“Hi,” the ogre said. Then he pointed at himself. “M’Grash!”
The man wiped his hand on his soiled tunic. Realising that it wasn’t any cleaner, he reached out and performed the same task with a napkin instead, leaving a grimy residue on the cloth. Then he stuck out his hand to M’Grash.
“I’ve seen you play,” the man said as he shook the ogre’s hand. “You’re very good.”
“Since when did you ever watch Blood Bowl?” Dunk asked. The question blurted out of him without him even thinking to ask it, and now it lay there between them.
The man recovered his hand from M’Grash and gave Dunk an easy smile. “Since you and your brother started playing it. I never saw much use in it before that myself. It’s not the stage or the opera, but I’ve come to appreciate it at its own level for what it is.”
“Which is?”
“An alternative to war, of course.” The man waved down a waiter and said, “Bring a bottle of your finest Montfort, and I’d like to see a menu too, please.”
Dunk slumped back in his seat, stunned.
“I’m Spinne,” the catcher said. “I don’t think I caught your name.”
“There’s not much you don’t catch, miss,” the man said. “I’ve seen you play too. I’ll consider it a compliment to have got anything past you.”
“You haven’t yet,” Spinne said, wearing a smile that barely covered a bulldog’s snarl. “I’d like to know who you are.”
The man shook a finger at the woman. “I like that. I really do; sharp, direct, and unafraid of confrontation. Unusual in a woman, especially in these parts, but I find it unnervingly attractive. I see what Dunk finds exciting about you. You’ll go far, miss.” He put out his hands in a wide shrug. “Hey, you already have.”
Spinne’s smile closed, and she turned to Dunk. “Perhaps you could identify our dinner guest for us.”
The man raised his eyebrows and shrugged at Dunk. “That’s your call, Dunkel. We have a lot of catching up to do. Whether you care to share that with your friends is up to you.”
Dunk shook his head at the man. He didn’t know how he felt about this yet, but it surprised him how easily the man could still push his buttons.
“Spinne, Slick, M’Grash,” Dunk said looking at each of them in turn and then at the man again. “I’d like you to meet Lügner Hoffnung, my father.”
Spinne gasped. M’Grash stared back and forth at Dunk and Lügner, confused as ever. Slick reached across the table as best he could and offered his hand, which Lügner took.
“A pleasure, sir,” the halfling said. “I’ve often wondered who could have had a hand in raising such a fine boy as you have in your son here.”
Lügner flashed a grin, which grew wider as his drink appeared. “I’m afraid you’ll have to blame most of Dunk’s upbringing on his blessed mother, gods rest her soul.”
“Oh, you’re just being modest.”
“No,” Dunk said, staring at his father through sunken eyes. “He’s not.”
Lügner looked abashed. “Come now, Dunkel,” he said. “Is that any way to speak to your father?”
“How would I know?” Dunk asked. “I haven’t seen you for over three years. We never did have much to say to each other.”
Lügner nodded as he glanced down the menu. “All too true, I’m afraid,” he said. “All too true.” Then he turned to the dwarf waiter who stood ready to take his order. “I’ll have the steak Bordeleaux, medium rare, light on the blue cheese, but heavy on the onions.”
“Excellent choice, sir,” the waiter said before gliding off towards the kitchen on a set of tall, metal stilts.
“What are you doing here?” Dunk asked. “I thought you were dead.”
“You thought wrong,” Lügner said with a devilish grin, “but you can take comfort in knowing you weren’t the only one. I wanted the world to think I was dead. Life, I find, is much easier that way.”
“What are you doing here?” Dunk repeated. He didn’t bother to ask his father if he knew about the Guterfiends and Lehrer and all the rest. He knew he did.
Lügner took a long draw from his stein and smacked his lips in satisfaction. “Well, I usually prefer to leave business for after the meal. I find it aids in the digestion to put such things off until then. But I can tell from your demeanour that you’re anxious to get started. Where would you like me to begin?”
“How about with the angry mob killing my mother and sister, and running us out of town?”
Lügner’s smile faded. “Yes. You would want to know about that, wouldn’t you?”
“What happened to you?” Dunk asked. “I went to the summer house. I checked in there for you every day for weeks. Then Lehrer ran me off the property because someone else had taken it.”
“The Guterfiends,” Lügner said with a grim nod. “I’d heard they’d ended up with the place, but I hadn’t guessed they’d take ownership so soon.”
“I thought you were dead,” Dunk said, his voice cracking on the last word. He grimaced to hold his emotions in check.
“I can see why,” Lügner said. “I wanted everyone to think I was dead. Even you.”
“Why?”
Lügner snorted at himself. “Face it, Dunkel. You were better off without me. I’d never done anything but put you and the rest of my family in constant danger just by living with me. You saw what that did to your mother and sister. I didn’t want to have that happen to you too.”
“So you did it for my own good?” Dunk asked. “You just wandered away and let me think you were dead and gone for three years out of your concern for my well-being?”
Lügner winced. “Well, that was what I thought would be a pleasant side-effect of my central reason, which was to escape the people who wanted me dead.”
“It looks like that worked well,” said Slick. Dunk shot him a murderous look, and the halfling sat back in his seat again.
“Why did the Guterfiends want you dead?”
Lügner let a wry smile play on his lips. “They didn’t, really. They didn’t even know me. Oh, sure, they knew of me, and they wanted me out of their way, but it wasn’t anything personal.”
“Not personal?” Dunk couldn’t believe his ears. “They killed your wife and daughter, ran you off your estate, took everything you owned, and ‘forced’ you to arrange for everyone to think you were dead.”
“No, Dunkel,” Lügner said. “You’re jumping to conclusions. You’ve got it all wrong. The Guterfiends didn’t care about me or anyone else who lived in our keep. They just happened to work for the same people. Once we were out, they were in. It was that bloodless and simple — at least to them.”
Dunk stared at his father. “Then who did all that to us?”
“Khorne,” Lügner said.
Dunk felt Spinne recoil next to him.
“You mean ‘Khorne’ as in ‘Khorne’s Killers’?” Slick asked, his eyes wide in disbelief.
“Yes.”
“Khorne, the Blood God?”
“Yes!”
“Khorne, one of the Lords of Chaos?”
“Yes!”
Conversation around the table ground to a halt, and Lügner tried to use a smile to mask his irritation. Soon enough, the dull roar of others talking nearby resumed.
“Why?” Dunk asked. “What would Khorne want with us?”
“Besides the fact that the Hoffnungs were one of the oldest and most influential families in the Empire?”
“There are other families with the same credentials.”
“True,” said Lügner, “but none of them were in such rotten shape as ours was when I took over the family business.”
Dunk narrowed his eyes at his father and tried to understand where he was heading.
Seeing that Dunk wasn’t about to hold up his end of the conversation with anything but prompts, both verbal and otherwise, Lügner continued to speak.
“Your grandfather was a great man: a patron of the arts, a good friend, and kind to all who knew him. Som
eone who put the ‘gentle’ in ‘gentleman’ and the ‘noble’ in ‘nobleman’. But he was a horrible businessman.
“In the twenty-five years my father was in charge of the Hoffnung family holdings, he managed to piss away hundreds of thousands of crowns — maybe even enough to pay for the price that’s on your head.”
Dunk winced at that.
“You see, that’s why I’m here. I wanted to tell you that the Guterfiends are the ones backing this Zauberer fellow’s mad claims. You’ve done a fine job debunking the man and making him look like the lunatic he is, but he made too big a splash.
“Even if you no longer have every joker with a sword in his closet coming after you for the reward, the professionals — the killers who really know what they’re doing — are going to figure it out. They’re going to go to that crackpot, and he’ll tell them who’s offering the money, and then they’ll go after you harder than ever. And the worst part is that you won’t even be expecting it.
“Or at least you wouldn’t, if not for me.”
Dunk smiled finally. “I already knew.”
It was Lügner’s turn to be surprised. “Really? How? Did you track it down through Zauberer yourself? Smart boy! I always told your mother you’d get over that head wound.”
“No, I heard it from — Wait! What head wound?”
Lügner grimaced. “Um, the one you got as a child when you were dropped.”
“Who dropped me?” Dunk asked. “You?”
Lügner nodded, his cheeks turning pink. “You were just a few months old, and Lehrer had tossed me a skin full of wine. I just — well, I wasn’t used to carrying a child around quite yet.”
Dunk slapped a hand over his eyes. “You dropped your infant son in favour of a wineskin.”
Lügner nodded, a pathetic look on his face. “It was some really good wine.”
Dunk put his head down on the table and wrapped his hands over it. For some reason, it seemed to be throbbing.
“So who told you the Guterfiends were behind the reward money?” Lügner asked, clearly hoping to change the subject.
“Lehrer,” Dunk mumbled.
“Who?”
“Lehrer,” Dunk said, raising his head. “He tracked me down in Magritta to let me know.”
“Lehrer?” Lügner’s voice was barely more than a whisper. “He’s still around?”
“He’s been with the Guterfiends ever since we left the keep. They came in and hired our whole staff on the spot, it seems.”
“He’s been with them far longer than that. He started up with them soon after I signed on with Khorne.”
Dunk blinked. “You did what?”
15
Lügner scowled at Dunk. “Don’t you dare judge me, Dunkel. The house was floundering. Your grandfather had not only lost everything we had, he’d also run up a horrendous debt. The people who held those markers were ready to take everything we had and then hang our skins from our flagpoles to make their point.”
“You made a deal with one of the Ruinous Powers, and you didn’t think that would come back to bite you?” Dunk stared at his father, stunned. He’d known his father had done some pretty horrible things in the course of building the family business back up over the years, but he’d had no idea that it had involved pacts with the forces of darkness.
“Of course I did!” Lügner scowled. “I knew the deal would go sour eventually — I did — but eventually can be an awfully long time. It got me through your entire childhood. Yours and Dirk’s.”
“But it killed Mother and Kirta. Does that seem like a fair trade?”
“That’s not fair, Dunkel. You know I would have done anything to save Greta and your sister from that mob. They came on so quick…
“As it was, I was thrilled to be able to save your life at least. That day was the first time I felt glad that Dirk had left home.”
Dunk just gaped at Lügner. The horror of the notion that his father had tied his family fortunes to the whims of the Blood God staggered him.
“You thought you could cheat him, didn’t you?” Slick said.
Dunk stared at the halfling, and then back at his father, who was squirming in his seat.
“Go on,” Slick said. “Admit it. I know what it’s like. Someone presents you with a deal you just can’t bring yourself to refuse, even though you know you should. You go back and forth on it, but eventually you convince yourself that there’s a loophole in it somewhere, some way for you to wriggle out of your end of the bargain — at least if something in the deal goes sour, which it will, especially for something that’s supposed to last forever.
“So you make the deal, and you regret it every day after that, knowing that some day the executioner’s axe will drop, and you have to be ready to try to dodge it at any second.
“I understand all this. I’m an old wheeler and dealer myself. Sometimes the temptation seems too great. I’ve seen it break many a desperate man in my time, but you just have to resist.
“It’s no way to live.”
Lügner nodded along with Slick, and said, “It’s an even worse way to die. Do you know what part of the deal was? Eternal damnation. Khorne owns my soul. When I die, it becomes his plaything for the rest of time.”
“I take it back,” Slick said. “You’re an idiot.”
“Hey,” Lügner said, becoming indignant, “I didn’t think souls were real back then, and if I did have one I wasn’t doing a damned thing with it. I was young. I was naive. I was—”
“An idiot,” M’Grash said, shaking his head in pity.
Lügner sighed. “I can’t win. Even the ogre thinks I’m an idiot.”
“What did you promise them?” Dunk asked.
Lügner waved his son off. “You don’t want to know,” he said. “It’s not important.”
“As unimportant as your soul?” Dunk felt his anger at his father rising again.
Lügner closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, Dunk could see that he’d been beaten. Given the look of his hair, skin, and clothes, he’d been that way since he’d left Altdorf three years ago. Dunk guessed that the man had lapsed into his old, enthusiastic ways only because of the encounter with him. Now that he’d had the wind taken from his sails, he’d reverted to the worn, tired, old man he’d become.
“I can’t say.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“It comes to the same thing.” Lügner hung his head low and spoke so softly that he could barely be heard.
“Tell me!” Dunk roared, slamming his fists onto the table.
Once again, all nearby conversation froze. It started up again a moment later, but Dunk knew that his table had just about worn out its welcome. The managers of the House of Booze traded upon their willingness to leave their patrons alone, but that included keeping them from upsetting each other.
Lügner raised his sunken, red-rimmed eyes. Dunk could smell the man’s fear.
“My bloodline,” Lügner said in a soft, horrified breath. “I — I sold you all.”
Dunk’s heart froze in his chest. He didn’t want to believe what his father had just said, but at the same time he knew that it was true.
“Forgive me, Dunkel,” Lügner whispered.
Dunk bit his lower lip so hard he tasted blood in his mouth. He gripped the edge of the table in front of him so tight he could hear his knuckles crack. Then he shoved out hard and flipped the table over in front of him.
Lügner’s chair tipped over hard, but the old man managed to scramble out of the way, squeaking clear before the table’s heavy top could crash into him. Dunk leapt down after the table before anyone could stop him. He landed crouched on the table’s upper edge and stared down at his father like a vengeful god come from the mountaintop to smite down the most offensive of heretics.
“Forgive you?” Dunk said. “You’re lucky I don’t tear out your heart and send you straight off to Khorne here and now!”
Lügner cried out in horror and threw his arms up over his head
and face for protection. He whimpered in a soft voice, “I did it all for you.”
The pathetic display triggered something in Dunk’s head. One moment he wanted nothing more than to rip the man’s life from him in large, bloody chunks; the next, he couldn’t stand the thought of laying his hands on the man, for fear that some of that creature’s weaknesses might rub off on him. Then Dunk remembered that this was his father and that it might already be too late.
“Isn’t that Dunk Hoffnung?” a lady dwarf asked from the other side of the tavern’s main hall.
Dunk knew he shouldn’t have been able to hear the dwarf’s question. Any other time he’d been in the House of Booze, the general background noise would have drowned it out. Now, it rang out in the silence that seemed to have smothered every other conversation to death.
“Get out of here,” Dunk said to his father as the man squirmed away from him along the tavern’s cold, stone floor. “If I ever see you again, you’re dead.”
* * * * *
“So, Dunk,” Lästiges said through the crack in the door, her floating golden camra arcing over her shoulder to get the best shot of the thrower’s reaction. “Tell our viewers just how long you’ve been worshiping at the altar of the Blood God?”
“Don’t do this to me,” Dunk said, trying to rub the sleep from his eyes. “Not now.”
“So you’re not denying reports of you threatening a harmless old man in the House of Booze last night and threatening to sacrifice him to Khorne?”
Dunk slapped both of his hands over his face. Of course, that’s what it must have looked like to an outsider, and plenty of them had seen him come within inches of killing his father. He wondered how many of them had tried to sell the story to Wolf Sports, especially considering that no one outside of his friends had moved more than a finger to try to stop him from carrying out his threats.
“Leave him alone,” Spinne called from inside the room. “He had a rough night.”
“I’m just happy to hear your voice, Spinne,” Lästiges said. “After the old man got away from Dunk last night, some of the witnesses wondered if he might be desperate enough to try to sacrifice you instead.”
[Blood Bowl 03] - Death Match Page 12
