[Blood Bowl 04] - Rumble in the Jungle

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  He knew, though, that she could not pick the claw up, no matter how thick the mists might get. That didn’t mean she couldn’t use it. Maybe she could just by touching it, and maybe she couldn’t. He didn’t want to debate the issue, just get the damned thing away from her.

  Dunk dived into the mists and swept his arms and hands in wide arcs. At first, all he could feel was the fast-cooling lava forming a brittle shell beneath him.

  He made a mental note to be as careful as he could so that he wouldn’t suffer the same fate as M’Grash.

  Even so, he worried more about getting ahold of the claw than avoiding a painful death. If his mother’s ghost managed to somehow use it, he could bet that nothing good would come of it.

  “I wish—” Greta’s ghost began, just as Dunk’s fingers brushed against the claw. His hand clamped down on it in triumph, even as he began to lose the feeling in his fingers and toes from the cold that surrounded him.

  “Forget it,” Dunk said. “I won’t let you kill us all!”

  The ghost wailed once more. With the Lizard’s Claw held tightly in his hands, Dunk could not cover his ears, and his head rang with the ghost’s anguish.

  “Your sister is about to die!” the ghost said. “You can still save her if you let go of the claw, now!”

  “No!” Dunk said. “I w-w-wish…” He tried to say more, to finish the wish that would activate the Lizard’s Claw, but his teeth were chattering too hard, and his lips felt like they’d frozen together. He felt the skin on them tear as he pried them apart and tried again.

  “I w-w-wish.”

  The ghost screeched louder than ever before, and Dunk found that he could not go on. He knew, though, that if he could just hold on a little bit longer he might be able to catch enough of a break to spit out his wish.

  In his head, Dunk damned his mother for being so horrible. He damned himself for not being stronger, and he damned Slick for opening his mouth. He’d always thought of his agent as smarter than that, much smarter.

  The ghost’s screaming stopped, and Dunk realised that he’d been screaming right along with her. He pulled back his lips to expose his teeth and took one last frozen breath so he could spit out his terrible wish. He wondered, for a moment, what terrible price the Lizard’s Claw would make him pay, and then he damned that as well. If it meant saving his brother, his sister, and his love, the price could not be too high to pay. Then Dunk realised he’d been going about this all wrong.

  “Don’t touch me!” he said. “You can’t touch me! You can’t hurt me! Not anymore!”

  Dunk dragged himself back on his haunches. The cold had forced every bit of air out of lungs, and he could not catch his breath. The world began to spin and grow dark around the edges. He fell backward, and the Lizard’s Claw spilled from his hand. “Yes!” the ghost shouted.

  Dunk’s head hit the encrusted lava, and he felt it crack. The pressure building beneath threatened to blast him back to his feet, although perhaps without his skull. He rolled onto his side and felt a pair of hands grab his shoulders and haul him back from the freezing mists that still curled around his feet.

  “I’ll stop her,” Spinne said once Dunk was clear, but Dunk knew it was already too late. He grabbed her arm and held her back. He looked around for Dirk and spotted him hauling Kirta from under the burning bleacher. She looked like she might still be alive.

  The ghost’s upper body spiralled into the sky while her swirling, ethereal tail enveloped the Lizard’s Claw. She had something to say, and she wanted everyone to hear it.

  “I wish,” she said, louder than even the PA system, “that I could be solid enough to hold my children one more time, and strangle them to death!”

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Spinne said as she stared up at Greta’s ghost in awe. “I see now why you never talked about your mother.”

  “Move it!” Dunk said. He grabbed Spinne’s hand and began to pull her away. Slick had already raced off ahead of them and had made it halfway back to the dugout. “Run!”

  Dunk glanced back over his shoulder. In the distance, he saw that Dirk had tossed Kirta over his back and was climbing into the stands. A few of the Fanatic’s fans still standing there helped to pull the two of them to safety. Almost everyone else had found the good sense to run off.

  Greta’s ghost began to coalesce in mid-air. As it did, it changed in both shape and hue, becoming less grey and more solid. Soon it formed into an all-too familiar figure that Dunk had known since his birth. His mother hung there in the crisp sky, hovering over the smouldering field for a long moment.

  “Yes!” she said. “Now, I will finally be able to bring us all together! To unite my children! To—”

  Gravity kicked in, and pulled the solid creature back to the earth. As she plummeted towards the frozen crust of lava below her, she screamed. This time, she sounded all too human.

  As Greta, or her ghost, or some other strange cross between the living and the dead, hit the field, the crust below her broke, and the lava trapped beneath it geysered into the sky, enveloping and incinerating her in a lethal instant.

  Spinne, who’d long ago seen enough, pulled hard on Dunk’s arm. He whispered a silent goodbye to his mother, and then turned his attention to chasing after his love as fast as he could.

  The burst that had opened up beneath M’Grash had destabilised the field, and Dunk guessed that once that happened it wouldn’t be too much longer before the entire crater erupted again. The blast that had destroyed Greta must have been the tipping point. It set off a chain reaction of other bursts throughout the pitch, which rocked the ground so hard that Dunk found it difficult to stay on his feet.

  “To the dugout!” Spinne said.

  Dunk glanced there and saw Cavre gathering up Slick and pulling him inside. Otherwise, the place was almost empty, everyone else having already raced down the tunnel to the locker room at the first sign of the eruption. Only Pegleg still stood there, waving Dunk and Spinne in by windmilling his hook.

  Dunk looked back and saw Dirk, Kirta, and the last of the Fanatic fans charging up the stairs in the stands to reach the exit. He hoped they would make it in time. He hoped they all would.

  Hissing steam and burning ash burst into the sky all around Dunk and Spinne. A blast from a large crack in front of them shot lava thirty feet into the sky and forced them to change course to circumnavigate it.

  With a final burst of speed, Dunk and Spinne reached the dugout and dived through the door. Pegleg swung in right behind them and slammed the iron-plated door shut. The torches that had once been lit inside the tunnel had gone out, but Dunk could see well enough by the reddish glow the metallic door began to give off as the lava outside roiled against it.

  Dunk pulled Spinne into his arms and gave her a passionate kiss. If the door wouldn’t hold against the lava, he wanted to die in her arms, and if it did, there still wasn’t anywhere else he wanted to be.

  After a moment, when it became clear they would not die, at least not right away, Pegleg cleared his throat. Dunk and Spinne broke off their embrace and looked at him, blushing just a little and giggling in relief.

  “I’ll say one thing for you, partner,” the ex-pirate said. “You always think of the important things first.”

  Dunk grinned like a fool. He didn’t understand what the man meant, but at the moment he was too happy to be alive to care.

  Spinne, who had still managed to keep her wits about her, said, “What do you mean, coach? He just blew up the entire stadium.”

  Pegleg turned the pair of them to face back down the tunnel and put a hand and a hook on their shoulders as he guided them back towards safety and light. “True. The game is over, and the tournament is done, but Dunk did one thing right before it all went straight to hell.”

  “What’s that, coach?” Dunk asked.

  “You ran the play that let us score first.”

  38

  “Will you marry me?”

  Down on one knee, Dunk looked up at
Spinne, a beautiful ring set with a rose-red gem held up to her in his hands. He’d been planning this since the end of the game against the Lusties, and he’d worked nearly every moment since then to set it up just right. He’d arranged for a delicious and private, candlelit dinner in the captain’s luxurious quarters aboard the Fanatic. He’d picked up a bottle of the finest wine he could find on Amazon Island, and he’d been on his best behaviour ever since they’d survived his mother’s self-destruction.

  Spinne looked down at him, tears welling up in her eyes, and said, “What, now?”

  “Yes,” said Dunk, a little taken aback. He’d hoped for a “yes,” dreaded a “no,” and had not at all considered any strange tangents such as this. “Is that all right?”

  Spinne bared her teeth as she squirmed in her chair. “How… how soon do you want an answer?”

  Dunk’s heart fell. He felt it bounce through the boards of each deck and emerge in the dark waters of the night-black sea, into which it continued to sink until he could feel it no longer.

  “The sooner the better,” he said, offering up a weak smile to go along with the ring. This was not going nearly as well as he’d hoped. She hadn’t hurled him out of the wide window at the aft of the ship, which had been his worst-case scenario, but this was almost worse. That he could understand, at least.

  Dunk put the ring down on the table next to them and put his hands next to Spinne’s in her lap. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “I thought you wanted this too.”

  “I do,” she said, looking at him with shining eyes, her voice raw as a fresh bruise. “I did. I… I don’t know.”

  “You did?” Dunk sat back in his chair, his shoulders slumped. Something had gone wrong. He’d had his chance, his window of opportunity, and somehow he’d missed it. “What happened?”

  Spinne wrung her fingers together. “I don’t know. It… When we were in your keep in Altdorf, after we won the Blood Bowl championship and saved the Empire from the wrath of the Blood God, I knew then that I wanted to marry you, that I wanted to be with you forever.”

  “And?”

  “And you never asked. I waited, I hoped, I even tried a prayer or two to Nuffle, but nothing. I thought maybe something would happen in Magritta. After all, that’s where we first met, right?”

  “But I didn’t do anything.”

  “Right, and I figured I’d bring it up when we got back to Bad Bay. I’m not some damsel in distress who needs rescuing and then a proper wedding before bedding, as you well know.”

  Dunk nodded.

  “But then we got sidetracked. We wound up going to Lustria to find your sister, and then we got wound up in this disaster with your mother, and you got so focused on everything else that I wondered if you wanted to marry me.”

  “But I do!”

  Spinne looked straight into him. Most of the time, he loved it when she did that, but now it terrified him. “You say that, but you haven’t been acting like it. For much of this trip, you haven’t paid much attention to me at all. I wondered sometimes if you knew I was around or if you just thought of me as another one of your friends on the team.”

  “But…” Dunk desperately searched his memory for something to contradict her claims, some evidence that her concerns had no foundation. “What about that night on Columbo’s Island?”

  Spinne gave him a wistful smile. “That was wonderful. You were sweet and romantic and full of life. But the next morning, when it turned out everyone else was gone, kidnapped by the pygmy halflings, so was the Dunk I’d spent the night with.”

  “I… I had a lot on my mind,” he said. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t spend enough time thinking about you.

  “I don’t think I realised it until my mother’s ghost almost killed us out on that field. When I had to choose to save you or my sister, I chose you. You meant the most to me of anyone. You still do.”

  He reached out and took her hands again. “I don’t ever want to lose you.”

  Spinne smiled at him, and his heart leapt with hope. “What about Dirk? Didn’t he figure into that at all? Two lives instead of one?”

  Dunk arched an eyebrow at her. “Dirk? Dirk who?”

  They both laughed, and the tension between them flowed out of the room.

  “I do want to marry you, Dunkel Hoffnung,” she said, holding his hands again, “but can we make it a long engagement?”

  “How long?”

  She winced gamely. “At least until we get back home?”

  Dunk nodded. “Does that mean yes?”

  Spinne jumped up and hauled Dunk into a tight, passionate embrace. “Yes!”

  Dunk’s heart rocketed up from the depths of the oceans and zoomed right past him on its way towards the stars. He had never been so happy in all his days. He slid the ring on her finger, and she admired it, both of them wearing the grins of lovestruck fools.

  Then Dunk looked to the door. “Oh, ah, I need to, um, say something to the, ah—”

  “How many people do you have waiting outside to hear about this?”

  Dunk flushed as he hemmed and hawed before spitting it out. “The whole crew.”

  “The whole team?” Spinne’s eyes flew wide in astonishment.

  Dunk winced. “Plus everyone else on the ship.”

  “And what do they think is going to happen?”

  Dunk rubbed his neck. “Well, the plan calls for me sweeping you up in my arms and then carrying you up to the top of the forecastle where Pegleg would marry us.”

  Spinne stuck out her bottom lip and appraised Dunk in a new light. “Amazing.”

  “Any chance you’d change your mind?” he asked. “Not on my behalf, of course. Think of M’Grash. He’ll cry like a baby.”

  Spinne caressed his cheek and kissed him softly on the lips. “You’re a good man and a great friend. Someday you’ll make a wonderful husband.”

  “Someday soon?”

  Spinne nodded. “But not today.”

  Dunk put an arm around her waist. “All right,” he said, “but we have to tell everyone together.”

  Spinne grinned as they walked to the door. “Of course.”

  The door opened to a massive cheer. Everyone aboard the ship had turned out on the deck to learn the results of Dunk’s proposal. They were all there: the fans, the crew, Dirk, Slick, Lästiges (her camra still over her shoulder and recording every moment), Cavre, M’Grash, Guillermo, Spiel, Getrunken (who couldn’t seem to stop whooping), Edgar, and Pegleg, and even Kirta, and Jiminy who’d decided to sail back with them to the Old World.

  The ship had been decorated from one end to the other with lanterns flickering in the wind. A white runner stretched the length of the ship, right up the forecastle’s steps. Kirta held a beautiful bouquet of flowers ready to hand to the bride-to-be, and from somewhere on the foredeck the scent of a delicious feast wafted towards Dunk’s nose. Everything was just as he had planned it.

  Dunk held out both hands and waited for the crowd to quieten down. When the only sound was that of the ship cutting through the waves, he spoke. “I have good news, and I have bad news. The bad news is that there will be no wedding tonight.”

  A collective “awwwww” ran through the assembled crowd. Before it could die out, though, Spinne stepped forward and held her hand in the air, the ring sparkling on it. “But we will be married soon!”

  The crowd went from crushed to jubilant in an instant. Well-wishers rushed in to offer congratulations and embraces all around, and this went on long enough for Dunk’s face to hurt from smiling so hard.

  Eventually, Kirta made her way through the crowd and wrapped her arms around both Spinne and Dunk in a huge hug. “I can’t wait to finally have a sister,” she said, kissing them both on their cheeks.

  Jiminy stepped up behind her and offered his hand in congratulations. “I wonder if I might make a request of you,” he said to Dunk and Spinne. He gave them a bashful grin.

  “Anything,” Dunk said.

  Jiminy looked around the
ship. “Well, it seems like an awful waste, a crime if you will, to let this amazing spread go to waste.” He took Kirta’s hand in his. “Since you’ve gone to all the trouble to come up with the perfect shipboard wedding, that is. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like your permission to ask Miss Kirta if she’d be amicable to—”

  “Yes!” Kirta said, leaping into Jiminy’s arms. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  The crowd sent up a cheer that rocked the Fanatic from one end to the other. Although it was clear his sister didn’t need anyone’s blessing, Dunk and Dirk both stepped forward and gave it freely. Tears welled up in many an eye as Kirta tossed Spinne the bouquet, and then scooped up Jiminy and carried him straight to where Pegleg awaited them atop the forecastle.

  Dunk held Spinne close as they watched his sister dash off to her wedding, the wedding that could have been theirs. Spinne held the bouquet up to her nose and gave it a tender sniff. “It smells wonderful,” she said. “You thought of everything.”

  “Kirta helped,” Dunk said. “Actually, she managed most of it. She knew where to get everything on Amazon Island, and she tackled it as if it was her own day about to happen.” He smiled. “Now I guess it is.”

  Spinne leaned in close and gave him a kiss. “I won’t make you wait too long,” she said, “just long enough for us both to be sure.”

  “We’re going to be on this ship for a while,” Dunk said, squeezing her tight, “and the instant you change your mind, I think I know where I can find a captain.”

  A GUIDE TO BLOOD BOWL

  Being a volume of instruction for rookies and beginners of Nuffle’s sacred game.

  (Translated by Andreas Halle of Middenheim)

  NUFFLE’S SACRED NUMBER

  Let’s start with the basics. To play Blood Bowl you need two warrior sects each led by a priest. In the more commonly used Blood Bowl terminology this means you need two teams of fearless psychotics (we also call them “players’) led by a coach, who is quite often a hoary old ex-player more psychotic than all of his players put together.