything I have. Dirk and I even put up the family keep in Altdorf against it.”

  Pegleg stroked his beard. “Really? Imagine that. Mr. Cavre drove you a hard bargain. He must have known how desperate you were. That’s not a good position from which to negotiate.”

  Dunk sighed. “I didn’t want to do it at all. Slick and Cavre convinced me that this was the only way, and since you’d been so stubborn about it, I believed them.”

  Pegleg said nothing. He watched the sails swell with wind, and a wry smile played on his lips.

  “I’d be happy to sell my shares back to you, once we get back from Lustria, of course.”

  Pegleg looked back over his shoulder at the ship chasing them across the sea. Dunk could see all four masts now, even without a spyglass’s aid.

  “Now, Mr. Hoffnung,” the ex-pirate said, “why would I want to take you up on that?”

  Dunk did a double-take. “Are you serious? I thought for sure you’d want the whole team back.”

  Pegleg arched his eyebrows. “I’m sure that once this foolishness is all over, Mr. Cavre will once again see things my way, and I’ll get to keep all your loot.” He scratched his chin. “A keep in Altdorf, you say? I always fancied living the noble life.”

  Dunk blanched.

  Pegleg clapped him on the back with his good hand. “Don’t you worry about that, Mr. Hoffnung. If we don’t escape that ship, the chances are neither one of us will ever see Altdorf again.”

  The Sea Chariot picked up speed on its new heading, and Dunk watched the water slip away beneath them as the cutter sliced through the waves. They moved as fast as he’d ever seen the ship go, and hope surged in his heart that they might have a chance.

  Then he glanced back over his shoulder, beyond the ship’s aft gunwale. He could see the whole of the pirate ship, from the tip of its mast to the waterline of its hull. It had gained on them as they came about, and it seemed to be getting closer still.

  “We’re not going to outrace her, are we?” Lästiges said as she made her way onto the bridge, the ever-present globe of her camra floating over her shoulder.

  “That’s why you’re the reporter and we’re the team,” Pegleg said as he gave the wheel a small correction. “Players have to believe in themselves. Reporters don’t believe in a damn thing.”

  Lästiges furrowed her wide and seamless brow at him. “You do realise you just avoided the question?”

  Pegleg smiled. “Turn that camra behind us, miss, and you can answer your own question.”

  Dunk turned and saw that the ship still gained on them. “Can we turn and fight?” he asked.

  “Against a galleon like that?” Pegleg asked. “She has around three score guns on her to our none, zilch, zero. Even if we could get inside her range, what would we do, board her? They must have a couple of hundred men aboard at least, maybe twice that.”

  “But we have to have a few of those cannonballs left, and we have M’Grash and Edgar.”

  “Even Mr. K’Thragsh can’t stand against that many. Edgar? They’d turn him into timber, maybe make him into their new figurehead. And those cannonballs? If we had a score or two of them, we might have a chance.”

  “But they worked so well against the Seas of Hate,” Dunk remembered how the rune covered balls of iron with the three finger holes in them had run right through the decks of that damned ship like a spear through a rotting corpse.

  “They were blessed, and that ship was damned, and packed with daemons. Whoever’s following us, they’re flesh and blood on a wooden ship. Blessings don’t work so well against the living.”

  “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

  “We’re running, Mr. Hoffnung. Pray for a freak wind.”

  Dunk reached into the captain’s coat pocket and withdrew the spyglass without a word of protest from Pegleg. He looked through it at the ship following them.

  It already loomed large enough in the lens for him to be able to pick out the faces of individual men peering out over the gunwales, waving their arms and pounding their fists against the ship. They bore wide grins on their faces, instead of the greed or bloodlust that Dunk had expected, and their cheery look made him shudder.

  “Does she have a name?” said Pegleg.

  “Who?” Dunk asked. “Spinne?”

  “The ship bearing down on us, about to destroy us, Mr. Hoffnung, does she have a name?”

  Blushing, Dunk swept the spyglass over the ship’s hull. He found the figurehead, which had been carved to resemble a Blood Bowl catcher diving for a ball just beyond his fingers. Dunk couldn’t see a face inside the spiked helmet, but he supposed the carving wasn’t supposed to be of a particular player.

  Then he spotted the ship’s name, emblazoned on the side of the stem in blood-red letters limned with gold.

  “It’s the Fanatic,” Dunk said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  Dunk lowered the spyglass to look at the captain. The man gave him a lopsided grin. “What’s so funny?” asked Dunk.

  Slick, who’d made his way onto the bridge, spoke up. “The Fanatic is the largest of the ships that follow the Blood Bowl tournaments around the Old World.”

  “People do that? I thought they mostly watched the games on Cabalvision.”

  “The wealthy can do what they want, and mostly they like to follow Blood Bowl. The Fanatic is the most notorious of the so-called ‘party barges’. It ferries the fans and their vices anywhere they want to go.

  “Their captain is an orc named Mad Jonnen. He hasn’t missed one of the majors since before you were born. He used to coach
the Orcland Raiders before he was fired. He was one of the best the game ever saw.”

  “Why’d they fire him then?”

  “He ate three of his players, on the field.”

  Dunk instantly felt seasick for the first time since climbing aboard the boat.

  “Okay, he didn’t eat them, just took a few chunks out of them with his teeth, during the middle of a game.”

  “Why?” Dunk glanced at Pegleg, hoping the conversation didn’t give the ex-pirate any ideas.

  “He’d bet on the game, and they’d caused him to lose thousands of crowns by not following his orders.”

  “He bet against his team?”

  Slick smiled. “No, he bet on the Raiders, but the players, who’d set up bets of their own, didn’t beat the spread.”

  “So why’s he chasing us?”

  “Two possibilities, Mr. Hoffnung,” Pegleg said.

  Slick pointed up at the sky. Dunk craned back his head and spied the crow’s next above. The Hackers’ flag snapped in the breeze above, its free end pointing in the direction they were going.

  Dunk looked back down at the halfling and shrugged.

  “They’re fans looking for autographs,” Slick said. “The Fanatic is packed to the sails with some of the top fans in the sport, and the Hackers have a lot of loyal admirers these days.”

  “What’s the second option?” Dunk said.

  “We somehow lost them a lot of money, and they’re here to collect it from our hides.”

  “So why are they flying a black flag?”

  “Jonnen used to coach the Raiders, son.”

  Dunk nodded. “And their colours are silver on black.”

  He raised the spyglass to his eye once more. There on the flag flapping high above the Fanatic, he spotted not a skull and crossbones but a silver helmet with a crest of spikes.

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Dunk brought the spyglass down to survey the people massed at the gunwales. He expected to see the same joyful expressions they’d worn before, although he had no idea if they’d been cheering for the Hackers or for their deaths.

  Each and every one of the people on the Fanatic wore a look of absolute terror. They waved at the Sea Chariot, some trying to get its attention, others using both arms to call it back. Some screamed in horror.