“It really was the only way,” Spinne said, looking up at M’Grash.
The ogre put down the keg he was carrying, and then leaned over and laid a heavy hand on Dunk’s shoulder. “Did it for you, Dunkel. My friend, Dunkel!”
The ogre’s breath reeked of beer, and lots of it. M’Grash drank regularly and often, but rarely this early in the day and never before a game. If Pegleg had thought it would help make the ogre mean, he’d have forced the alcohol down M’Grash’s throat himself. Unfortunately for the coach, beer just made M’Grash sweeter than ever. He was — unlike any other ogre Dunk had ever met — a happy drunk.
Why M’Grash was drunk now, he could only guess. Then he noticed that when M’Grash had set his keg down on the ground it had thumped with a peculiarly hollow noise. It was empty.
Dunk leapt to his feet, aghast. “You brought me here in that?” He pointed at the keg, the top of which he could now see was missing.
M’Grash grinned and nodded at Dunk so much that Dunk feared the ogre’s head might roll off and crush his legs. Spinne winced in sympathy as she put an arm around him. “It was the only way,” she said, “and we knew it wouldn’t be comfortable for you. We didn’t want to have to worry about you getting cramped or scared in the keg, so…”
“So you had our hired quack slip me something to keep me out.” Dunk shook his head in disgust. As he did, he realised the cobweb inside his skull had disappeared. As creepy as the apothecary was, Dunk had to admit the old elf knew his potions.
Spinne held him tight and cocked her head low to peer up into his eyes. “Are you all right?” she asked. “They had to fold you in half to get you to fit in the keg. I begged them to stop, but they promised me it wouldn’t hurt.”
“Of course he’s fine,” Slick offered as he strode up to stand in front of Dunk. “Look at him. He’s the picture of health. Looks like a million crowns — I mean — oh, never mind me. You look great!”
Dunk scowled down at the Halfling, who beamed back up at him, undeterred by his client’s attitude. “You seem pretty happy for an agent whose top client got his last three days’ pay docked.”
“Ah,” Slick said, his grin broadening. “That might have been the sad fate of an ordinary player with an ordinary agent, but there’s nothing at all so pedestrian about you and me, son.”
“So you talked him into forgetting about me ditching practice?”
Slick pursed his lips. “It’s more like I made a little wager with him. If we win today, he’ll pay you every dime for those lost days — plus we’ll get our share of the championship purse!”
“And if we lose?”
Slick glared at Dunk as if he’d been slapped. “Shut your mouth, son! We’re not going to lose this game.”
Dunk raised an eyebrow at Slick, and then knelt down to whisper at him. “You convinced Pegleg to bet against his own team?”
“He looks at it this way: If we should — through some horrible twist of fate — happen to lose the game, he gets some of his money back. When, instead, we win, he’ll be happy to pay the properly owed amount out of the winner’s purse.”
Slick gave Dunk a smug smile. “Don’t think of it as a bet. It’s more like we offered your employer a money-back guarantee.”
Dunk laughed quietly as he stood up and looked down at his agent. “Only you could sell that angle, Slick.”
“That’s why you pay me to be your agent.”
Dunk just sighed. Then a thought struck him. “Who won the game the other night?”
“You don’t know?” Spinne asked, concerned.
Dunk shook his head. “I was busy running for my life. I haven’t seen a crystal ball or a broadsheet since. So, who are we playing?”
Spinne stared straight into Dunk’s eyes. “The Reikland Reavers,” she said with a twisted smile, “of course.”
Dunk put his hands over his face, and then pulled them down past his chin. “Of course.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Dirk Heldmann said as he shook Dunk’s hand for the camras. As team captain, Cavre had asked Dunk to accompany him to the centre of the field for the opening coin toss. With Dirk as the Reavers’ captain, this would be the only chance for the two brothers to talk before the game began, and Dunk thanked Cavre for the opportunity.
“I’m just here to play Blood Bowl,” Dunk said.
Dirk glared up at Dunk. It often struck Dunk how different the two brothers looked, seeing as how they’d undeniably come from the same two parents. Dunk had a thick build and his hair and eyes were so dark they were almost black. Dirk, on the other hand, was lean and wiry, with white-blond hair and bright blue eyes, and stood at least an inch taller than his older brother. When the pair stood next to each other, people could see the resemblance, but only then.
“You’re going to get killed,” Dirk said.
“That’s sweet that you’re concerned for me, but I know how to handle myself on a Blood Bowl field.”
Dirk grabbed Dunk by the side of his helmet and pulled him close. “You’re not listening to me. You never listen.”
Dunk sighed. They’d had this fight countless times before, and it had long since become old. “Okay. Speak.”
“The Reavers — the players, at least — have decided that collecting the reward on your head is more important than winning the game. The first chance they get, they’re going to kill you, snatch your body, and load you on the fastest boat to Altdorf.”
“You really know how to make a guy feel wanted.”
“Stop being cute.” Dirk sneered down at Dunk. “You are wanted — dead or alive.”
Dunk scowled. “Hasn’t anyone bothered to consider that Zauberer might be lying? What makes anyone think they can take his word on anything? He’s a wizard of the blackest kind.”
“With that amount of money possibly on the line, people are willing to take the chance. Besides, Lästiges’ sources say its real.”
“I can’t believe you’re still dating her.”
Dirk rolled his eyes. “You need to leave here. Now. Before the first play. You’re a fine player, Dunk, but even you can’t beat ten-to-one odds—”
“Orcs or Eagles,” the referee — Rhett Bool again — grunted as he presented Dunk and the team captains with a commemorative coin cast just for the game.
“Never bet against the Emperor,” Dirk said. “Eagles!”
The minotaur flipped the coin into the air and let it bounce to a stop on the Astrogranite. “Eagles!” he announced before he turned to Dirk. “Kick or receive?”
“Receive.” Dirk glared at Dunk with desperate eyes. “Don’t let them do this to you,” he said. “Meet me after the game. We can figure this out.”
“North or south end?” Bool asked.
“South,” said Cavre.
Dunk grimaced at his brother, and then reached out and pulled their helmets together for an instant. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t.”
With that, he turned and trotted down to the south end of the field.
6
Soon after Edgar kicked the ball, Dunk knew Dirk had been right. The ball went sailing right over every one of the Reavers and landed in the stands behind the end zone. The bloodthirsty fans — eager for the game to get started in earnest — tossed the ball back onto the field, but the Reavers ignored it. Instead of going for the ball, they went straight for Dunk.
“Have you ever seen anything like this, Bob?” Jim’s voice boomed out over the PA system. “The Reavers seem to have decided that taking out Hoffnung is more important than playing the game!”
“With a million crowns on the line, can you blame them?” said Bob. “Maybe they hope to stake their claim in Hoffnung’s valuable chest and then go on to destroy the Hackers to put the froth on that blood money.”
“Hoffnung’s a contender though. I don’t think he’ll go down without a fight.”
“Your money’s better than mine already, Jim. In the Gobbo’s pool, I had him being found floating in the harbour last nigh
t!”
Dunk let the commentators’ banter fade into the background as he concentrated on the task at hand: staying alive. He raced towards M’Grash, who was already trotting in his direction.
“They want to hurt Dunkel!” M’Grash said, dismay painted on his face. For a moment, Dunk thought the ogre might weep.
“Let’s see that doesn’t happen, big guy,” Dunk said. “Give me a ride?”
M’Grash’s fear for his friend’s life evaporated in an instant. Childlike joy danced in his eyes instead. “Piggyback?”
“How about on your shoulders?” Dunk said. He scrambled up the ogre’s outstretched arms and wrapped his legs around the ogre’s tree trunk of a neck.
Just then, the first of the Reavers hit M’Grash in the legs. The lineman speared the ogre in the thigh with the line of spikes that ran along the crest of his helmet.
M’Grash howled in pain. For all his size and strength, Dunk knew that he was a bit of a baby when it came to being hurt.
Most teams respected M’Grash for his superhuman strength and gave him as wide a berth as possible on the field. He spent most of his time chasing them down and breaking them apart like a series of desert-dry wishbones. Sure, he had to take on the big bruisers on the other teams, but he was ready for that. To have a human attack him directly surprised the ogre, and he didn’t like it one bit.
M’Grash reached down and plucked the money-mad lineman from his thigh. He hauled the Reaver into the air by his helmet, the strap of which held tight, choking the man as his feet thrashed in the empty air below them.
“You hurt me!” M’Grash bellowed into the front of the man’s helmet, raw spittle drenching the terrified lineman’s face. “Me hurt you!”
With that, the ogre swung his arm in a wide arc and pitched the hapless lineman high into the air. The Reaver sailed through the sky over the field and landed in the stands behind the Hackers’ dugout. The fans there — at least the ones that weren’t crushed — cheered and set to taking their revenge on the Reaver for having the nerve to fall on top of them.
Downfield, Dunk saw that one of the new Hackers, a Bretonnian catcher by the name of Singe de Fromage, had scooped up the ball and was making a mad dash for the end zone. A moment later, Rhett Bool blew the whistle and stuck his arms up to signal the Hackers’ first touchdown.
Dunk and the rest of the Hackers were too busy battling with the Reavers to pay any attention. Despite the score, which should have stopped the game for a moment, the Reavers refused to end their assault.
M’Grash tried to avoid the Reavers, but there were just too many of them. They grabbed at his legs and ankles, trying to trip him up or drag him down. Dunk watched Spinne tear the helmet off one of the Reavers and start to beat him senseless with it, and Guillermo was in the process of breaking the arm of one of the Reavers’ throwers. Still, Dunk knew it wouldn’t be enough.
Then he saw Edgar standing in the middle of the field, waving his arms. “I’m open!” the treeman hollered. “I’m bloody well open!”
Dunk tapped M’Grash on the top of his bald skull and pointed towards Edgar. The ogre might have had the smarts of a five-year-old, but he understood Blood Bowl well enough to know what Dunk wanted. He plucked his friend off of his neck and pitched him towards Edgar’s waiting branches, a dozen yards away.
Dunk flung his arms and legs wide, trying to make himself as large a target as possible for Edgar to catch. As he hung in the air at the apex of the throw, he realised that M’Grash had hurled him a bit long. He was going to land on the treeman’s far side.
Edgar spotted this and spun around, stretching his branches out towards the north end of the field. When Dunk flew over his leafy top, he reached out as far as he could and caught the thrower like a baby in a basket.
“Thanks!” Dunk said, amazed not to be lying flat on the Astrogranite with a crushed spine. Then he glanced back around Edgar’s trunk. “Now run!”
The Reavers had happily given up on M’Grash as soon as Dunk left the ogre’s hands. M’Grash lumbered after them with a roar, his flying tackle smashing three of them under his bulk. The rest of the Reavers — a half-dozen of them — kept right after Edgar, ignoring their fallen team-mates.
“Just more for the rest of us!” said one of the Reavers — their fastest catcher — as he clawed onto Edgar’s back with his spiked gauntlets and began to climb towards where Dunk sat in the treeman’s branches.
Then another Reaver reached out and pulled his teammate off Edgar, smashing his helmet into the ground. Dunk cheered as he saw Dirk pounding away at his own teammate.
“I’m still the captain of this team!” Dirk said as he picked up the Reaver catcher and bodily flung him at the other Reavers stampeding up behind them.
“That’s just the kind of old-school discipline missing on most teams these days,” Bob’s voice said, “I remember back when Griff Oberwald was the Reavers’ captain. He’d have never let his players disobey him like that.”
“True enough,” Jim said, “but with a million crowns at stake, Oberwald would probably have led the charge. What we have here is less a case of needed discipline than blood being thicker than Hater-Aid.”
“Really?” Dunk could hear the vampire licking his lips. “The Hater-Aid I drink comes with blood in it!”
The Reavers chasing Edgar pounded to a halt in front of Dirk, who stood between them and his brother. Dunk grabbed Edgar and pointed for him to turn around so they could see what happened next. Somewhere in the distance, he heard the protesting screams of de Fromage as the fans pulled the celebrating rookie into the stands and started to pass him up and over the stadium’s outer wall.
“Stand down,” Dirk snarled at his team-mates. “The play is over. If we want to win this game—”
“Sod the game,” said one of the Reavers’ linemen, a bearded, bearlike man with a belly that probably weighed more than Dirk. “And if you stand between us and that reward, sod you!”
As the lineman spoke, he stepped up closer to his captain and stabbed his finger at Dirk’s face. Dirk reached out and grabbed the finger, and then snapped it, in one, quick motion. The lineman retracted his mangled digit, screaming at it in disbelief.
Dirk lowered his shoulder and charged into the astonished lineman, driving him backward into the other Reavers. “Game on!” Dirk shouted, and the brawl started up again.
Seeing how his captain had betrayed the team, the Reavers’ coach cleared the team’s bench, and another four players in their blue-and-white uniforms raced on to the field. Never one to let another coach get an edge on his team, Pegleg did the same.
With Dirk in the middle of the brawl, Dunk refused to keep out of the fight anymore. “Toss me in there!” he ordered Edgar.
“A bloody ‘please’ wouldn’t hurt,” the treeman grumped.
“Please!” Dunk said. “Now!”
A moment later, Dunk found himself arcing through the air again. This time, he came down hard in the middle of the action, spiked knee guards first. As he smashed into one Reaver’s back, he lashed out with his fist at another and felt a satisfying crunch.
Joining in the brawl felt right to Dunk. He’d been running from his problems for too long. It was time to take his destiny in his own hands and stop letting others fight his battles for him.
Then all other concerns except the fight dropped away, and Dunk gave himself over to punishing the Reavers for their collective attack. Every time he saw a blue-and-white helmet or armour, he punched, tore, and kicked at it until it went away. He couldn’t tell for how long he fought — it could have been seconds or hours — but he kept swinging, determined to put an end to this on his own terms or to go down fighting.
“Wow!” said Bob. “You don’t usually see that much violence until the post-game parties!”
“I think it’s refreshing,” said Jim. “Players these days are all about the money. They don’t show any passion for the game.”
“I don’t think this is about the game anymore.”<
br />
“That’s my point! If it was, they’d be more concerned about scoring than surviving. Too many of these pansies want to live forever.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be a concern for most of the Reavers after today. Look! There’s only one of them left standing!”
Dunk dropped the Reaver blitzer he’d been beating and spun around to defend himself. He grabbed at the only Reaver he saw on his feet, and smashed his helmet into the other player’s.
“It’s me, you idiot!” Dirk snarled as he punched Dunk away, his blow knocking his brother’s helmet askew.
Dunk ripped his helmet from his head and stared at his brother, huffing and puffing for breath. He nodded his thanks to Dirk wordlessly, but Dirk ignored him.
Dirk turned around slowly, surveying the human wreckage on the Astrogranite. Dunk followed his brother’s eyes and saw that only a few of the players on the field could still stand under their own power. A number of them were clearly dead, including, Dunk guessed, whoever owned the better part of an arm lying near midfield.
Players from both teams counted among the dead, and even more of them were injured. M’Grash bled from a half-dozen wounds he didn’t seem to feel. Edgar had sap running out of a hole in his trunk. Guillermo and Spinne were battered and bruised, with their share of minor cuts, but no worse than they would have received in the course of a game. One of the Hacker rookies lay whimpering to one side, cradling a mangled hand.
Now that it appeared the fight had come to an end, a squad of stretcher bearers from the stadium’s staff swarmed onto the field. As the orange-uniformed men lifted the dead and wounded onto their litters, some of them glanced at Dunk with a familiar hunger in their eyes. He snarled at the one closest to him, and the man wet himself. As he scurried off the field, the others returned to their jobs, carefully avoiding Dunk’s gaze.
[Blood Bowl 03] - Death Match Page 5
