[Blood Bowl 01] - Blood Bowl

by Matt Forbeck - (ebook by Undead)

  “We don’t normally take animals on board,” Cavre explained, “but Mr. Fullbelly has a special arrangement with the captain.”

  Slick grinned. “See, son, the sort of crowd you fall in with can colour your fate.”

  “For good or bad,” a voice growled from behind Dunk.

  The young warrior turned to see a tall, broad man glowering at him. He was about Dunk’s height but broader across the shoulders. The sides of his head were shaved, but he’d grown long what was left so that it pulled back from his widow’s peak to a long warrior’s braid threaded through with bits of steel wire. He smiled, and Dunk saw that he’d filed each of his teeth to a dangerous point. He seemed like a walking shark.

  “The name’s Kur Ritternacht,” the man said as he tried to crush Dunk’s hand in a vicelike grip. The young warrior gave back as good as he got, refusing to squirm in Kur’s gaze.

  “Never heard of you,” Dunk said. “But then I only know of the star players.”

  Kur released Dunk’s hand, and the young warrior breathed a private sigh of relief. “Don’t worry, kid,” he said. “I don’t play for the fans!” His emphasis on the last word left no doubt that he considered Dunk to be a member of this lowly class, something unworthy of his attention. He turned his back on Dunk and walked away.

  “Don’t let him rattle you, son,” Slick said, patting Dunk on the back of his leg. “He’s just worried for his job.”

  “How’s that?” Dunk asked as he watched Kur shove sailors out of his way as he went to recline in a hammock set up near the ship’s bow.

  “He’s the Hackers’ starting thrower… for now.”

  Dunk looked down at the halfling grinning up and him and felt a shiver run up his spine.

  “Don’t let him rattle you, Mr. Hoffnung,” Cavre said.

  Dunk smiled at the man. “You can call me Dunk, please.”

  Cavre smiled and shook his head. “Thanks, but no.”

  “I’d feel more comfortable if you did. Only my old teacher called me Mr. Hoffnung.”

  “And why is that, do you think?” Cavre asked. He raised his eyebrows and waited for the answer.

  “I took it as a sign of respect,” Dunk answered, just a bit confused.

  “And did your father’s other employees call you Mr. Hoffnung?”

  Dunk thought about that for a moment. “No, actually, none of them. They reserved that name for my father.”

  “Do you know why?”

  Dunk shook his head. He had a few ideas, but he somehow knew that none of them would match up with what Cavre would tell him.

  “First names are something to be shared with your peers.” Cavre smiled and then snapped a salute at Dunk before returning to his duties on the ship.

  Dunk and Slick strolled over to the ship’s railing so they could watch the towering buildings of Bordeleaux recede as they moved further down the river and towards the sea. The midday sun shone down on them brightly, bouncing off their red tiled roofs and piercing the smoke rising from the tall chimneys spotted throughout the town.

  “Well, we’re here, son,” the halfling said. “That was the first part. Now all we have to do is complete the second.”

  After a long moment, Dunk prompted Slick to continue. “Which is?”

  “To make the team, of course. Once we reach Magritta, Pegleg will set up a quick and dirty training camp and host try-outs. It’ll be up to you to outshine the others. Those who do will find themselves filling out the Hackers’ roster. The rest just get to go home.”

  Dunk turned around and leaned his back against the railing. He scanned the people around him, many of them working the ship’s rigging or helping guide it through this narrowest part of the navigable portion of the river as the Sea Chariot raced toward the sea. Others sat by themselves or stood gazing back at the city they’d left. A few exercised in ways that were designed more to impress the observer than condition the participant.

  “How many spots are there?” Dunk asked.

  “Now that’s thinking,” Slick said, turning to follow Dunk’s gaze. “I like to see that in my players.”

  “How many?”

  “Assuming there haven’t been any injuries or desertions since I left Pegleg in Bad Bay, there were twelve active players on the team. That leaves four spots to fill.”

  “Who’s on the team already?”

  “You already met Cavre and Kur. The two men who took our mounts, those were the Waltheim brothers, Andreas and Otto. Otto’s a catcher and Andreas is a blitzer. You see that woman over there?”

  Dunk followed Slick’s finger over to where a tall, androgynous figure swung high in the ship’s rigging. The blond-haired woman swung from rope to rope, working like a spider in its web, as if she was as at home there as anywhere else in the world.

  “That’s Gigia Mardretti, the other catcher. Her lover is the man in the crow’s nest, Cristophe Baldurson, one of the linemen.”

  Dunk craned his neck back to see a small, stocky man scouting out toward the horizon and shouting orders to the bridge below.

  “The man at the ship’s wheel, that’s Percival Smythe, a good bloke if a bit smug in his position. He’s the other, other catcher.”

  Slick swung his attention back toward the lower part of the ship’s rigging, where men worked the sails, unfurling them into the wind where they billowed taut and tall. “That lot there are the rest of the linemen: Kai Albrecht, Lars Engelhard, Karsten Klemmer, Henrik Karlmann. Kai and Lars have the dark hair, although Lars has thirty pounds on Kai. Karsten has the dark blond hair, and Henrik’s the one with the white-blond locks.”

  It struck Dunk as funny that Slick would refer to these men by the colour of their hair. They were uniformly the toughest group of people he’d ever seen. He supposed, however, that the hair was what set them apart from each other. They must have heard Slick mentioning their names, but they went about their business like trained professionals. They had no time for a hopeful rookie and his pint-sized agent.

  Dunk counted up the names quickly, then glanced at Slick. “That’s only eleven,” he said to the halfling. “You said there were twelve.”

  Almost as if prompted, the hatch through which Dunk and Slick’s mounts had been taken into the hold flung open, and a large humanoid creature stalked out. He stood somewhere over eight feet tall and had to have weighed in at nearly four hundred pounds. Great tusks jutted out from his lower jaw, lending a hungry look to the already monstrous face lurking below his bald and polished pate. Despite his size, his dark eyes seemed beady, set deep into his craggy face above a broken nose that featured a golden ring large enough to serve a bracelet for Dunk.

  Someone in the bow of the ship screamed. A low rumble escaped the ogre’s chest, and it took Dunk a moment to recognise it as laughter.

  “Dunk Hoffnung,” Slick said out of the side of his mouth, never taking his eyes from the massive creature approaching them, “meet M’Grash K’Thragsh.”

  7

  Dunk’s breath caught in his chest. The ogre before him seemed like something out of a child’s nightmare, so large and impossibly ugly that he could only have been excavated from the darkest fears buried in that child’s mind. Its breath smelled like it had been chewing on rotting meat and gargling sour goat’s milk.

  Strangely, it was smiling.

  Stunned, Dunk’s first inclination was to reach once again for his nonexistent sword. Instead, he stuck out his hand and said, “Well met, M’Grash.”

  The ogre looked down at Dunk’s hand, and thunder rumbled in his chest. He reached and took hold of the young warrior’s hand with surprising gentleness. Though when he shook it, Dunk feared his arm might separate at the elbow.

  “Name?” M’Grash said.

  Dunk couldn’t tell if the ogre was greeting him or threatening him. He had no social points of reference for this kind of meeting. In a flash, he decided to remain friendly and calm. Any other route, including leaping over the ship’s railing — which he considered for a moment — s
eemed sure to end in a terribly painful demise.

  “I am Dunkel Hoffnung, from Altdorf, the capital city of the Empire.”

  A thick smile spread across the ogre’s face. M’Grash’s mouth was wide enough that Dunk was sure he could stuff his whole head into it. He hoped that no similar idea was passing through the ogre’s mind at the moment.

  “Dunkel,” M’Grash said, the name rolling around on his tongue like a side of beef, sounding suddenly all too small in that massive mouth.

  “My friends call me Dunk,” the young warrior said, realizing then that M’Grash still held his hand in its massive mitt. He carefully extricated it from a grip he was sure could crush his comparatively tiny bones.

  “Dunkel,” M’Grash repeated. “You are Dunkel.”

  “Um, yes,” Dunk said. “That’s fine. Call me what you like. I’d like to be your friend.”

  A gurgling noise erupted from next to Dunk, and he looked down to see Slick looking as if he’d choked on his favourite kind of candy. The wide-eyed halfling gazed up at him and shook his head back and forth as he whispered, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no.”

  Before Dunk could ask what Slick was warning him against, he heard M’Grash rumble in childlike delight, “Friend?”

  Dunk snapped his head back around to look into the ogre’s gleeful eyes. The young warrior knew only one thing at that moment; that he should do whatever he could to avoid disappointing M’Grash. Tentatively, carefully, he nodded, bracing himself for whatever might happen next.

  “Friend!” M’Grash howled at the top of his capacious lungs. “Friend!”

  The ogre gathered up Dunk in his arms and gave him the bear hug of his life. The air rushed out of his lungs, and for a moment Dunk flashed back to an incident in the play yard of his family keep when his entire class had piled upon him during playtime. Crushed beneath so many bodies, he had wondered if he would ever be able to breathe again.

  This was worse.

  It only lasted for a moment more before M’Grash let go. “Friend!” he roared again. This time, he tossed Dunk into the air and caught him in his outstretched arms. “My friend!”

  When M’Grash brought Dunk back within arm’s reach, the young warrior grabbed on to the creature and embraced his massive neck with all his might. “That’s right!” he said. “I’m your friend for life!”

  “For life!” M’Grash said, returning the hug, much to Dunk’s despair. As the air rushed from his lungs again, he thought to himself, at least I’m not being tossed in the air.

  An instant later, Dunk found himself standing on the ship’s deck again, right before the massive creature. Without moving his hands, he mentally checked through his body, searching for any broken bones or otherwise permanent damage. Other than a few possible bruises, he thought he’d live.

  “My friend Dunkel!” The ogre’s grin was terrifying. Dunk was afraid he’d made the creature so happy he’d keel over dead right there.

  “Mr. K’Thragsh!” Cavre’s voice rang out from the bridge. “That will be enough.”

  It was as if a storm cloud had opened up over the ogre’s head. As Dunk looked up at the creature, it seemed almost possible that he was large enough to demand his own weather. M’Grash’s face fell, and his bottom lip shot out in a pout that looked like it could have beaten Dunk senseless.

  “About your duties, please, Mr. K’Thragsh,” Cavre said. “I’m pleased you’ve made a new friend, but we depend on your abilities to get us to sea.”

  M’Grash’s lip pulled at least halfway back in, and his eyes brightened. “Bye, friend!” he said to Dunk before turning away and stomping up toward the bridge.

  “By my grandmother’s best buttered biscuits,” Slick said, “I thought you’d made your last friend ever for a moment there.” He scanned Dunk over, checking for injuries. “You need to be more careful with ogres.”

  Dunk nodded, still stunned by the encounter. “Who was that?” he said, his voice distant, as if just waking from a dream.

  “M’Grash is the Hackers’ best blitzer. Pegleg found him in the forests around Middenheim. He lived with a family of loggers there who’d taken him in as an infant. Apparently the locals killed his family but couldn’t bear to put the sword to a newborn.”

  “But he’s an ogre,” Dunk said quietly, almost ashamed of the words as they left his mouth. “I mean, don’t ogres normally eat people?”

  Slick nodded. “Most do, but M’Grash’s upbringing changed that. He eats a lot, but humans, elves, halflings, and the like are not on the menu.”

  Dunk shook his head to clear the cobwebs. It was as if his mind had left him during his meeting with M’Grash, keeping him from screaming out loud in absolute terror. Now it came smashing back into his brain.

  “Is he dangerous?”

  “Very,” Slick said. “But he treasures his friends. Congratulations for making it on to that tiny list.”

  “Really?” Dunk said, slumping against the ship’s rail as the cutter found its way to deeper water. Its sails snapped briskly as it the wind pulled it to the west and the open sea beyond. “He seemed friendly enough to have an army on his side.”

  Slick smirked. “Most folks don’t respond so well to an ogre’s greeting, son.”

  Dunk breathed in big gulps of the salt-tinged air. He’d never been on the ocean before, and never on a sailing ship so large. The barges that crawled up and down the Talabec and the Stir as they met at Altdorf to form the mighty Reik might have been larger, but they couldn’t rely on something as capricious as the wind to move them toward their goals. The whole day seemed painted with a thick coat of the surreal, and he feared life would only get stranger as the days rolled on.

  “Who are those others at the bow?” Dunk asked, hoping to take his mind off what had just happened.

  Slick looked over at the three men sitting together at the bow of the ship, almost in the shadow of Kur’s hammock, as if he were an altar at which they worshipped. They wore their dark hair wild and greasy, and they seemed to be missing most of their teeth. They chatted with each other furtively, their eyes darting about the rest of the ship. The largest of them, a bear of a man who now seemed tiny compared to M’Grash — Dunk hoped the rest of the Blood Bowl league wasn’t filled with creatures like that — glared over at Dunk and flashed him a sneer filled with golden teeth.

  “Those are the other hopefuls, I suspect,” said Slick. “Once we get to Magritta, Pegleg will hold team tryouts. Bloodweiser Beer is sponsoring the event, so they’ll have plenty more give it a try once we get there. I’d guess that lot signed on back in Bordeleaux.”

  “What makes you say that?” Dunk asked, still just a bit fuzzy headed.

  “For one, they’re Bretonnian for sure. Just listen to those mealy-mouthed accents. More importantly, though, do they remind you of anyone?”

  Dunk stared at the men for a moment. The gold-toothed one spat back in his direction. Then it dawned on Dunk, as cold as a wintry dip in the Reik. “Do all the dockworkers in Bordeleaux look so much alike?” he asked, not sure what the best answer would be.

  “Only when they’re brothers or cousins.” Slick shook his head. “Blood Bowl is a deadly game, on the pitch and off. Those ruthless buggers we met on the dock didn’t attack us at random. They wanted to thin out the competition for their friends here.”

  “But won’t there be a lot more hopefuls in Magritta?”

  “I said they were ruthless, son, not smart.”

  Dunk lay his head back against the railing and looked up at the open, blue sky. “What have you gotten me in to, Slick?” he asked.

  “Just settle back,” the halfling said. “We have a long trip still ahead of us.”

  * * * * *

  Dunk awoke that night with a knife against his neck and a garlic-coated voice hissing in his ear. He knew who it was, at least within a group of three people, before he heard the words. “You killed my brother, and now you’re going to die.”

  Most of the Hackers had gone below decks afte
r sunset. Their berths were down there, as was the galley. Cavre had brought Dunk and Slick a bowl of passable stew each and handed out the same to the trio at the ship’s bow. “Recruits sleep on deck, Mr. Hoffnung,” he’d said. “When you make the team, you’ll find yourself below.”

  “When?”

  Cavre had just smiled and then disappeared through the hatch again.

  “The agents sleep up here too?” Dunk had asked Slick.

  The halfling had looked up from his bowl of stew, already over half in his belly. “You see any other agents around here, son?”

  Dunk had made a show of looking around, but he had known the answer. “Nope.”

  “Blood Bowl teams don’t care much for agents. We’re more what they like to call a ‘necessary evil’. We bring them the best talent, but we also make sure they pay the best rates for it.”

  “So you’re sleeping up here?”

  Slick grinned as he finished up his stew and set his bowl aside. “I wouldn’t trust my neck down there.”

  Now it was Dunk’s neck on the line. Without thinking, he brought up his hand to grab at his attacker’s knife arm. The assassin pulled back and brought his knife down at Dunk’s chest instead, intending to plunge his blade deep into the young warrior’s heart.

  The point of the blade glanced off the breastplate under Dunk’s shirt.

  You think I should take it off, Dunk had asked Slick. We’re on a boat after all.

  Not tonight, son, Slick had said as he laid his head down on the deck and closed his eyes. Better to get the lay of the land before you let down your guard. Besides, if you get tossed overboard in the middle of the sea, you’d be better off getting dragged to the bottom before the sharks got you.

  Slick had snickered at that, making Dunk think the halfling had intended it as a joke. However, when he thought of Pegleg, it didn’t seem all that funny.

  Dunk slid from under his attacker and let out a yell for help. He couldn’t see much in the darkness. The ship sailed along under a sliver of a moon, the pilot able to pick out the coastline several miles to port, but Cavre had said the captain didn’t like to attract attention at night. That sort of thing could be fatal out here, so they ran without lights instead.