Dunk arched an eyebrow at the reporter. They had spent a lot of time together the previous year. She’d come along on the Hackers’ trip to Albion and made a documentary based on how they’d found and captured the original Far Albion Cup.
“Your concern is touching,” he said. “Now go away.” With that, he shut the door in her face.
“Dunk,” Lästiges said. “Dunk! You know this story is going to be airing on every major Cabalvision network by the end of the day. I’m giving you a chance to head off the negative publicity and tell your side of the story!”
“Let her in,” Spinne said as she tossed on a fresh shirt and skirt.
“Are you nuts?”
Spinne shrugged. “She’s got a point. Besides, do you think she’s going to go away?”
“Not without an exclusive,” Lästiges said through the door.
Dunk sighed and pulled the door open, holding it wide and gesturing for the reporter to enter.
“Thank you,” she said as she strolled past him, her camra hovering around her shoulders, its eye taking in everything at once. She gave Spinne a little wave and then curled up on the couch near the room’s bay window, through which the morning sun streamed. Dunk could hear the calls of sea birds riding the gentle breeze across the bay, which stretched out towards the horizon beyond.
“So,” Lästiges said, “what can you tell me about this man you assaulted? Crazed fan? Jilted lover? Evangelist for Khorne?”
“None of the above,” Dunk said, rubbing his unshaven chin. “I’ll talk to you about it if you like, but you have to turn that camra off.”
Lästiges frowned. “But what if you say something interesting for once?”
“That’s a chance you’re just going to have to take.”
Lästiges peered up at him from the couch for a moment before making her decision. “All right,” she said. At her signal, the camra dropped from the air to land neatly in her hand. She polished it on her sleeve and then stuffed it into a pocket on her Wolf Sports jacket.
Satisfied for the moment, Dunk looked down into Lästiges’ deep brown eyes. “It was my father,” he said.
“Lügner Hoffnung?” The colour drained from Lästiges’ face. “I thought he was dead.”
“No one could have been more surprised than me,” Dunk said. “I hadn’t seen him since the night we were run out of Altdorf.”
“What — what’s he doing here?” The news of Lügner’s return had shattered the woman’s concentration.
“He came back to warn me about who’s behind the price on my head.”
Lästiges shook her head. “But how can you believe a word he says? He’s one of the most evil people to ever walk the planet.”
“That’s a bit harsh, I think,” said Dunk.
“Do you know what he did to my family?” the woman asked, her eyes welling up with tears of rage and frustration as she spoke. “Do you know why I ended up taking a job as a Blood Bowl reporter? He ruined us — entirely! The only way I could deal with that was to know that at least he was dead.”
Lästiges’ eyes shone as she looked at Dunk’s impassive face. “And now you tell me he’s alive? What do I do with that?”
Dunk shook his head. He knew his father had done some horrible things with the family business, but up until now he hadn’t realised just how bad they might have been. For the first time, he truly felt sorry for Lästiges.
“How’s Dirk?” he asked. He knew his brother would want to know about their father, but he had no way to reach him. He’d be able to commiserate with the lady reporter at least.
“I — I don’t know,” Lästiges said, pouting out her red lower lip. “I’ve been dreading you asking me that. I haven’t seen him since he quit the Reavers.”
Dunk frowned. Dirk and Lästiges had been dating for a while and becoming a serious couple. If he had cut off all ties with her as well, it couldn’t be good. He could understand Dirk being mad at him, but staying away from Lästiges didn’t make sense.
“So why did you attack him?” Lästiges asked, her reporter’s instincts kicking in. “Your father, I mean. I would think you’d be thrilled to see him.”
Dunk snorted at that. “I’d love to tell you, but only as a friend and as the woman dating my brother.”
“Have you done something to be ashamed of?” Lästiges asked. Dunk could tell she smelled blood. If she had to spill that of a few innocents to take her revenge on Lügner, he didn’t doubt she would.
But Dunk and Dirk weren’t just innocents to her, were they? Dunk had come to know and grudgingly respect Lästiges over the past couple of years, and Dirk had shared more with her than just her bed.
“Do you think I can trust her?” Dunk asked Spinne.
The catcher mulled it over for a moment. “I think you have to.”
“This has to be off the record,” he said, turning to the reporter.
“Of course,” Lästiges said, leaning forward to catch his every word.
“When the family business was bad, before Dirk and I were even born, my father made a deal with Khorne. He sold the Blood God his soul and the souls of all his heirs.”
The reporter’s face went white, and she sat back in the couch, horrified. “Are you… He told you this?”
Dunk nodded.
“Then what happened?”
“We got rich,” Dunk said, confused by the question.
“Sure, and then you got run out of town. Why?”
Dunk stopped. “I don’t know,” he said, mystified. “I never asked.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“My head was still ringing from the ‘I sold your soul to Khorne’ thing.”
Lästiges nodded as she stared out of the window. “Amazing,” she muttered. “I should have known.”
“You need to find Dirk.”
“What’s that?” she asked, raising her eyebrows at Dunk.
“You need to find my brother and tell him about this. He needs to know.”
“Then what?” Lästiges asked. She felt most comfortable when asking questions. It put her back on familiar ground.
“Then find us, and we’ll figure out what we need to do about this.”
“Why did your father come forth now?” Lästiges asked. “He’s been missing for years.”
“The Guterfiends are the ones who put up the reward for my head. He wanted me to know — and know why they want me dead.”
“Zauberer!” Lästiges said. “I almost forgot. That’s the reason I’m here!”
“You didn’t come just to ask me awkward questions about that encounter in the House of Booze?”
She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “That was just for fun. This is serious.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out her camra. With a little toss, it rose into the air under its own power and hovered near her shoulder again.
“I said, no camra.”
Lästiges gave him an irritated smile. “I’m not going to record anything. I need to show you something.”
The reporter snapped her fingers twice, and the eyehole on the front of the camra grew wider. Then a ray of light stabbed out of the hole, shining on a blank wall at one end of the couch.
Dunk blinked his eyes, and stared at the brightly lit spot on the wall. There he saw an image of Schlechter Zauberer frozen in a sneer. It looked like a painting that the light had somehow revealed, as if it had always been there, just waiting for the camra to point it out.
“These Daemonic Lidless Projectors are incredible,” Lästiges said, “and they just keep getting smaller every year.”
“A DLP?” Spinne asked. “You can make a moving image without a crystal ball with one of those.”
“Give the girl a clean shirt,” Lästiges said. “These things are great for playback. It used to be I couldn’t see what I’d recorded until I got back to the studio.”
“So what’s on the marquee tonight?” Dunk asked.
Lästiges reached out and touched something on the floating camra, and t
he image on the wall sprang to life. It showed Zauberer slinking down a dark hallway.
“Wolf Sports got this footage from the camras we had set up at the Orcidas Stadium in the Badlands.”
“Isn’t that where the Gouged Eye play?” Dunk asked.
Spinne nodded. “They beat us — the Reavers — in the finals for the Chaos Cup last year.”
“Funny you should mention that,” said Lästiges. “Watch.”
In the image, Zauberer snaked his way down the hallway until he reached a room in which a couple dozen orcs lay scattered about. From the sounds — which also emitted from the camra — they were all sleeping off a great deal of drink.
“Yesterday, the Gouged Eye beat the Marauders in their annual grudge match. They play it during the Dungeonbowl tournament every year that neither team is invited to the main event.”
“So they play every year,” said Spinne.
“Without fail,” said Lästiges. “When the Gouged Eye wins, they have a massive party to celebrate. Most of them survive it. Not this year though.”
Zauberer tiptoed through the orcs towards an oak table in the centre of the room. On it sat a large trophy — the Chaos Cup itself, Dunk realised — fashioned from what looked like the skull of a many-horned daemon squatting atop a pile of tiny skulls with equally vicious fangs. As the wizard approached, an eye appeared in one of the daemon-skull’s sockets and rolled around to focus on the intruder.
Zauberer froze and said something to the trophy. It opened its toothy maw and began to laugh. The wizard tried to shush it, but it only laughed louder and louder until the orcs nearest to it started to wake up.
Zauberer dashed forward and plucked the cup from its stand. He clutched it to his chest, and the thing bit through his clothes and flesh. His blood ran red on its ivory-bleached bones. He screamed.
The nearest orc — Dunk recognised him as Da Fridge, the Gouged Eye team’s best blocker — leapt up and grabbed the wailing wizard. The massive monster stretched up to his full height and held Zauberer out at arm’s length, his feet flailing a full yard off of the floor.
Then Da Fridge burst into flames.
The orc dropped Zauberer, who landed nimbly on his feet. The other orcs around him leapt to their feet. Some of them had woken when Da Fridge had started laughing at the wizard, and his screams had jolted even the most intoxicated of them from their sleep.
Da Fridge tried to run, but he only made it a few feet before a blast of ebony lightning lanced out from the cup and ran him through. He collapsed at Zauberer’s feet without another sound.
Some of the orcs charged the wizard. Others tried to escape, scurrying in every direction.
Zauberer cackled in evil mirth. With each laugh, another ebon bolt shot out of the Chaos Cup, skewering another screaming orc. Within seconds, the wizard stood alone in the room, surrounded by nothing more than the corpses of charred orcs.
Zauberer stalked around the room like a victorious conqueror surveying a smoking battlefield. No one else moved.
Then the wizard spotted the security camra that had been recording the entire event. He strutted up to it, a wicked smile splitting his face. He held the Chaos Cup up before the device, and the thing’s eye swivelled about and focused through it as if it could see right through the camra’s lens to Lästiges, Spinne, and Dunk.
Dunk reached out and held Spinne’s hand as she stifled a gasp. Lästiges sat unmoved, solid as a rock. She’d witnessed this scene at least once already. It wasn’t until he glanced at her chin that he saw that she was shaking.
“Tell the world,” Zauberer said. “The power I have sought for so long is finally mine.
“Tell everyone you meet. Soon they will all worship me as their emperor-god.
“For anyone else, if Dunk Hoffnung is hurt before I get my hands on him — if anyone even scratches his armour — I’ll destroy you and everyone you hold dear.
“And be sure to tell Hoffnung this for me when you see him: Dunk, my old friend, you’re next.”
16
“Byufell Triehugger has the ball!” Bob’s voice said. “The Elfheim Eagles are on a roll!”
Dunk swore under his breath. This game hadn’t gone well at all.
When the Hackers had first lined up against their all-elf opponents, Dunk had thought that the wizards who had sponsored the Eagles must have owed their coach some kind of favour. He hadn’t had a lot of experience with elves, but these didn’t look like any Blood Bowl players he’d ever seen.
Each of the Eagles was physically perfect with stunning good looks. That they enhanced their appearance with make-up and designer orange-and-purple armour had surprised Dunk. Apparently helmets were out this year, although Dunk couldn’t say if this was a fashion decision or that the elf players just refused to mess up their perfectly coiffed hair.
All of this made Dunk think that the Eagles were a team composed merely of poseurs who had showed up simply to display how good an elf could look on the field. He expected that the rough-and-tumble Hackers would tear them apart before they had to break a sweat — something he suspected the Eagles themselves would have refused to do for any reason short of torture.
He’d been sorely mistaken.
The immortal elves had a different kind of strategy than Dunk was used to. Instead of focusing on raw power, or even the elegant use of skill, they excelled at the use of rotten tricks that were technically within the rules. Apparently Nuffle had never written anything in his sacred rulebook about using a herbicide in the middle of a game, for instance, despite the fact that it had sent Edgar into an itching fit that made it impossible for him to do anything during the rest game.
The Eagles had made good use of the dungeon’s terrain too. They had drawn M’Grash into the room with the bottomless pit and then knocked him off one of the string of floating rocks. The poor ogre had been falling for over ten minutes now, wailing in terror at the top of his lungs the entire time.
Cavre had been the most successful in dealing with the elves, but he’d had a chest explode on him. While he was stunned, the Eagles had stuffed him into the chest and bound it tight with something Dunk could only guess was an elf’s excuse for a jockstrap.
That left Spinne, Guillermo, and Dunk as the only Hackers still in the game. Outnumbered two to one, they were bound to have a hard time of it. The most frustrating part for Dunk was the fact that he’d not even been able to tackle anyone yet. The Eagles had studiously avoided having any contact with him. Whenever he entered a room, they left.
“What’s going on?” he’d asked Guillermo. “Why won’t they come after us?”
The Estalian had used the back of his arm to wipe some blood from his eyes. “I think you mean, why don’t they come after you?”
Dunk realised the lineman was right. Word of Zauberer’s capture of the Chaos Cup and his subsequent threat against anyone who might hurt Dunk had saturated the Cabalvision networks almost immediately after Dunk had seen it himself. In the middle of talk shows like Bloodcentre, player after player had gone white at the thought of being forced to play against Dunk while the sorcerer’s edict against harming the Hacker stayed in effect.
Not so for Lassolegs Gladhandriel, the Eagles’ captain. “As you know, we always play strictly by the rules,” he’d said. “We do not fear that we might hurt Mr. Hoffnung accidentally.”
Of course, that left a lot of room for things the Eagles might try to do to Dunk on purpose. So far, just isolating Dunk had worked well. Unless he or his team-mates found the ball, the Eagles had no need to get anywhere near him.
Now that the ball had been found, Dunk hoped to turn the tables. He gave up trying to figure out how to rescue M’Grash without getting killed in the process, and bounded across the floating rocks in seconds. When he reached the room with the mirrored walls, he closed his eyes and felt his way through the place, taking care to listen hard for any attackers approaching him while he was blind.
Once through the mirrored room, Dunk found a teleportat
ion pad in the hallway beyond. He didn’t know where it would take him, but since he needed to get ahead of the ball carrier fast, he jumped on it and hoped for the best.
He popped into a room filled with rabid, three-headed, seven-tailed cats that smelled of carrion and looked as if they’d been starved half to madness. He moved off the glowing circle, and then jumped back onto it again. It blinked him away.
Dunk landed in another golden circle, and promptly skidded off it, out of control. The floor in this high-ceilinged chamber was a smooth sheet of ice, and his boots could find no purchase on it.
As Dunk slid, he started to pick up speed. The room seemed to go on forever. As he stared around, he realised he wasn’t in a room at all. The teleportation pad had transported him to the top of a snowy mountain peak, and it had been engineered to send him slipping along its face at top speed.
Although he had managed to maintain his footing, he could do little to change his course. Peering ahead, he saw the land in front of him disappear into thin air. Then he knew where he was. He’d seen the place from a distance as they’d sailed in to Barak Varr. The dwarfs called it Khalakazam, which had no equivalent in the Imperial tongue. The best that one of the bartenders at the House of Booze had been able to come up with was, “Mount You-Must-Be-Joking.”
“They call it that because of the steep drop-off on its front face,” the bartender had said. “If you happen to slip off it, it’s nearly a mile down before you hit anything else. They say you’d probably pass out and die long before that happened, but me, I think they just say that. More likely you flounder there screaming in the air every damned second until you smash into the rocks below. I hear most people bounce near twenty feet in the air after an impact like that.”
Dunk and Spinne had paid their tab and gone to find another bar after that.
“Oh, no! Hoffnung’s found his way on to Mount No-Freaking-Way!” Jim’s voice said from somewhere off to the left. “He’s doomed for sure.”
“If that’s true, I’d hate to be the dwarfs who built that death trap — or the wizards who commissioned it,” said Bob. “I can’t imagine that watching this happen on live Cabalvision—only here on Wolf Sports!—will make a certain wizard very happy. I can only guess where he’d begin to take his revenge.”
[Blood Bowl 03] - Death Match Page 13
