When the Hackers finally made it back to Bad Bay, tucking into a natural harbour on the Empire’s north shore, overlooking the Sea of Claws, they headed straight for the room they shared at the FIB Tavern. Although the place had been named for an obscene variety of Imperial Bastard — a shot at the occasional visitors from Altdorf who sometimes vacationed there — the staff had always treated Dunk like family, and Spinne had come to enjoy the place too. They could have taken a suite in the Hacker Hotel, the poshest place for miles around, but since they spent so little time there Dunk preferred to remain with people he’d come to trust.
The winter snows had come to the place, and the sky had turned its seasonal steel grey. When Dunk and Spinne barged into the tavern, the only thing on his mind was a hot drink and a warm bed that he hoped to not have to get out of for a week. Instead, they found company waiting for them: Dirk and Lästiges.
“You took your damned time getting here,” Dirk said as he gave his brother and then Spinne a hug. “I thought we might have to send out a search party.”
“We had a bit of a delay near Valhallaholic,” Spinne said. “Once we got through that, it was smooth sailing.”
“Spending time in a tourist trap while there’s a price on your head?” Lästiges said to Dunk. “That has a certain kind of mad style to it.”
“I thought you debunked that on Cabalvision,” Dunk said.
“To the public, sure, but we all know that what you hear on Cabalvision isn’t often even a close cousin to the truth.”
Dunk couldn’t help but grin at Dirk as the quartet took a private table in the back corner of the main room, far from anyone else in the place. The people of Bad Bay were used to seeing the Hackers around and had long since become impervious to their fame. They gave the four a wide berth out of respect for them and the kind of money the Hackers brought into town on a regular basis.
“I’m just glad to see you alive and well,” Dunk said to his brother. “You look good. Not playing Blood Bowl agrees with you.”
“It’s just the lack of cuts, bruises, and other injuries,” Dirk said. “You’d be surprised what that can do for your outlook on life. For the first time in years, I don’t hurt every time I move.”
“So,” Spinne said once they’d signalled for a round of beers — Hacker High Life, of course—“what are you two doing here?”
“It’s a crime to want to see my brother?” Dirk asked, taking mock offence.
“Traditionally, it’s not been high on your list,” Dunk said with a wry smile.
“Dirk’s turned over a new leaf,” Lästiges said. “Family’s important to him these days.”
Dunk frowned as he nodded. “She told you about Father.”
Dirk nodded too. “I can’t believe the old bastard’s still alive. Lästiges told me about your meeting with him in the House of Booze. I’ve been doing some poking around about him and the Guterfiends since I left the game. It’s one hell of a twisted tale.”
“Tell me about it,” said Dunk. As Dirk laughed, Dunk repeated himself. “No, seriously, tell me about it.”
“All right,” Dirk said, as their drinks arrived. He hoisted his tankard for a toast. “To the Hoffnung brothers, no matter what their names may be now. May their blood always run thick.”
Dunk grinned. “You’re just trying to put off having to tell me what you know.”
“Not so,” Dirk said. He took a large swing of his beer, leaned forward with his elbow on the table and began to talk in a conspiratorial tone. “I just want to make sure you’re ready to hear it.
“I checked in to what Father told you. It seems like most of it’s true.”
“What’s not?”
“Well, there seems to be some disagreement among some of the people who were there about how Mother and Kirta died.”
“I always thought the angry mob got them.”
“Sure,” Dirk nodded, “that theory makes some sense, but I tracked down one person in Altdorf who’d been a part of that mob. He says that Mother and Kirta were already dead when they opened the door.”
Dunk frowned. “That doesn’t make much sense. Who inside the keep would want to kill them? You don’t think Father had something to do with it?”
Dirk shrugged. “It’s possible. Maybe he wanted to make a last-second attempt to keep his daemon lords satisfied with his performance. Or maybe he wanted to cheat them of the chance to kill Mother and Kirta and banish their souls to the Realm of Chaos.”
“But he didn’t kill me.”
“Maybe he didn’t care so much about your soul.”
“It doesn’t add up,” Spinne said. “Why kill them if the mob was about to do that anyhow?”
“Who knows if they would have?” asked Lästiges. “Maybe they knew something dangerous, something that Dunk wasn’t aware of.”
Dunk shook his head. “I just don’t believe it. Father got into trouble with Khorne for refusing him the souls of his children. That included Kirta. If Father loved us enough to squabble with the Blood God over us, I don’t think he’d kill any of us the first time things looked bad. You don’t defy Khorne without bringing down misery on yourself, after all.” He narrowed his eyes at Dirk. “What else do you have?”
“I went to Altdorf and spoke with Chiara.”
“The head maid?” Dunk was impressed. Chiara had never cared much for him, but she’d doted on Dirk all his life — up until he’d run away from home. After that point, she’d refused to even speak his name, referring to him as “that other boy”.
“She wasn’t happy to see me at first, but I soon had her eating out of my hand. She didn’t want to talk about our family at all when I arrived. ‘Better to let the dead stay dead,’ she said.
“Eventually she confessed that Father’s bargaining with Khorne was an open secret among the keep’s senior staff. There’s only so much you can do to hide the pentagrams and other things you need to communicate with gods in their far-off realms, after all.
“Some of the staff just ignored it. Lehrer, for instance, never paid it any mind. He only cared that the people who were supposed to dole out his pay actually did. He didn’t care how they came up with it in the first place.”
“Ever the practical soul,” Dunk said.
“So what happened?” Spinne asked. Dunk wasn’t sure why she felt the need to prod the conversation along, but she clearly wanted to hear everything Dirk had to say — and fast. “Why did your father turn against Khorne?”
“It seems that his deal with the Blood God stated that Khorne got the souls of his children as well as his own. You can’t just sign away someone else’s soul though. They have to be given freely. However, Father had promised he could make that happen as part of his own bargain.
“He had until the day one of his children became betrothed.”
Dunk’s breath froze in his chest.
“At that point, it seems that the child would be considered to be an adult. After all, if you can pledge yourself forever to a mate, you can certainly do the same for a daemon lord.”
“But Father never mentioned any of this to me,” Dunk said. “Ever.”
“And what would you have done if he did?” Spinne asked. “Would you have sold your soul to Khorne to keep your family’s fortunes safe?”
Dunk considered this for a moment. “My first instinct is to say, ‘No, of course not’. However, if it would have saved my mother and sister, I don’t know. At the least, I’d have known what was coming our way. I could have helped him fight against it.”
“You’d have been killed as well,” Spinne said, placing her hands on his arm.
“We could have run away and kept everyone safe. Or I could just as easily not got engaged. It was an arranged marriage, for the love of life. Father arranged it himself.”
Dirk frowned. “Could be he never thought Khorne would try to hold him to the letter of his agreement. Or maybe he thought he could convince Khorne that an alliance with the Brechers would be more valuable than just han
ding you over. Either way, it seems he meant to protect you from what he was doing.”
Dunk glared at Dirk. “Did you know what he was doing? I mean, you had all those fights with him, and then you left home without ever telling me why. I thought you two just kept butting heads because you were too alike, but — did you learn something you shouldn’t have known?”
“Do you have to ask me that?”
“At this point, I think so. So?”
Dirk screwed up his face for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I stumbled into Father’s den once while he was speaking with a daemon.”
“Was it Khorne?” Lästiges asked, suddenly all ears. It seemed Dirk hadn’t shared this with anyone else before.
“What did you do?” Dunk asked.
Dirk looked away. “I — I turned around and left before he could see me. The daemon saw me though. He looked straight at me through the crack in the door that I’d peered through. He caught me with those glowing red eyes, like a fly in amber. For a moment, I couldn’t move out of sheer terror that I might send the daemon into a rage. It took everything I had just to shut the door and run away as if I had a horde of daemons on my heels.”
“Did you ever talk with Father about it?”
Dirk shook his head. “But it came between us anyway. I wanted to demand an explanation from him, but I couldn’t conceive of anything he could say that could possibly justify what he was doing — and I hated him for it.
“I finally did say something about it, but not until the night I left the keep for good. I told him not to come after me, or I’d let Mother and the rest of the world know about his sins.”
“He told me he’d had to disown you.”
Dirk smirked. “It came down to the same thing. Neither of us wanted to have anything to do with each other, and we both got our wish.”
Dunk stared at his younger brother. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this back then?”
“So you could let your guilt over your complicity in Father’s plots tear you apart too? No thanks. It was bad enough I had to deal with it. I couldn’t drag you into it too.”
Dirk took a long drink of his beer, polishing off the last of what was in his tankard. When he finished, Dunk could still see the hurt hanging in his brother’s eyes. Dunk reached across the table and shook Dirk’s hand. “Thanks,” he said. “I wish you hadn’t done it — but thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Dirk said in a dry tone. “Anyway, according to Chiara, my leaving the keep seemed to be the turning point for Father. I think that’s when he realised what he’d be missing if he kept to his deal with Khorne.”
“You think as highly of yourself as ever,” Spinne said.
Dirk ignored her and kept his focus on Dunk. “That’s why when everything went wrong on your wedding day, he was ready for it.”
“Ready?” said Dunk. “Mother and Kirta were killed, and we had to run for the hills.”
“More ready than he would have been. Honestly, when I heard what had happened that day — weeks after the fact — I was shocked. I thought for sure he’d be better prepared than that. I — well, I thought you were all dead, of course.”
Dirk lowered his head and took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I mourned for you all, but — through that — the one thought I held on to was that if it had happened then at least Father had finally stood up to the daemons and gone back to being his own man.”
Dunk hadn’t thought of it that way. He hadn’t understood much of what had happened, and he’d blamed himself for it for a long time. He’d thought that he must have done something to bring the wrath of all those daemons down on the night of his engagement party.
Now, although he hated what his father had done, he could respect how he’d refused to sell out his family in the end, no matter what it might cost him. And it had cost him everything he had.
Dunk raised his tankard for a toast, and Dirk joined in. “Here’s to him,” Dunk said. That was enough.
“What about the Guterfiends?” asked Spinne, pulling her hands back to herself. “Who are they, and how did they end up in your keep?”
“We couldn’t find out too much about them,” said Lästiges. “It seems they were a middle-class family of travelling merchants, supposedly hailing from Nuln, although I couldn’t confirm that.
“As for their rise to power, it looks like they were just in the right place at the right time. The day after the Hoffnung keep was nearly burned down, the Guterfiends were there laying claim to the place. They paid off the right people and secured the deeds to all of the Hoffnung holdings, and they moved in soon after. A few months later, it was like nothing had ever happened, except the name over the gate had changed.
“Of course, they could only purchase these things because everyone in the Empire thought that the Hoffnungs were all dead, their line extinguished. In such cases, the property goes to the Empire, and the bureaucrats there were only too happy to sell the Hoffnung estate in one large block to the Guterfiends for a monstrous lump sum. If the gold they paid with smelled a bit like brimstone, no one seemed to notice or care.”
“What about Dirk?” Dunk asked. “He may have changed his last name to Heldmann, but his real identity was an open secret.”
“Father disowned me, remember?” Dirk said. “It may have come after I’d removed myself from the family, but it meant I had no legal claim to the property as far as Imperial law was concerned.”
“So when I started playing Blood Bowl…”
“The Guterfiends aren’t fans of the sport,” Lästiges said, “but they heard soon enough that you’d come back. They feared you might come forth to claim your inheritance and strip them of everything they’d paid so much for.”
“That’s why they put up the money for Zauberer’s ludicrous reward,” Spinne said. “But where would they get that much money?”
“Gold isn’t anything to a Lord of Chaos, assuming Khorne’s backing the Guterfiends like he did Father,” Dirk said. “Of course, it’s easier to kill those who come to claim the reward than to pay them a million crowns, so I wouldn’t count that out either.”
Spinne started to speak, but she choked on her words. Dunk reached out his hands to her, but she pushed them away. “You need to quit the Hackers,” she said, her voice low and raw. “You need to leave Blood Bowl behind and get as far away from the Empire as you can.”
Dunk stared at her, trying to understand her distress. “Hey, now. People try to kill me all the time. It’s part of my job.”
“Orcs, elves, ogres, sure,” she said, “but not people like this. These Guterfiends have real power, and you’re a direct threat to that power. They’ll do anything they think they must to make sure you’re dead.”
Dunk reached out to caress Spinne’s flushed cheek, but she pulled away. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “We can handle this.”
“We can’t.” Spinne said. Her chin dropped to her chest. “I can’t.”
Dunk started to ask what she meant, but decided to keep his mouth shut. He knew.
Spinne sat there for a moment, no one saying anything. When she looked back up, her eyes were red and wet. “We’re talking about people who have as much gold as the Emperor. Who have Khorne — the bloody Blood God — backing them.
“We’re just people. Sure, we play Blood Bowl in front of hundreds of thousands, and we make a good living at it, but it’s just a job. It’s not worth death and eternal damnation.”
Dirk stared at Spinne. “I’ve known you for years,” he said. “I’ve never heard you talk like this. We defy death during every game. What’s so different about this?”
Spinne ignored Dirk and Lästiges and gazed into Dunk’s eyes instead. “I never cared much about living before.” Then she frowned and wiped her eyes. “Besides, we’re not talking about my life here. It’s Dunk’s life and his soul. And yours too, damn it. Just because the Empire doesn’t see you as an heir to your father — who deserves to burn for all time — doesn’t mean Khorne has given up h
is claim on you.”
Dunk peered into Spinne’s eyes. “I can’t walk away from this,” he said.
“Then run!”
“I have to see this through.”
“I know you do,” Spinne said as she stood up to leave, “but I don’t.” She reached down and gave Dunk one last, passionate kiss. Then she walked out the tavern’s door.
Just before Spinne shut the door behind her, she turned back and said, “I can’t watch you do this. Tell Pegleg I quit.”
20
“Welcome to Spike Stadium here in beautiful downtown Praag for the something-or-other annual Chaos Cup Tournament!” Bob’s voice said, ringing out over the snow-covered field. “We’d tell you how many years it’s been, but no one knows. That’s Chaos for you!”
“You said it, Bob!” said Jim. “If you want to see some Chaos around here, look no further than the Hackers. They’ve lost ten players since their appearance in the Dungeonbowl Tournament — including star standout Spinne Schönheit.”
“Still, they had the guts to accept Da Deff Skwad’s invitation to play here in the first round of the Chaos Cup. How many teams would be that stupid?—I mean, desperate?—I mean, brave?”
“Who’s the brave team here, Bob? With the edict against harming Hoffnung still hanging over his head, who’s going to be crazy enough to try to tackle him?”
The crowd’s roar started out low and built to a deafening crescendo as the wall-sized orcs who made up Da Deff Skwad prepared to kick off.
“Well, Jim, I think we’re about to find out!”
Dunk rubbed his hands together for warmth, and cursed the cold. To get to Praag from Bad Bay in time for the tournament, the Hackers had been forced to make a mad dash, both by land and by sea. They hadn’t had any time to pick up warm underclothes for their armour, and when they got to Praag they found that the other teams had cleaned out what stock there was in the city. The Evil Gits, for instance, had bought ten sets of warm underclothes for each of their players — far more than they needed — and then burned them in the courtyard of their hotel for their first pre-game rally.
[Blood Bowl 03] - Death Match Page 16
