“And that’s before your part of each game’s take,” Slick said.
“There’s more?” Dunk said, still stunned by the initial number.
“Every game a team plays comes with a purse put up by the sponsors. For non-tournament games, it’s not always all that much, a few score crowns each for the winners, a little less for the losers. For any of the Four Majors, though, it can be as much as another thousand apiece.”
“Let’s go!” Dunk said, already halfway out the tent.
“Wait!” Slick said, panic nearly stealing his voice.
“What’s wrong?” Dunk said.
“It’s better to stay cool about these things, at least in front of your coach,” Slick said. “You don’t want them thinking they paid too much for you.”
“Right” Dunk nodded. “Right. Stay cool.” He found that he couldn’t strip the grin from his face though. “How am I doing?”
Slick reached up and smacked Dunk on the side of the head. His hangover came ringing back in, hungry for revenge.
“Hey!” Dunk protested, grimacing in pain.
“There,” Slick said. “Now you look cool.”
“Thanks!” Dunk said as he aimed a fist at Slick’s head, but the halfling capered out of the way.
When the pair reached Pegleg’s tent, the coach called for them to come in before they even announced themselves.
“How did you know it was us, sir?” Dunk asked.
Pegleg squinted at Dunk as if perhaps regretting his decision to sign the man to a contract, no matter how much he might need him. “It’s a small camp,” he said at last. “I heard you whooping in your tent from here. I assume Slick told you about our agreement.”
Dunk nodded.
“Excellent Mr. Hoffnung. Then, if you’re amenable to that arrangement all we need is your signature here.” Pegleg took two pieces of parchment from the centre drawer of his desk and slipped them across the surface to Dunk. With his hook, he pushed a quill pen and a pot of the best ink from Cathay after it. “Take your time and read it if you like.”
Dunk did. If there was one thing he’d learned from his family, it was how important it was to read something before you signed it. There were two identical copies of the contract, which was surprisingly short and simple, and the deal seemed more than fair to him.
“I thought it would be as long as a book of spells,” Dunk said, signing his name next to Captain Haken’s on the bottom of both of the documents.
“They used to be,” Pegleg said, “but we don’t hire Blood Bowl players based on their intelligence. Many of them can’t even read. We try to make it as easy as possible.”
Pegleg took one of the contracts back from Dunk and gave the rookie the other. He slid his contract back into the desk, then rose and offered Dunk his hand. Dunk took it and shook it firmly.
“Welcome aboard, Mr. Hoffnung,” Pegleg said. “May you have a long and exciting career.”
“Thanks, coach!” Dunk said. He surprised himself by how much he loved calling someone that. “I’m ready for duty. When’s the next practice?”
Pegleg allowed himself a small smile. “No practice today, Mr. Hoffnung. At noon, we have our first game of the playoffs, against the Darkside Cowboys. It’s going to be a long week, with games every other day, but not for you.”
“Excuse me, coach?” Dunk said, suddenly concerned. “Why not?”
“Regulations state that a player cannot take part in a game until twenty-four hours after he’s been hired. It helps keep teams from trading ringers in and out at the last second.”
“Doesn’t that happen all the time anyhow?” Slick asked. “It’s a dirty game. Why start playing clean now?”
Pegleg smirked. “Normally I’m not so circumspect about such things, as you well know, Mr. Fullbelly. However, the murders garnered the attention of the Game Wizards, so we’re not able to be so careless with the rules as we might like.” He turned to Dunk. “You’ll be eligible to play during our next game in two days. In the meantime, I have an assignment of vital importance for you that, coincidentally, will keep you from the arena today.”
“What’s that, coach?” Dunk said eagerly.
“The rest of us will be in the arena,” Pegleg said. “We need someone to guard the camp.”
Off in the distance, from the stands of the Bay Water Bowl in the heart of Magritta, the crowd roared for what Dunk could only assume was another touchdown for somebody. He hoped the Hackers had scored, but he had no way to know. Pegleg had refused to activate his crystal ball for this game, insisting that Dunk patrol the camp instead. “Otherwise, you’ll be stuck in here watching the game, Mr. Hoffnung, while someone robs us blind.”
Dunk had to admit that he probably would have found it hard to pull himself away from watching the game via Cabalvision. He’d seen precious few games in his life and never watched one all the way through. Now it looked like that might not happen until his first game as a professional player, and the thought made him nervous.
To take the edge off his nerves, Dunk took to pacing around the camp with Slick. This not only helped him walk off his excess energy, but it also meant he was doing a good job at the task Pegleg had set for him.
“It’s important you keep Pegleg happy,” Slick told Dunk. “While we have a great deal with him, he can fire you at a moment’s notice.”
“And then I’m out in the cold?”
“He still has to pay you for the month after you’re fired, unless you take up with another team, of course. Then you’re on your own.”
“But I don’t want to do that. I like the Hackers.”
Slick looked up at the rookie. “What would you do if someone offered you more money, son? A lot more?”
“Sign up with them for next season, or ask to be traded.”
Slick smiled wanly and shook his head at Dunk. “That, son, is why you have me to handle the deals around here. It’s not all that simple.”
Dunk glared down at the halfling. “You can’t make another deal without my say-so though, right?”
Slick nodded. “I need your mark on the bottom of the contract, don’t I?”
“Always looking out for me, right?”
“I’m not the only one,” Slick said as they strolled along. “You might want to extend some gratitude toward your brother.”
Dunk froze in his tracks and frowned. “For running out on our family when we needed him most?”
Slick shook his head. “I don’t know the details of all that, son. Not any more than Dirk told me, at least.”
“Dirk…?” Dunk cocked his head at Slick. “He… he told you about my family?”
The halfling nodded sheepishly. “You don’t think I was wandering through Dörfchen on a whim? That would have been an amazing coincidence.”
Dunk stared at Slick. “Dirk told you where to find me?” He felt like he might start to choke. His voice grew more strained as he spoke. “He told… he told you about what happened with our family? He gave you what you needed to blackmail me into playing Blood Bowl?”
Slick put up his hands to calm the young man down. “He was only looking out for you, son. He’d heard you’d set off to slay dragons. He was concerned for your life.”
“Blood Bowl is safer?”
Slick summoned up a wide grin. “It pays far better.”
Dunk jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. He wanted to throttle the halfling and then hunt Dirk down and do the same for him. His brain felt like it might burst out through his eardrums first.
Dunk pulled his hands from his face and roared at Slick in heartrending frustration. The halfling flinched away and tumbled onto his back, raising his arms to fend off Dunk’s attack.
Dunk glared down at the halfling lying there in the ground, defenceless against him. He could have gutted him with his bare hands. He could have broken his neck with a single twist, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He threw back his head to roar again when he spied the far-off entrance to Pegleg’s tent
moving. He immediately fell silent and pulled Slick to his feet. “Did you see that?” he asked the halfling.
“If you mean how you knocked me into the beach, then yes, I got that,” Slick said, spitting out a mouthful of sand.
“Someone’s in Pegleg’s tent.”
The halfling sat up and joined Dunk in peering around the edge of their tent. “Are you sure?” he asked.
Dunk nodded, his anger fading away. “I saw the flap of his tent moving, and there’s no breeze in the air today.”
“Maybe Pegleg came back for something he forgot.”
“In the middle of a game?”
Dunk grimaced and drew the sword that Pegleg had given him. “We can’t have you guarding the camp with that little snotling-sticker of yours,” he’d said.
When Dunk had first pulled the blade, he’d been astonished at its sharpness and balance. It was as if it had been forged for his hand. “It’s marvellous,” he’d said to Pegleg. “I can’t thank you enough for it.”
“No,” the coach had said, “but you can pay me. It’s coming out of your first month’s salary.”
“Will I have anything left?” Dunk had asked, just a bit worried.
Pegleg had narrowed his eyes at the rookie. “Mr. Hoffnung, are you sure your agent fully explained to you the exorbitant amount of gold I’m paying you?”
The blade felt just as good now as it had before, and its heft in his hand gave Dunk a shot of confidence. “I’m going in,” he said.
“Good on you, son,” said Slick. “I’ll stay out here to sound the alarm if you don’t come out in five minutes.”
Dunk glared at Slick. “How very brave of you.”
The halfling shrugged. “I’m an agent, not a player.”
Dunk patted Slick on the head and then took off for Pegleg’s tent at a dead sprint. When he reached the tent’s door flap, he charged right through, his sword in front of him.
There, behind Pegleg’s desk, stood a middle-aged man dressed entirely in robes of a dark, midnight blue, trimmed with bluish-white piping that seemed to glow against the bulk of the cloth. The man was tall and gaunt with a wispy white beard. His hair, if he had any, was covered entirely by a silver skullcap that approximated the outlines of a taut widow’s peak that came to a point in the centre of his forehead. His bright green, watery eyes glared out at Dunk with a hatred the young man had rarely seen, and the man’s lips trembled nervously as he spoke.
“L… leave now,” the man said, shutting the drawers of Pegleg’s desk that he’d been rummaging through, “and I will not feed your s… soul to the Blood God Khorne.”
“You’re sure that’s not ‘K… Khorne’?” Dunk said as he came at the man, his blade before him, ready to strike.
“Everyone’s a c… comedian,” the man said with disgust. He turned toward the dressing screen in the back of Pegleg’s tent. “Stony, please remove this man.”
The hairs on the backs of Dunk’s arms and neck stood on end as the dark-skinned creature crept around the edge of the screen. It was no taller than Dunk, except for the twisted horns curling atop its head and its wide, bat-like, claw-tipped wings that scraped against the tent’s walls and ceiling as it moved forward on goat legs. It flexed its thick muscles as its full-crimson eyes, which seemed to be filled with blood, rested on Dunk, and a set of savage talons popped from the tips of its fingers.
“Yes, Zauberer,” the creature rasped, its voice like metal on stone.
“That’s ‘master’ to you, gargoyle,” the man said menacingly. Then he pointed to Dunk. “Kill him. Permanently. Now.”
15
Dunk leapt at the daemon, his sword flashing out before him. The wizard, if that’s what Zauberer was, fell back out of the way, clutching some papers in his grasp.
Dunk’s sword slashed across the gargoyle’s chest, biting through its thick skin and drawing blood. The sight brought a smile to the rookie’s face. If the thing had been made entirely of stone, this would have been a short and fatal fight — for him. As it was, he thought he still stood a chance.
The gargoyle bellowed in pain. The closest thing Dunk had ever heard was as a child when he’d seen a man get his arm caught in a mill. The combination of the man’s screams and the sound of living bone being ground to dust had set his teeth on edge in the exact same way.
The gargoyle jumped into the air on its backward-folding legs and launched itself at Dunk. It slammed into him painfully and the two went soaring back through the tent’s front flap and into the open area beyond.
Caught in the gargoyle’s granite grip, Dunk struggled to catch his breath. As he did, he smashed the pommel of his sword into the creature’s face, drawing both blood and a sinister cackle from the thing’s battered mouth. He lashed out again and his blade sliced through the edge of one of the gargoyle’s grey, leathery wings.
The daemon howled in rage and shoved Dunk away from it, sending him tumbling back over himself until he came to a stop near the now-cold fire pit in the middle of the camp. When the rookie managed to recover his feet, the daemon was nowhere to be seen. The wizard, on the other hand, was sprinting along the beach, back toward the distant docks of Magritta.
His sword still in hand, Dunk burst out of the camp after the wizard. Zauberer’s speed was no match for the rookie’s, and soon Dunk was close enough to hear the wizard’s laboured wheezing as he tried futilely to outrace him.
“Dunk!” Slick shouted from somewhere back in the camp. “Look out! Above you!”
Dunk cursed himself for being so foolish. Of course, that’s where the gargoyle had gone. He’d taken his focus off of the greater threat in this fight, and now he would pay for it, possibly with his life.
The gargoyle slammed into Dunk from behind, hard. Instead of sprawling along the wet sand of the beach, though, Dunk found himself being lifted into the air with the fervent beating of the creature’s leathery wings.
The rookie wrenched himself around in the daemon’s rough-hided arms as they climbed higher and higher into the air. Dunk looked back to see the waters of the bay growing further away by the second.
The gargoyle bared its teeth at Dunk, its face only inches from his. It was a moment before Dunk realised the creature was smiling.
Dunk smashed the creature in the face again, but it just kept smiling at him, unaffected by the blow and uncaring about the blood that it brought forth.
Dunk raised his right arm as high as he could and slashed at the creature’s wings. His blade sliced straight through the top angle of one of the wings, and it collapsed instantly, unable to hold the air any longer.
This elicited a stony screech from the gargoyle as it flopped lower, struggling to keep aloft with only a single working wing. “We are over the water,” it said in its metal-on-stone voice. “You will kill us both!”
It was Dunk’s turn to smile as he angled a blow at the creature’s other wing. “I can swim,” he said.
The blade cut deep into the wing, and it parted like a torn sail. The gargoyle and Dunk plummeted out of the air as if struck by a boulder from one of the trebuchets mounted on the fortresses at the tips of the bay’s horns.
Dunk smashed the creature in the face again as they fell and pushed away hard. The gargoyle’s arms let him loose as it began to flap them as well in a vain attempt to keep itself in the air. He kicked away from it and arced into a long, curving dive, tossing the blade clear. The last thing he needed was to impale himself on it when he hit the water.
Dunk hoped the water would be deep enough where he landed.
The rookie pierced the surface of the bay like a giant bird of prey going after a fishy meal. The waters were cool, and the shock of hitting them nearly drove the air from his lungs. He curved himself about as his momentum tried to carry him deeper, letting the water sluicing around his body bring him parallel with the bay’s sandy bottom then push him back toward the surface.
When Dunk’s momentum finally ran out, he kicked hard and climbed his way back to the surface
as fast as he could, his arms and lungs protesting at the effort. He could see the light of the sun high overhead through the water above him. All he had to do now was reach the unfiltered light before he ran out of air.
A moment later, Dunk’s head broke the surface. He nearly choked while gasping in the sweet-tasting air. His lungs filled again, he glanced about for the shore and then made a beeline for the nearest beach.
When Dunk finally found sand beneath his feet again, he looked back at the bay behind him that had almost become his unmarked grave. The well-named Bay of Quietude was as calm as it ever was, except for the ripples his own movements threw across its surface.
“By Nuffle’s horny helmet, son,” Slick said as he raced up to the rookie. “That was amazing! I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Just.” Dunk stopped for a moment to hack a few dregs of water out of his lungs. “Just doing my job.”
Slick scratched his chin with a fat finger at that. “I’d say this is beyond the call of duty. Perhaps we can put in for hazard pay?”
At that moment, the waters behind the pair erupted, and the gargoyle flung itself into the air again. It let loose a horrifying screech that put gooseflesh all along Dunk’s waterlogged skin. Then, glaring down at Dunk with its blood-red orbs, it faded away in the light of the merciful sun.
Dunk slumped back down on the beach stripping off his wet clothes until he was barefoot and naked to the waist. “I think the players got off easiest today,” he said. A moment later, a roar went up from the distant stadium again.
“We can but hope, son,” Slick said. “We can but hope.”
In dry clothes once more, Dunk, who was sore over every inch of his body from his spectacular dive, stood with Slick in Pegleg’s tent. “What do you think this Zauberer was after?” the rookie asked.
“I don’t know,” Slick said, who seemed spooked to be in a tent where a daemon had recently slouched. “And I don’t care. We got rid of him, didn’t we? There should be a bonus in it for us. Guard duty’s supposed to be little more than busy work. It’s not meant to be life threatening.”
[Blood Bowl 01] - Blood Bowl Page 12
