The lookout in the crow’s nest heard Dunk’s cry and opened his hooded lantern, shining it down on the deck below, catching the young warrior in the light.
Dunk glanced back, and his assailant — one of the recruits from the bow of the ship — tackled him. Dunk slammed back an elbow and felt it smash into the man’s cheek, the bone cracking from the force.
Still in the man’s grip, Dunk wrenched himself about and found the man about to drive the knife down at him again. This time the attacker aimed for Dunk’s eyes with a two-fisted stab straight down.
Dunk reached up with both hands and caught his attacker by the wrists, stopping the point of the knife bare inches from his nose. The man grunted with fury and strained to bring the knife down further. He was strong, maybe stronger than Dunk, and in his position he could bring all his weight to bear. Slowly, inexorably, the point of the knife drove lower and lower, glinting in the lookout’s lamplight, as well as that of a beam piercing the night from the cutter’s bridge.
Dunk pressed up against his attacker’s arms with all his might. He tried to wriggle left and right, but the assailant held him fast with his legs. There was nowhere to go.
Dunk howled in frustration. Then suddenly the attacker was gone, hauled up into the night. The lights followed the man, and Dunk saw him thrashing about as he dangled precariously in M’Grash’s grip.
The ogre held the panicked man at arm’s length and roared at him. “Don’t hurt my friend!”
The terrified assassin brought his knife around to stab it into M’Grash’s neck. The ogre didn’t see the attack coming, and Dunk feared the killer might fell even the massive creature with a well-placed blow.
“Get rid of him, M’Grash!” he shouted.
The ogre swept his arm out and back, then hurled the assassin into the black waters beyond the ship’s rail. He screamed the entire way as he arced through the night air until crashing through the waves into the deep below.
The attacker’s two friends dashed forward from their spot at the bow, their rapiers drawn, and thirsty for the ogre’s blood. Although he knew it was foolhardy, Dunk pulled out his hunting knife and stood with M’Grash, ready to take on the duo if they pressed the issue.
The gold-toothed man lashed out, but Dunk leaned back, just out of reach, and the sharpened blade whizzed bloodlessly by. “That’s three lives you owe me now,” the man hissed in his Bretonnian accent.
“What in Nuffle’s name is going on?” a voice shouted from behind Dunk. He glanced over his shoulder to see Cavre storming towards him and the others, four of the team’s linemen behind him, each bearing a long knife. “Stand down!” he said. “All of you!”
M’Grash fell to his knees instantly. Even in this position, he looked down at everyone else on the ship.
The two attackers immediately started in with their lies. “This man threatened us, and when Patric tried to defend himself, he had his pet ogre here throw him overboard!”
Off in the distance, somewhere in the water behind the ship, Dunk could hear a voice calling out for help. It was barely loud enough to hear already, but he knew the man was shouting as loudly as his lungs would let him. He started to say something, but Cavre cut him off.
“Shut your mouths, all of you!” The blitzer turned to the ogre. “Is that what happened?”
M’Grash shook his head so violently that Dunk feared his eyes might fly from their sockets. “Dunk in trouble. I help.”
“Their friend tried to knife me in the night. He could have killed me if M’Grash hadn’t stopped him. When he tried to stab M’Grash too, he threw the man overboard.”
Cavre shaded his eyes against the light and looked up at the crow’s nest. “Is that how it happened?”
A voice Dunk recognised as Kai’s called down. “Who would you trust?” Cavre opened his mouth to respond, but Kai cut him off. “M’Grash’s pal there has it right as far as I saw.”
Cavre glared at the gold-toothed man and his companion. “Mr. Jacques Broussard and Mr. Luc Broussard, is it?” he said. The men nodded sullenly. “Surrender your blades, all of them. There will be no killing here. You save that for the field.”
The men hesitated for a moment, then complied. The first only had his sword and a knife. Luc the one with the golden teeth, removed three other blades secreted about his body and handed them to Cavre. The blitzer weighed them in his wide, soft hands for a moment, then threw them overboard.
Jacques began to protest but Cavre cut him short. “You’re lucky that’s not you, Mr. Broussard. Now shut up and go back to where you were. If there’s another disturbance, I’ll have you thrown to the bottom of Manann’s watery kingdom, and you can search for your lost weapons there.”
The two men slunk back towards the bow of the ship without another word. The looks they shot back at Dunk felt like they might set his clothes afire. When Slick slapped him on the back of his thigh, he nearly jumped from his skin.
“That pair won’t be giving you any more trouble for the rest of the trip, son,” the halfling said. “Just leave them a wide berth.”
Dunk turned to Cavre and shook the man’s hand. “Thank you, sir, for seeing through their lies.”
The blitzer grimaced. “I wasn’t doing you any favours, Mr. Hoffnung. There may be some rivalry between those who wish to join the Hackers, but I won’t permit that to spill blood on this trip. Once we get to shore, though, you’re on your own.”
Dunk nodded. “I understand.” He hesitated a moment before continuing. “Can I ask you one more question?”
“Go ahead, Mr. Hoffnung.”
“What about the man overboard?” Dunk pointed back behind the ship, from where he could still just barely hear his attacker’s forlorn cries.
Cavre’s face turned even more serious now. “For what he did, Mr. Hoffnung, I’d have had him thrown overboard. M’Grash here just saved me the trouble.”
With that, Cavre turned and led the linemen with him back down the hatch.
8
Five days later, the ship pulled into the wide and sheltered Bay of Quietude, around which sprawled Magritta, perhaps the busiest port city in all of the Old World and certainly the busiest Dunk had ever seen. Dunk and Slick stood at the port rail as the ship slipped into the harbour and found itself a mooring at the pier. By now, the sun was high enough to splash the city with sunlight.
Guards in each of the two fortresses capping the twin horns of the bay waved down at the Sea Chariot as it found its way to the sheltered waters. They bellowed at the sight of the Hackers’ banner, some of them starting in with a rousing chorus of “Here we go, here we go, here we go!”
With the Spike! Magazine Tournament about to begin, it seemed that Blood Bowl fever had infected the entire town. Dunk was just glad to get a friendly response from the watchers in the towers. The catapults and trebuchets trained toward the bay made it clear that unwelcome guests would not enter so easily.
Other than Bordeleaux, Dunk had never been in a seaport before, and Magritta was as different from the Bretonnian town as Altdorf itself. The salty waters of the bay lapped right up against the docks that lined the edges of the city. From that buttressed border of wood and stone, the streets wound their way up into the hills that overlooked the water until they terminated in a tall stone wall that lined the natural ridge encompassing the bay.
“Is it safe for us to be here?” asked Dunk, suspicious of every new town after his reception in the previous two.
“Very,” Cavre said over Dunk’s shoulder. “With Spike! Magazine holding its tournament here, there won’t be any trouble. No one would dare, it’s worth too much to them and losing the tournament would half cripple this place.”
“It’s all about the crowns,” Slick said, a faraway look in his eyes. Dunk imagined he could see the reflections of those gold coins spinning in the halfling’s pupils. “The tournaments bring a huge number of visitors to the region with coins to toss around like confetti. Plus, there are the sponsors: Bloodweiser and th
e like. Not to mention the Cabalvision rights. I hear the new Wolf Network — you know, Ruprect Murdark’s group — won the rights this year to bring their camras to the field.”
“Camras?” Dunk had avoided most exposure to Blood Bowl throughout his life. Given his brother’s passion for the game, it hadn’t been easy, but he’d managed it.
“Enchanted boxes with a spirit trapped inside of them. The box is formed so the spirit has to look out through the glass lens on the front of it at all times. Back when there was an NAF—”
“A what?”
“The Nuffle Amorica Football league? The original league founded by Commissioner Roze-El back in 2409?”
“That’s a hundred and fifty years ago, a bit before my time.”
“It didn’t dissolve until 2489.”
“Still.” Dunk waved his hands at himself.
“Wait.” Slick narrowed his eyes at the young man. “Just how old are you? I can never tell with humans. Never mind! Don’t answer that. I’m sure I don’t want to know. It’ll just make me feel older than I want to be. Where was I?”
“Crowns. Camras. The NAF.”
Slick brightened. “Right! The various broadcasting companies hire wizards to use the Cabalvision spell to broadcast whatever the spirits in the camras see. Some people pay to have these appear directly in their minds. Others prefer to watch them in their crystal balls. Some of the best pubs have dozens of them, some larger than a wagon wheel, showing all the games played around the Old World at once.”
“My family had one of those. I never knew how it worked.”
“Other people use their Daemonic Vision Renderers to keep the broadcasts around so they can play them back later. These have the games broadcast into the head of an entrapped daemon, which is ensorcelled into having to play back the games it’s seen at the owner’s request. Of course, most daemons have tiny brains, so they can only remember so many different games at once.”
“You’re kidding,” Dunk said.
“Pegleg’s got one in his cabin. That’s why he never comes out during the whole trip. He locks himself in there to study the games — both ours and those of our likely opponents — picking out their weaknesses and protecting our own.”
Dunk shook his head. “Amazing. All this over some game.”
Cavre spoke up as the ship slipped into its slot in the docks. “It’s not just some game, Mr. Hoffnung. It’s the greatest game ever.”
Slick woke up Dunk at the crack of dawn the next morning. The Hackers had been the first Blood Bowl team to arrive in town, even though the games were due to start in only two days.
“Travelling to these games is expensive,” Slick explained as Dunk ate his breakfast and got ready for practice. “Most teams like to cut their trips as short as possible. No other Blood Bowl games are played in the region the week before the tournament. Everyone wants to be healthy for their shot at one of the four big cups.”
“There are four of these things?”
“There are lots of these things, if by ‘things’ you mean ‘tournaments.’ There’s probably a Blood Bowl game going on somewhere on any given day of the year, and there are tournaments every month. The big four — the Majors — those each only happen once a year.
“Your timing couldn’t be better, son, for starting out a career. The Spike! Magazine Tournament is the first of the Majors. From there, it’s the Dungeonbowl, a series of games played in underground stadiums, but you need to be sponsored by one of the Schools of Magic to enter that, so the Hackers won’t be in that this year. After that is the Chaos Cup, which is just as crazy as it sounds. It all culminates in the Blood Bowl, the greatest tournament capped by the greatest championship game of the year.”
“I thought the game was called Blood Bowl.”
“Technically, it’s Nuffle Amorica Football, or just Nuffle, but most people just call it after the most important match. ‘Blood Bowl’ just has a much better ring to it than NAF, don’t you think?”
Dunk just shook his head. “All those games, all the blood. How does anyone survive a full season?”
“Son,” Slick said, patting Dunk on the back. “You’d better just concentrate on surviving the tryouts.”
The Hackers had set up camp in an open area on the western shore of the bay. The tents stood on the dry part of the beach, and the gentle lapping of the waves lulled the team to sleep at night.
During the day, the team and its coaching staff assembled on a level grassy field between the beach and the great wall that ran between the city proper and the westernmost of the two fortresses that guarded the entrance to the bay. A score of hopefuls showed up for the tryouts on the first day, lured by the chance to play in one of the Majors, even for a relatively new team like the Hackers.
Slick informed Dunk that the current odds against the Hackers winning the tournament were 40 to 1 against.
“How many teams are entered?” Dunk asked.
“It varies from year to year. It’s somewhere in the hundreds.”
Dunk’s jaw dropped.
“Son,” Slick said, “the Majors are big. Humongous. Wait until you wander into town and see the tens of thousands of fans there. How do you think the teams can afford to pay the players so much gold?”
Dunk shook his head. “How do they whittle so many teams down? Do some of them not have to play in the first round?”
“Sometimes I forget how little you know about the game,” Slick laughed. “The first round doesn’t have any eliminations. The teams play as many games as they like against as many opponents as they like, although you can only play the same team once. If you win, you get a point.
“At the end of the first week, the teams with the top four number of points scored enter the semi-finals. The winners of those games face off in the finals, and the winner of that game is the champion. The runner-up gets 100,000 crowns, and the team that wins first place gets 200,000 crowns and the Spike! Magazine trophy; a mithril spike held in the fist of a gilded gauntlet.”
Dunk whistled. “Do the players see any of that?”
Slick raised an eyebrow at the young warrior. “Is that a hero’s first concern?”
“Isn’t it a Blood Bowl player’s?”
“Right you are, son!” the halfling said, slapping Dunk on the back and then looking him in the face. “Ah, I’ve never been prouder.”
Dunk almost thought he saw a tear start to form in Slick’s eye, but the halfling started talking again, breaking the sentimental mood. “Some players get bonuses if their team wins a big tournament. It depends on the team and the deal that the player strikes with the team.”
The halfling’s grin set Dunk’s teeth on edge, as Slick hooked his thumbs into his ever-straining braces and said, “That’s where I come in.”
Dunk stood up. Having come from wealth and been sheltered by it, the topic always made him uncomfortable. He knew that he needed to make a fortune somehow to help restore his family’s name and to make up for the horrible mistake he’d made to trigger his family’s fall in the first place. He was going to have to get over his embarrassment at talk of money for this to work at all. While he didn’t always like Slick, he was thankful that he’d found him. The halfling would give him just the kind of help he needed — or so he hoped.
“Right!” Slick said. “It’s time to report in for practice. You’re going to have to look sharp. I did a bit of scouting around last night, and there’s a lot more competition for those spots than we saw on the Sea Chariot!”
The two emerged from the shelter of their tent and trotted over to the practice field. Along the way, Dunk stopped to check on Pferd. The stallion had survived the ocean voyage well, but Dunk could tell he was anxious to stretch his legs. He’d have to take him for a ride later.
“How many?” Dunk asked.
“At least two score,” Slick answered, his tone flat and business-like.
Dunk nearly tripped over his own feet. “More than forty?” he grimaced. “Vying for how many spots?”
“There are four open slots.”
Dunk ran his hand through his hair. “I didn’t think there would be so many.”
“Don’t worry about it, son,” Slick said. “It doesn’t matter if there are four or four hundred. You’ve got the talent to be the best.”
“But I don’t have the first clue about what I’m doing.”
“Again,” Slick said with that grin that made Dunk shudder, “that’s where I come in. Stop for a moment, and I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
Dunk nodded. “We don’t have much time.”
“It’s all right,” Slick said, flipping a hand at Dunk. “I won’t get into things like throwing team-mates or avoiding chainsaws or Dwarf Death-Rollers. I’ll just cover the basics.
“Blood Bowl is played on a field or ‘pitch’ a hundred paces long by sixty wide. At each end of the pitch, there’s an ‘end zone’. The idea of the game is to take the football and get it into your opponent’s end zone by any means available, and score a touchdown.
“Each game starts with a coin toss. The winner chooses to kick off the ball or receive. If the ball goes out of bounds, the fans just throw it back in, and the game keeps going. It only stops for a touchdown. Then the team that scored kicks off to the other team, and it all starts over again.
“There are two thirty-minute halves with a twenty-minute break between. When the clock runs out the team with the most touchdowns wins the game.”
Dunk listened intently throughout. “That doesn’t sound so hard to follow.”
“It’s not,” Slick said. “That’s what makes it so popular. Even goblins can manage it. There’s all sorts of fun stuff I’m leaving out, of course, like how to best cheat and how to bribe the referees but we’ll have plenty of time to get to that once you make the team. The only real rule you need to remember is this: no weapons allowed.”
[Blood Bowl 01] - Blood Bowl Page 7
